Knowing how to promote a successful webinar or online seminar is one of the best ways to generate highly qualified sales leads or educate and up sell existing customers. Below are a few tips for promoting webinars shared with us from Charlwood eMarketing.

Define objectives

It sounds obvious, but you really need to think about what you are trying to do with a webinar, so that you can measure your success and ROI after the fact. Is your objective:

  • To acquire leads and bring in new sales?
  • To educate existing customers on a new product/service?
  • To obtain research or feedback on an existing offer?

If you are looking to acquire leads, one effective approach is to focus on third party opt-in email list rentals. If you are increasing awareness of a new product or doing research among existing customers, then conducting a permission-based internal email campaign could be the most efficient use of your resources.

Set expectations

After setting objectives, setting your internal expectations is the next most important step, and too often overlooked. Do you expect to cover all costs within 1 week of promoting your seminar, creative and development costs of optimizing your registration micro-site, running the webinar software/hosting and sending follow up reminder and thank you/missed you emails? If so, you may need to be more realistic, especially if you have low product margins. Often acquisition campaigns are longer term strategies that will generate new leads which may need 3 to 12 months to remarket to via email, phone and personal visits before recouping costs.

Estimate response

What will my response be? Ah, the $64,000 question! Well, of course response rates always depend on many variables, but mainly 3 things: your offer (e.g. the quality of unbiased webinar content), the creative (how well are you communicating the benefits, not features of your product for your webinar), and the targeting (are you using job title targeting in your email lists?). Web traffic is also very seasonal, and timing during the week for email broadcasts is important – typically Tuesday to Thursday mornings are optimal for maximizing response while people are at their desks reading email.

Determine your target cost per registration

In our experience with promoting technology hardware or software online seminars to acquire new customers using opt-in email list rentals exclusively, a typical cost per registration (CPR) for a promotion with good unbiased content, a brand-name guest speaker and optimized creative and landing/registration process is around $50 to $100 US (this cost goes down to much less when mining an existing customer database, but this is just an example of the potential cost of acquiring new leads). If for example, you have a profit margin of $300 per sale and close 1 in 3 leads to make a sale, which would give you a cost per acquisition (CPA) of $150 to $300 US. One disaster conference client targeting Risk Managers said he’s happy with a $100 cost per lead. If your margins are high enough, cost per lead rates up to $500 may still be well worth it, especially if you are looking for a gateway customer into a Fortune 100 company.

Maximizing attendance

Usually the actual turn-out rate from those registered is about 40% to 60%, so you will need a strategy for following up on those who registered but didn’t show. We usually suggest an email sent a few days after your event, with follow-up with links to a copy of the agenda and presentation and link to your offer such as a free product trial etc.. Be sure to show the details of the agenda to be covered, broken down by 5 to 10 minute increments, and indicating each speaker to ensure registrants are clear on why they should attend. Try providing incentives to sign up by a certain date, and information on redeeming those incentives when registrants attend your webinar.

Source: http://www.charlwood.com/webinar_marketing.htm