Category — Web Seminar Promotion

Last year’s research into online presentation best practices shows that people hate it when you start a webinar late.

To be fair, sometimes crap happens.  And to be doubly fair, I acknowledge that two minutes late doesn’t seem like much when you’re in person.

And a confession:  when you’re online and your early arrivers are looking at their computer clock and start typing “hey, is this thing starting!?” and “hey, how unprofessional to start late!” into the questions panel at one minute past my gut reaction isn’t full of love and joy.

But, here’s another way to start late and get by with it.

—-> Put it on your opening slide.

Less perfect is a phrase like “We will be at approximately 11 am.”  But you’re off the hook.

I prefer being specific with “We will begin at exactly 11:03 am.”  But then you better do it.

Like I said in a previous post about one way to do this, since a good chunk of your audience is logging in a few minutes late anyway, this gives you a chance to get more of them into the ‘room’ and more of them will hear the opening welcome/instructions.

And while we’re at it, here’s one thing I’ve tried that didn’t work.

While the Sr. Dir. of Marketing at Corvent (as a co-founder I had liberty to try new things), I tried actually advertising our internal webinars with start times like “11:03 am.”

Problem?

Nobody noticed, remembered what they saw or read their confirmation emails or all of the above.  #Fail.

Start late without pissing anybody off by stating it clearly on the slide attendees see when they join your event.

David asks a fair question in response to this post about how many webinar reminders is too many.  Because invitations and reminders a different beasts in a couple important aspects, I’m copying his question to a new post and tackling it separately.

He asked:

“I have been asked by my Marketing colleagues to send a seminar invite every week for 6 weeks. That would mean 6 weeks leading up to the event the customers would get an email reminding them of the event and hoping to gain more registrants. I manage and am gatekeeper of our database. I am the final point of call on all of our email marketing and I tend to have the best visibility of the number of emails sent to our customers. The majority of our audience receive an email every week, without any seminar or event invites. It is my opinion that 6, one a week for 6 weeks, is too many. I would be interested in your thoughts and opinion?”

David, the big difference between your question about invitations and the previous post about reminders is the nature of the opt-in.  Clearly for webinar reminders, folks have opted-in to hearing about that event, and most of the time the expectation is that the opt-in has a lifespan of that one event.  Given the information you’ve shared, I’d likely lean toward your perspective of caution.

Here are some questions I’d consider:

What was the pretense under which people ended up on your email list?
If it’s to hear about offers and events, that’d be very different than if they’re expecting a newsletter with how-to tips.

What is the nature of the email they’re used to getting from you?
For instance, is there a way to add an event invitation into a newsletter (even prominently) rather than making the invite an explicit pitch for your webinar?  Are the list members opted in with their primary email addresses and used to seeing your emails routinely?  Are they using their “santaclaus@genericemailprovider.com” address that they only check every few weeks (in which case a long list of invites in their inbox will look excessive)?

Is your webinar invite part of or in addition to the weekly email they already get?
The answer to this question is an important one as it is the difference between adding a promotional message to what they’re already getting versus doubling the quantity of emails they receive each week.  Quantity is a big part of tolerance and fatigue.

Is the proposed webinar invitation different every week, or it the same email promoting the same thing over and over?
…which leads to the next question…

Does your organization maintain multiple lists for multiple purposes?
While I’m not a huge fan of automatically opting people into new lists, I do think it can be done with integrity.  For example, some organizations have one list for the newsletter, another for special product offers, another for event announcements, etc.  You could create a new list just for webinar invites and duplicate your email list there.  I’d make it clear that this its own unique list, but the benefit to you is that if they unsubscribe from the webinar invites list, you’ve not lost them on the newsletter list (though I would, however, use  forms that gives them the option of choosing which lists they opt into and out of, including ‘all’).

Have you considered testing?
It might be worth testing the marketers’ request, tracking results against a control group.  Comparing an increase in webinar registrations (the positive) against unsubscribes (the negative) might give some great insight against which to evaluate what action to take with the rest of your database.

Overall, I tend to think the golden rule rules…are you truly providing them value or just pitching more of yourself?  All our prospects and customers realize we all need to reach out, but I tend to think they can tell if our intentions are good.  I’m on several lists that literally send email several times weekly, but there’s value to be gained in between the promotional notes.  We each have tolerance for this stuff like dealing with commercials on television.

All my best, and thanks for sharing.  If you have a chance, please share an update with our readers!

In a recent webinar, Simon D. asked, “Can you overdo reminders?”

Hmmm… as you’ve heard me say before, “It depends.”

And I think the question is “What is your market’s tolerance for email?”

The good thing about a webinar reminder email is that nearly everyone realizes that it’s event-based.  In other words, it’s not going to come in ad infinitum.

Here are three things to do:

Ask
It’s pretty simple to add a query to a registration page or end-of-event survey.  Questions that have low intrusiveness (e.g., how many reminders do you like, when do you want them, what’s you’re preferred day/time for webinars) have a good chance of getting honest, useful feedback.

Test and observe
Does your webinar solution have an opt-out feature?  Ironically, many don’t (and DUH, they registered for the event, but nothing surprises me these days).  But many do, and you might test and observe.  If you increase the frequency of reminders does your ‘unsub rate’ go up too much?  Obviously you’ll have to make a judgement of what ‘too much’ is, and that should be relative to improvements (if any) in attendance rates.

Determine the value of a live attendee
If you can’t test/observe, I’d probably make a guess at how valuable it is for your organization to have registrants actually show up.

The reality is that for some organizations they don’t care.  They’ll give lip service to wanting people to attend, but the way they act is that if they get a name and contact info for follow up, they’ve done their job.

If it’s important to have registrants become attendees, I’d err on the side of more (versus fewer) reminders.  Here’s why:

1.  They’ve already opted in
2.  As mentioned, it’s a finite project.
3.  If you do too much, people will let you know.
4.  We get more email than ever.  Even the most interested folks in your webinar find that their good intentions slip down to the bottom of their email pile.  Frequency improves your chance of cutting through the noise.

Rule #1:  know your audience.  Rule #2:  Don’t assume an email cut will through the noise.  They’ve opted in.  Have integrity, but don’t be shy.

1080 Group has partnered with my friend Bob Hanson at QLM Marketing to conduct an independent study on the success factors for webinars.

To get a pre-release copy of the report, participate in the survey.  It should take you about 5 minutes.

In a recent webinar I was touching on the value of tapping into the audience’s own motivations to have your best shot at getting them to respond to an invitation, and Roger H. asked a good next-level question:

“What do you find most beneficial, formal surveys or Q&As with the future audience?”

Fair question, Roger, but I’m not sure I’d call one better or best, I’d call them different.

Formal surveys are good for a few things.  One, it’s easier to quantify data, cross-tabulate one response set against another for deeper insight, etc.  For instance, you might ask yourself “of those respondents who expressed X on question 3, how did they answer question 6?”  As with anything, formal surveys come with some tradeoffs.  They might take longer to develop.  You will likely only have a fraction of those invited respond, meaning you’ll need to be inviting enough to generate a sample size that’s statistically relevant.  And you’ll have to balance between length (“I’d love to have answers to ALL these questions”) and what you’re going to need to do to get responses (would YOU want to fill out a survey that would take you 30 minutes?).

That said, there’s one other key challenge:  being able to ‘read between the lines’ and respond on the fly.

That’s where a few conversations with your future audience can be gold.  Someone might tell you something over the phone that they’d not put in a survey.  Or you might be able to infer meaning from their tone of voice.  In addition to being able to ‘read between the lines,’ your dialogue very often will lead you to learn things you didn’t even think to ask in a more formal survey.  Often this leads to you asking additional questions to explore something else.

Conversations are also good when you want to explore something less tangible.  For instance, imagine that you know that your product/service has a positive impact on clients’ process but you know clients often have different policies and procedures and processes.  Creating a formal survey that roots out the insight that you can use is difficult at best.  The tradeoff with conversations, however, is that they take time, let alone if you want to have a number of them.

Without knowing more specifically what Roger does and how he does it, I’d probably suggest a combination of tactics.  Some initial conversations would likely deliver insights that would help create a more effective formal survey, but I wouldn’t stop there.  In-event polls or end-of-event surveys are awesome tools for dialing in the relevance of your content, too.  Consider asking a question or two that would specifically assist you with dialing in your invitation messaging to those things that your audience is most likely to take action on.

Remember that what you think is important is (mostly) irrelevant.  Your audience will take action when they perceive your webinar is relevant to them.

The industry has come a long way.  When I started we coded registration pages from scratch in HTML and pushed reminder emails manually.

Fast forward more than a decade – the pain of much of the project management of producing a web seminar has been eliminated by conferencing service providers integrating those tasks into their wares.

But at least one thing as suffered:  the presentation of benefits.

A rule of thumb for the question of “how many registrants will show up to my webinar” has long been “a third” or “a third to half.”  There are a lot of factors that go into that, and that’s another blog post another day.

The problem with automation, however, is that most often promoters don’t take one extra, valuable step:  including in the reminder email some copy that reminds registrants of why they signed up in the first place.

My exhortation:  take one extra step.  Take the content you put on your registration page, or at least the bullet points below the “Attend this webinar to learn:” and copy it into the reminder email(s) that will hit your registrants’ inboxes.

Here are a couple reasons:

1.  Just because they registered three weeks ago doesn’t mean they are fully in touch with the motivation that got them to register when they get the “don’t forget this webinar at 10am tomorrow” email.

2.  Hopefully your event title is descriptive and compelling, but if that’s all you wanted and needed, you wouldn’t have written additional copy for your registration page.

3.  If anybody pushes the “forward” button (often a desire of marketers!), the person receiving the email will have more to motivate them.

Go beyond “what” in your reminder emails.  Remind them “why.”

I just received an email for a webinar entitled “Survey Results.”

Huh?

Now to be fair to the creator, I do need to disclose that this email was a confirmation email – that one that comes to you after you’ve registered for an event.

But here’s the problem:

Two weeks from now when I get a reminder for the event (often a day before the webinar), what will that communicate to me?

The SAD truth is that most web conferencing and webcast providers don’t include your promotional content or event description in the automated follow up emails.

So here’s my question to you:

You KNOW that only a portion of those that register attend (very loosely a third to half).  So if your message is important for them to hear, why wouldn’t you want to improve your odds in this statistic.

To do that, I think a confirmation or reminder email should reiterate to your audience the benefits of why they should show up… stuff that’s typically in the invite or registration copy…

…but isn’t in a headline like “Survey Results.”

This gets us back to the power of the title.  IF you’re like most folks, you’re using the automated confirmation and reminder emails that come from your webinar solution provider.

Which means you’re missing out.

Make sure your webinar title is descriptive, laden with benefit(s).  This post isn’t a “how to write headlines” so much as a plea:

Tell me, in your webinar title, why I should give you an hour of my precious time.

Phil writes, “What is the best day of the week for webinars?”

The best day of the week for webinars is when the greatest percentage of your audience is available.

That said, consider what others do and a couple questions to ask yourself.

Much of the corporate world prefers Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Wednesdays, in that order.  We know this because these are peak days for conference calls in general, and web seminars follow the same pattern.  Mondays are considered busy meeting days, and Fridays might find people checked out at one level or another.

But just because that’s what everyone else is doing doesn’t mean it is right for you.

There are numerous exceptions when a Friday afternoon or even nights and weekends become the best options for audiences.

So a few questions to ask yourself:

Have you asked your audience? A best practice, whenever possible, is to do this bit of research.  It could be as simple as a question you ask using registration and/or polling.  Beware, though…this captures people who are already responding to that day/time, and may not uncover other opportunities.

Is your audience a business or consumer audience? Reaching end consumers may be better in an evening or on a weekend when they’re not at work.  Business audiences, assuming the topic is relevant to their work, are best reached during their work time.

What is their work or life pattern? If you need to reach salespeople, for instance, when are they most likely to be busy with calls and appointments?  I’ve found Fridays are a good time connect with salespeople in many organizations.

Absent of any of these inputs (and Phil, I don’t have any additional information from you as I write this), I’d probably join the masses and host the event mid-week.  But don’t do it for long… it’s too easy to gather feedback and adjust.

Ask your audience what day they prefer to attend.

As an active Twitter community member, I’m an amused observer of the various ways people (“tweeps”) approach the quality vs. quantity question.

Some say, “There’s no way you can connect with thousands, so why follow that many?”

Others, “More is better.”

Me?  “Both.”

There’s a fundamental marketing exercise that most Twitter participants aren’t thinking about – many of which are even marketers.  It’s called…

Segmentation.

Marketers of web seminars are always concerned about the size of the audience, and a VFAQ (VERY frequently asked question) is “how do I drive attendance?”  To do this, you need to reach people, even a lot of them.  But focusing only on quantity is a very 1.0 approach (and if you give away free guitars, you’ll get a LOT of attendees).  You need a way to figure out which are qualified prospects and how to separate them so you can communicate differently to them.

The reason I don’t focus ONLY on a small group of tweeps in Twitter is for the same reason that marketers segment their lists…I don’t want to communicate only with a small group (you don’t know when someone will bubble up out of the broader group – and it happens regularly on Twitter), but I DO want to FOCUS primarily on a smaller group.

I use Tweetdeck to create a sub-group of about 200 people out of the ~5800 I’m connected with on Twitter.  I follow almost everyone back, and I’m not drawn to the ego trip of unfollowing 5600 so it looks like I follow 20 and have 5600 more following me.  It’s too easy to do the same thing AND have an ear to the ground with a broader audience.

Final proof point:

I once followed back a gal whose profile screamed “housewife and mom.”  When I did, though, she sent me a message saying that she was a happy escapee from the corporate world and knew all about online presentations and elearning.  And guess what… in NETWORKING that’s called someone who most definitely knows someone else I might want to know given my line of work.

So this post isn’t to disparage anyone else’s strategy, but it is to encourage putting aside ego trips, using tools, and practicing a simple, powerful thing marketers have been doing for a long time:  segmentation.  It’s not ‘quantity versus quality,’ it’s managing ‘quantity and quality.’

Thoughts?  What’s your strategy?

Thanks for being such a lively part of today’s presentation!

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