Category — Web Seminar Promotion

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?