MBA2501 Q&A Wednesday: How do I get more attendees to my webinar? - The $100 MBA Show

Summary

The $100 MBA Show: MBA2501 Q&A Wednesday – How to Get More Attendees to Your Webinar

Release Date: July 31, 2024

In the episode titled "MBA2501 Q&A Wednesday: How do I get more attendees to my webinar?", Omar Zenhom, host of The $100 MBA Show, delves into effective strategies for increasing webinar attendance—a crucial factor for those leveraging webinars to sell services or products. Drawing from his extensive experience of running over 500 webinars and founding Webinar Ninja, Omar provides a comprehensive, step-by-step guide tailored for entrepreneurs seeking to maximize their webinar’s reach and impact.

1. Understanding the Importance of an Email List

Timestamp: 05:45

Omar emphasizes that the cornerstone of a successful webinar is a robust email list. He asserts, “Email is still king when it comes to leads, when it comes to your audience.” Unlike social media platforms where posts can easily be missed, emails land directly in the inboxes of your audience, ensuring higher visibility and engagement. Building and nurturing this list is pivotal, as it forms the primary channel through which webinar invitations and other valuable content are disseminated.

2. Step-by-Step Strategy to Boost Webinar Attendance

Step 1: Utilize Paid Advertising to Grow Your Email List

Timestamp: 06:30

Omar advises against directly advertising the webinar through paid ads. Instead, he suggests directing ads toward a lead magnet—something of immediate value that entices individuals to provide their email addresses. “You want to drive traffic to some other value other than the webinar that they can get access to immediately,” he explains. This approach not only lowers the cost per acquisition but also increases the likelihood of individuals taking action compared to promoting the webinar’s date and time.

Step 2: Nurture Leads with Valuable Content

Timestamp: 08:20

Once the email list begins to grow, Omar underscores the importance of nurturing these leads with high-quality, relevant content. This involves sending a sequence of automated emails—ranging from blog posts and videos to templates and mini-courses—that establish trust and position you as an authority in your field. “The first three to five emails you send in your automation to that new lead are critical,” he notes, emphasizing that these initial interactions are essential for building a strong relationship before inviting leads to the webinar.

Step 3: Regularly Host and Invite to Webinars

Timestamp: 09:50

Consistency is key. Omar recommends conducting sales webinars at least once a month to maintain engagement and continuously invite your nurtured email list to attend. “This is all like a flywheel. It’s like a system,” he describes, illustrating how each component—from paid ads to nurturing leads—feeds into the next, creating a sustainable cycle of engagement and conversion.

Step 4: Track Registrations and Attendance

Timestamp: 14:11

Monitoring who registers and attends your webinars is crucial for assessing effectiveness and making necessary adjustments. Omar advises implementing systems to track these metrics, which helps in refining your strategies and understanding your audience's behavior. This data-driven approach ensures you can optimize future webinars for better attendance and higher conversion rates.

Step 5: Follow Up with Non-Attendees and Non-Customers

Timestamp: 16:05

Post-webinar follow-ups are essential. For those who registered but did not attend, Omar suggests reinviting them to future webinars, highlighting what they missed. For attendees who didn’t convert into customers, sending tailored follow-up emails encourages them to engage again. “A lot of people skip this step...they get an invite as well because they haven't seen what I have to offer on the webinar yet,” he explains, pointing out that persistence can lead to eventual conversions.

3. Closing the Webinar: Converting Attendees into Customers

Timestamp: 19:45

Beyond attracting attendees, Omar highlights the importance of delivering value during the webinar to facilitate conversions. By effectively showcasing how your product or service addresses the audience’s pain points, you make the decision to purchase a natural one. “If you do that, it’s going to be a no-brainer for the right customer,” he states, underscoring the necessity of a compelling and solution-oriented presentation.

4. Bonus Tips for Maximizing Ad Effectiveness

Timestamp: 20:30

To further enhance webinar attendance, Omar shares additional insights:

A/B Testing: Continuously experiment with different ad copies, images, and targeting options to identify what resonates best with your audience. “It’s all about differentiation. It’s all about AB testing,” he advises.
Optimize Landing Pages: Ensure that landing pages are streamlined and persuasive, facilitating higher conversion rates from clicks to registrations.
Engage During the Webinar: Keep the audience interactive through questions, polls, and chats to maintain interest and increase the likelihood of conversion.
Focus on Value: Ensure that every aspect of the webinar provides substantial value, making attendees feel that their time investment is worthwhile.

5. The Broader Benefits of Hosting Webinars

Timestamp: 20:55

Omar concludes by highlighting that webinars offer more than just sales opportunities. They provide valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and language, which can inform future marketing strategies. Additionally, webinars help in building brand awareness and establishing a strong brand identity. “There are so many side benefits to that live webinar other than making sales,” he remarks, encouraging listeners to view webinars as multifaceted tools for business growth.

Key Takeaways

Build and Nurture an Email List: Focus on growing your email list through targeted paid ads offering immediate value.
Consistent Engagement: Regularly send valuable content to maintain and strengthen relationships with your leads.
Strategic Webinar Invitations: Schedule webinars consistently and track registrations and attendance meticulously.
Effective Follow-Ups: Re-engage non-attendees and previous webinar participants to maximize conversion potential.
Deliver Value During Webinars: Provide compelling, solution-oriented presentations to facilitate conversions.

By implementing Omar Zenhom's strategies, entrepreneurs can significantly increase their webinar attendance, leading to higher sales and stronger customer relationships. For those seeking practical, actionable business lessons, this episode serves as an invaluable resource in mastering the art of effective webinar marketing.

Transcript

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Hey oh. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show. Practical business lessons for the Real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. And today is Q and A Wednesday where we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you've got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at omar@100mba.net Today's question is from Eric and Eric asks how do I get more attendees to my webinar? I'm running live webinars to sell my services, but I ran my first live webinar, put a lot of effort into it and only had two attendees. How do I get more attendees to attend so I can make more sales? Eric, you're in luck. I have run over 500 webinars. I'm the founder of Webinar Ninja, which is a webinar software that we grew for the last 10 years and recently sold, got acquired by Proprofs. So I know a little bit about what works with webinars, especially sales webinars. Today I'll walk you through step by step, my personal strategy when it comes to getting more attendees to your webinar. With a paid marketing funnel, this is gonna be the fastest way for you to boost your audience and get attendees. The good News is, is that if you do this right, the amount of money you spend on the ads is gonna be made and then some, of course, with a profit, with the sales you make on the webinar. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Let's step back a little bit. At the end of the day, when you wanna get people on a webinar, this requires you to have an audience. The larger audience you have, the larger amount of people that you can reach out to, the better chance you're going to have to get them to buy anything or attend your webinar for that matter. And in my opinion, and the opinion of many expert marketers, the best audience to have is not on Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn or TikTok or anything else. It's actually your email list. Email is still king when it comes to leads, when it comes to your audience. Why? Because you can contact people with email and you can contact them at mass also with email, you own the asset. You can control how you contact them through your email marketing software. And the thing about email is that it's hard to ignore. Meaning that if I post something on Instagram, there's a good likelihood that somebody that follows me is not gonna see it. But if I email them, they're going to probably see it. People have to deal with their inbox. They have to remember, review their emails, archive their emails, do something with it. They can't just ignore it or thumb through it like a feed on social media. So the name of the game when it comes to any business really is to get more emails, to get more leads. Now when you have these leads, when you have these emails, you can then invite them to a live webinar. Now, there's a lot more to it, which I'll explain today, but that's the gist of it. The more emails you have, the more, the higher the likelihood of people attending your live webinar. Because when you invite them via email, they're gonna register and attend that session. So how do you get these emails? Well, the fastest way to do this is through paid marketing. You can of course do this slowly. Grow your email list through content marketing, through SEO, through partnerships, all other kinds of things. But if you are running a webinar, let's say in a month's time, and you wanna get as many attendees possible, then paid ads is the best way to do it. Cause you can do it quickly. And that's what we're going to focus on in today's episode. How to use paid ads to drive that traffic and attention to your brand, to get email addresses. So then you can then later on invite them to your webinar. There's a few steps involved in between, so let's go through them. The first step in this funnel from paid ad to webinar attendance, and then obviously becoming a customer is advertising something to get somebody's email. Now, many people make the mistake of where they're running a webinar, and they say, okay, I'm gonna run an ad to a webinar. So they're running ads to a webinar saying, hey, my webinar is next week. This is the date and time. It's gonna be amazing. This is actually, in my experience, not the best way to spend your ad dollars. The cost per acquisition is much higher. Why? Because if I see an ad that says there's a webinar next Tuesday at 8am, 5pm or whatever it might be, I'm giving them reasons not to sign up. I'm giving them reasons not to give their email because they might say, well, I can't make that time, or I don't know if I'll be busy. I don't know if I can do this. I might need to do something at that time. And then they don't click on the ad and they don't give their name and email address. So what you want to do here is you want to drive traffic to some other value other than the webinar that they can get access to immediately. Instant gratification, a lead magnet of some sort. This could be a checklist. This could be a template. This could be a video. This could be a guide, whatever it might be. But the point here is, is that they will get that thing, that value immediately when they give their name and email address. This is going to increase the likelihood of them converting, meaning clicking on the ad, giving their information, and lowering your cost per acquisition. Because the more people that actually take action on your ad, the better. Meaning you're going to get more leads per dollar you spend on the ad. Trust me, I've been doing this for a very long time. You want to do this instead of driving traffic straight to the webinar. There is a place and time for that, you know, running an ad for the webinar itself. But if you don't have an unlimited budget, it's not the best way to start. So you're going to run an ad to some sort of value, some sort of opt in, some sort of guide or checklist. Many people like to run Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Google Ads, even to reach their target audience. I actually prefer a specific type of ad on Facebook and these ads are called lead ads. Facebook lead ads are ads that you run where Facebook will capture the name and email address right on Facebook. Why do I like this ad? Because they never leave Facebook. And as you know, there's a lot of operating systems and browsers that are blocking cookies, blocking tracking, especially Apple devices, which is like 50% of the world or something. So it's very hard to track if you actually got the lead from the ad. Long story short, when they stay on Facebook, as they put their name and email address, you can see the conversion because Facebook can track it. And therefore you can optimize your ads and get more bang for your buck and know how to change the ad, how to optimize the ad in your favor. And this is super simple. Facebook lead ads will just collect the name and email address. You'll then have an automation to send them the opt in, send them whatever value you're giving them. And now you have their email and they're on your email list with an automation. Very simple. Okay, so now they're on your email list. What do you do next? That's step two and that's nurturing the lead with valuable content. Listen, you want to nurture and warm up your leads as much as possible before you actually invite them to your webinar. Listen, your webinar is one step away from making an offer. If you're going to use an analogy like a relationship, when they attend the webinar, it's like you're engaged, okay? And then you get married when they buy your product or service. So before you pop the question and get engaged, you want to make sure that you build the relationship first so they trust you and they know that you're credible. So this is where you nurture the lead. So they're on your email list. And yes, of course you're gonna give them your weekly newsletter or whatever it might be, but you want to give them a great automation sequence. This is a sequence of emails over the next couple of weeks giving them more and more high value content. These could be blog posts, these could be videos, it could be free resources, more templates, more checklists, maybe a mini course. The key is to provide useful and relevant information that provides a way for you to position yourself as the expert in your field. And this way it keeps your audience interested in what you have to offer. They're looking forward to the next email. They're opening up your emails because the last email was so good. So those first, I would say three to five emails you send in your automation to that new lead are critical. You wanna make sure those emails are high value and the best emails they've ever seen. Once you've nurtured the lead, I would say for at least two weeks, then you send your invitation to your webinar. This works really well when you do webinars regularly, and I'll tell you why in a bit. But I recommend you should do a sales webinar to sell your products and services at least once a month, if not once every two weeks. I know people that run webinars more than two or three times a week, but they have huge lists and they have a lot of people that can attend webinars. So at the start, once a month is your baseline. So every month you're going to send an invitation to your email list that you've nurtured and invite them to your next live webinar. See, this is all like a flywheel. It's like a system. The ads are getting you leads, the leads are being nurtured, Those nurtured leads get invited to the webinar. So let's say you do a webinar once a month and you wait 30 days. From the moment you start running ads. In those 30 days, you might have collected, you know, a hundred, 200, 300 leads, depending on how much you're spending on ads. And then you're inviting them to the webinar. When I was doing this, I was always aiming for a 10, 10 conversion. What does that mean? I want 10% of my email list to be responsive enough to attend my webinars. If they've never been on a webinar before, when I invite them. And then I want another 10% of those people that attend the webinar not just register, but attend the webinar. Let's say, for example, I had 100 people on the webinar. Then I want at least 10%, 10 of them to be customers. That was my baseline. 10, 10. Now, when you invite them to your regular webinar, this is not just once and done, not one email. You want to send an email or emails leading up to the webinar. So I liked five emails leading up to the webinar. So one email would be maybe a week out. The next email would be like three days ago, another email would be the day before, another email be the day of, another email would be maybe a few hours before. Now you might be saying, isn't that a lot of emails? Well, that leads me to the next step. You know what's fun and useful? Learning a new language. I've been brushing up on my Italian because I'm going to go to Italy soon and Rosetta Stone has been helping me along the way. What I love about it is that I don't feel like I'm memorizing. I feel like I'm learning. I'm picking up skills on how to do things that are really important, like how to order a coffee and a croissant. And that's un cafe un corneto popovore. By the way, I use Rosetta Stone because they've been in the game for 30 years. They've helped millions of users and they got plenty of options.