Easy Ways to Increase Registration and Attendance for Your Webinars

Webinars, as you likely know, are a useful tool to disseminate information, answer customer queries, and generate leads.

That is, if you can get anyone to register for it. Then, if you do get people to register, there’s no guarantee that any of them will actually show up on the day of the webinar.

It’s a well-known problem, and there are many possible solutions. Some simple fixes, like optimizing the date and time at which you hold the webinar, can make a significant difference in your attendance numbers.

Changes like that can only do so much, though. Let’s get to the root of the problem – why aren’t more people signing up for your webinar, and why do many of the people who actually do sign up miss the event?

How Do You Get People to Register?

There are a number of resources available that aim to answer this very question. Each of these posts center on the same points – creating content that all directs back to the webinar (like spokes in a wheel), optimizing the promotional process, setting goals, and sending frequent reminders leading up to the webinar.

These ideas are all good, but you’ve likely heard them before. It’s important to think outside the box in trying to get more people excited about your products and events.

The best way to get people registered for webinars is to make the process as simple as possible for them.

Top Three Recommendations for Boosting Registration:

• Create content linking back to the webinar signup page
• Promote your webinar strategically – have a plan beforehand
• If users have already entered their information into a lead form, keep the information saved alongside a checkbox that the reader can sign up for the next webinar with one click. Simple moves like this are small but incredibly effective ways to increase the likelihood that a visitor to your site will sign up for your events.

How Do You Get People to Attend?

Congratulations! A record number of people have signed up for your next webinar. You’re anticipating a standing-room-only crowd, so to speak.

Now what? How do you convert those registrants to attendees?

One of the newer ways that some companies have increased their conversion rates is by deploying interactive content leading up to the event. This most commonly comes in the form of a survey that requests information tied to why the registrant signed up for the event in the first place.

Castlight Health, a healthcare company based in San Francisco, is a company that has implemented interactive content before its webinars and serves as a strong use study for how to do it successfully.

After visitors registered themselves for its webinar, “Drive Employee Engagement With Predictive Analytics,” Castlight sent an email containing a link to a pre-webinar survey. It asked good benchmarking questions, and got the answers it was looking for in the survey. And despite the fact that the company presented a lot of information, it was seamlessly presented with simple text and quick questions.

It wasn’t a major time commitment – Castlight said the survey would only take about two minutes of the participant’s time – but the company was able to obtain valuable information. Castlight incorporated the results of the survey into the webinar, tailoring the content of the event based on the preferences of the registrants.

In doing this, Castlight sends registrants a reminder about the date of the event, a refresher on why the registrant signed up for the event in the first place, and, in teasing the reveal of the survey results, gives people a reason to come back for the webinar.

And that was all just in one email.

Castlight’s biggest focus in using interactive content was to increase the amount of registrants that actually attended its webinars. The company’s previous benchmark for registered guests who attended the webinar was between 40 and 50%.

The outreach proved to be successful – in the end, Castlight exceeded its previous benchmark for registrants who attended the webinar. The company reported high click-in rates and good conversions from the webinar.

TeamQuest, a computer software company based in Iowa, also used a pre-webinar survey with the goal of increasing conversion rates for the event. The company asked what relevant products the registrant used in the context of the webinar, if they had any questions leading up to the webinar, things they were hoping to learn at the webinar, and if they were interested in upcoming webinar topics.

Key Takeaways

There are a number of methods you could use to increase registration at your next webinar. It might be as simple as picking a better date and time for the event (studies show that middle of the week and middle of the day are the best times to host a webinar). It might be that you’re not picking a topic that is interesting enough – that could require a longer-term fix.

Then once you get people to sign up, hold onto them for dear life. It’s not necessary to barrage them with reminders – instead, be smart about how you reach out to your registrants before the event. Pre-event surveys represent a more efficient outreach option in which you can send a reminder, get information you need, and provide a reason for the registered guest to come back for the event.