Most people who run B2B webinars think an automated reminder before the event is enough.
That used to be me, too.
I was wrong.
If that’s all you’re sending, you’re hobbling your sales efforts and you’re also short-changing your potential customers.
Classic story:
I was chatting with someone the other day about sending pre-webinar nurturing emails.
When I suggested sending two or more content-rich emails to people who signed up, here’s what she wrote back:
Anyone who signs up will be getting an automated reminder. People also added the event to their calendars 🙂
While it’s absolutely of utmost importance to remind people to attend – there’s only so much we can do. We also ship other communication (i.e., the Tuesday insights) so we need to be mindful not to overcrowd people’s mailboxes so we have to keep the balance.
We’ve all been here.
Let’s pull out the two big underlying assumptions.
- People are competent adults
- We don’t want to bug people
Yes, people are generally competent adults who are capable of deciding what they want to spend their time on and following through on it.
But we’re also horribly distracted most of the time.
Someone saw your headline and liked it. They thought there was a pretty good chance their future self would be interested enough to devote an hour to it.
But then a week passed. Or two.
The “future self” is now today’s self, and they’re not quite clear why that past self was so interested.
They’re looking at their calendar for the day, pre-occupied with the tasks they didn’t finish yesterday. Then they check their email and see something that needs to be handled.
They don’t show up. And if they do, their attention is still half on that email from their boss.
The nationwide average is something like 50% of people are no-shows at webinars they sign up for.
If you’re going to shift this average, you need to do something different.
Point #2, about bugging people.
Sure, don’t send people annoying emails.
But some guy named Peter raised his hand and said he was interested in the topic. He said, “Yes, I care enough about this to block off an hour in my calendar to learn more about it.”
You think he won’t be interested in a couple of well-written emails that are on-topic for something he cares about?
Do you think he won’t be able to differentiate between your regular weekly email and a nurture sequence for an event he opted into?
He will.
So what’s the action plan?
Send interesting emails.
The key is to provide value and/or spark curiosity.
Every case will be different, but here are a few ways to think about it.
- Add more color to the speaker’s bio. For example, your webinar signup form probably had the speaker’s bio. Great, but bios are boring. What if he or she recently wrote an article for Harvard Business Review on a topic related to what they’ll be speaking about? Send that in one of the emails. It’s valuable because it reinforces their expertise and it focuses the reader’s attention on the general topic of the webinar.
- Tease a topic from the webinar. Use the classic copywriting technique of creating an “open loop” in the reader’s brain so they’ll want to attend to get the resolution that closes the loop.
- Provide important context that will help people get more out of the presentation. Is there foundational knowledge that will make a difference for the attendees?
Yes, this all takes extra effort. But think of all the effort you’re putting into the webinar. Wouldn’t it be worth a little extra to make sure you get more attendees and they get more out of it?
Want to push back? The comments are open.
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