Jack’s Hacks: Three Big Tips for Driving Webinar Attendance

One of the most common questions we get here at ON24 is, “How do I get people to sign up for my webinar?” There are a lot of tactics and strategies you can deploy to encourage registration. But one of the more underrated angles, to me, is making the most out of the registrations you have. Focus, especially for nascent programs, should be directed to driving webinar attendance.

For any given webinar, you’re only going to get a set number of people who register. Not everyone who registers, however, will attend the event. Your goal should be to keep the number of no-shows to a minimum and entice as many of your registrants as possible to actually show up to your live webinar. There are two ways to go about this.

Webinar Attendance Generating Tip 1: The Giveaway

The first and the most successful tactic for us, the giveaway, also requires a bit of budget. But, if you can afford to hold a raffle or drawing with prizes every now and then, you can see great results. You can also encourage a bit of engagement as a part of your raffle as well. For example, you could ask attendees for questions on a given subject ahead of the event and draw a random winner from that cohort live.

Keep in mind that you don’t have to break the bank for prizes that draws an audience. We’ve given away t-shirts, headphones and other items that have helped to draw an audience.

Webinar Attendance Generating Tip 2: Adjusting Your Messages

By default, ON24 sends emails to webinar registrants two days before an event and two hours before. While this is a good standard to employ, we decided to change things up with our email messages.

We had our presenter, in this case, Mark Bornstein, write and send a reminder email the morning of the event. The message is simple and is there to encourage people to attend and remind potential participants about any promotional giveaways happening during the webinar as well. Sending this very simple email has had a noticeable effect on webinar attendance.

There’s also one more message we’re experimenting with — and that’s a reminder email email sent from the platform 15 minutes after the event has started. It may sound counter intuitive, but we’ve noticed a distinct spike in webinar attendees after we’ve sent the post-15 minutes message. With these slight tweaks, we’ve seen as much as a 10% increase in webinar attendance on certain events.

Webinar Attendance Generating Tip 3: Driving On-Demand Viewership

Finally, there’s the on-demand webinar element to consider. Remember the drawing/raffle experiment I mentioned in tip one? Well, we’ve been playing around with picking people a week or so after the event to boost on-demand views.

What we’ll do is send out two reminders telling no-shows  about the webinar they missed. We’ll also another message from the speaker a week later recounting the event and, if there was a drawing and no one claimed the prize, that there’s still a chance they won. We’ve some fairly good success with that tactic as well.

That’s all for now. Good luck webinaring, webinerds!