Everywhere you look, everyone is talking about how webinars are the hottest selling tool right now.
While this is true, what most people don’t know is that the average attendance rate versus how many people registered for a webinar is slowly dropping. Although this may not be true in all niches, it is definitely happening in a few niches such as Internet marketing.
I remember when upwards of 60-70% of the people who registered for a webinar would actually show up for the live event. But now, webinar attendance has dropped to about 30-35% of registered attendees.
Why? There are a few reasons for this.
One of the main reasons is that everyone is having a webinar now. Once everyone is doing the same thing, the novelty and impact wear off.
Most people now know that a webinar almost always closes with a sales pitch and there is nothing wrong with this if the pre-pitch content is valuable.
With so many webinars happening in a particular niche, attendees have gotten more conscious of their time and realize that they can’t attend all of them.
Also most people know that a webinar replay is usually put up within hours of the live webinar and prefer to watch it on their own time.
If you have seen a drop in your webinar attendance, here are a few suggestions to get it back up.
1. Provide rock-solid content before the sales pitch so your webinar attendees actually learn something in exchange for their time.
2. Offer an exclusive bonus for everyone who attends the live webinar. Maybe a free report or software tool.
3. Offer prizes such as an iPad 2 that will be given to a random live webinar attendee. People love contests and a chance to win.
4. Engage your webinar attendees with polls and questions so that they feel apart of the webinar.
5. Offer an exclusive deal for the product pitch just for live webinar attendees.
6. Make the webinar replay available for only a limited time period.
7. You may not even want to make a replay available. This may get more people on the live event.
8. Instead of just boring powerpoint slides, spice them up with animations, images and possible video in your webinar presentation.
I still do think webinars are one of the best marketing tools for promotions, but webinar presenters are going to have to become more creative to get attendance back up.
Your thoughts? Can you add to this list? What would make you attend a live webinar?
Comment below.
Gauher Chaudhry
