How to Increase Webinar Attendance Rate by 2x or More [2024]

15%.

According to some reports, that’s the rate of attendees who end up purchasing a product or service being showcased in a webinar.

And that’s not a bad conversion rate!

Hence, webinars can be a valuable and successful tool in your marketing toolkit.

With such a powerful opportunity, you want to make sure that you get as many people to show up to your webinar as possible – so that you can get more sales out of that 15% total.

But how?

Here's how to increase webinar attendance rate… in some cases by 2x or even more!

Make Your Webinar Audience-Centric (Not Salesy)

To be frank, your audience isn’t really interested in your business.

They are interested in how your business can benefit them.

So how you present your webinar could make a big difference.

If you present your webinar as “Learn How to Use Our Product Reviewing Service,” that won’t connect with people (unless they are really far down the sales funnel).

Why not?

For one, because people generally aren’t itching to “learn” anything unless it’s something they’re already highly interested in.

Furthermore, a title like that implies you’ll be talking a lot about your service… and probably trying to sell it to them.

Obviously, selling your product or service is the ultimate point of a sales webinar. However, people will be turned off if you come across as salesy from the get-go.

So how do you present your webinar as “audience-centric” and therefore attract more attendance?

Here are a few practical tips.

1) Use Words That Are Highly Appealing and Create Less Friction

Many words marketers typically use are actually turn-offs.

Words like “learn more” and “sign up” and even “try” are common, and may work just fine.

But they imply work—they communicate that the audience must do something.

And words like these aren’t too exciting. They don’t in and of themselves sound like something people really want to do.

It’s better when you can use appealing language that really speaks to your audience’s desires. As much as possible, speak to what people are getting rather than what they are doing.

And when you do have to speak to what people are doing, try to use language that sounds as little like work as possible—for example, think “Discover” instead of “Learn” and “Get My Free Consultation” instead of “Sign Up.”

You may not get a huge wave of new registrants by tweaking a bit of language here and there, but you want to remove every point of friction possible, because every little bit helps.

2) Speak to Benefits or Outcomes That Are Desirable to Your Audience

When promoting your webinar, you have to understand what your audience really wants or needs.

Then speak to that. Let them know how they will make progress toward that goal through your webinar.

Why should your audience register and show up for your webinar?

What benefit will it be to them? What goal will it help them achieve?

How will your webinar help put them closer to that goal?

Try to answer one or more of those questions succinctly in promoting your webinar, and you’ll attract a larger audience.

3) Be Specific!

Specificity stands out.

For instance, which of the following sounds better?

• “How to Get More Sales with AI Marketing”
• “3 Steps to Getting 3x More Sales in 28 Days Using AI Marketing”

Specificity not only makes things more interesting, but it also can make outcomes easier for your audience to visualize.

It’s hard to visualize a nondescript “how to get more sales.” It’s much easier to visualize the specifics in the second example above.

So when promoting your webinar, be as specific as is feasible. Don’t worry too much about being “too specific”—for most messaging, the issue is being too generic.

Now, of course, you don’t want to make any untrue promises. So in your specificity make sure you’re being truthful.

If you’re saying there are “3 steps to getting 3x more sales in 28 days,” make sure that the goal and plan you’re proposing is actually possible and attainable (at least for the right audience).

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The bottom line is that you need to think about what people really want and about how you can present that to them when advertising your webinar.

Putting all of this together in an example…

Instead of advertising your webinar with “Learn How to Use Our Product Reviewing Service,” you could present it as “Discover How to Get $200 a Week by Reviewing Products Online.”

That puts the audience more front and center. It uses more appealing language. It speaks to a desirable outcome. And it gives them a specific benefit that will connect with (at least some of) them.

Provide a Lot of Value

So the ultimate point of your webinar is to bring people down the sales funnel so that they purchase.

HOWEVER...

Depending on which part of the funnel your audience is located currently, your webinar shouldn’t be mostly about selling.

Sure, you may get to the sales part at the end.

But most of your webinar should be about providing lots of good value.

You probably know this, but it’s worth reminding yourself over and over.

Give them value. Give them value. Give them value.

What can you provide to your audience that will legitimately help them? What will give them new insights, new strategies, new plans of action, new ideas to consider?

What can you give for free that will help their life in some way?

Just because your webinar is (most likely) free, doesn’t mean you should be stingy on the value you provide.

In fact, being overly generous may help you in the long run if it gets people hooked to your brand.

Your webinar can show people the expertise and authority you can offer and the kind of quality service you can give.

When people see how much you can truly help them is when they will be more open to handing over their hard-earned money to partner with you.

What points of value can you provide in a webinar?

1) Educate Your Audience on a Topic They’re Interested In

Give people the info they’re craving to know regarding whatever topic you’re an expert in.

If you’re a business coach, that could be the latest marketing tactics.

If you’re in healthcare, that could be a walkthrough on the newest advances in medicine.

If you’re in finance, that could be a breakdown of the concept of cryptocurrency.

Whatever will be interesting and helpful to the audience that you’re trying to reach - that’s what you want to provide for them.

(And the nice thing about these educational presentations is that they can lead very naturally into your sales pitch.)

2) Repurpose Your Existing Helpful Resources

What resources do you currently have that your customers or clients have already found useful?

This could be content from ebooks, top blog posts, or other resources you’ve had success with in the past.

You can simply take this quality content and repurpose it into a webinar presentation.

Not only does this save you time because you don’t have to start from scratch, but you’re using content that you already know is helpful to your audience.

You can even present it as a top example of the kinds of resources you provide to your clients, as an enticement to get them to register for the webinar (and after the webinar, to follow through with a purchase).

3) Address Your Audience’s Top Problems, Fears, or Concerns

As mentioned previously, your audience is looking for what benefit you can provide.

One way to benefit them is to help them solve a problem, assuage a fear, or address concern—especially one that is of highest importance to them.

If you can communicate that you understand their problem and that you have a solution, that will give them a reason to sign up for your webinar.

Now, that means you have to make sure to actually give them a tenable solution. Sure, you can point them to a sale for additional help, but don’t leave them hanging without any sort of resolution.

4) Address Your Audience’s Top Desires and Goals

Alternatively, rather than addressing a problem, you can address a desire or goal.

(Admittedly, sometimes these concepts are intertwined, but speaking to a desired goal is more of the positive side while addressing a problem is more of the negative.)

As with addressing a problem, you have to demonstrate that you can relate to your audience’s goal—and let them know you have a path to help them reach that goal.

Give your audience clear guidance that helps them take steps toward achieving what they’re wanting to achieve.

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With all of these methods of providing value… sharing real guidance, real expertise, and real solutions will make your webinar more successful—and will keep people coming back to future webinars.

When you have quality content to provide, you can try to pack the benefit of that content in how you promote your webinar.

Employ Scarcity

Moving away from more high-level strategies to some more specific tips…

It’s a general fact of human nature that we just don’t like to miss out on things.

That’s why all marketers, businesspeople, and even most consumers are aware of scarcity tactics.

Marketers use scarcity all the time, because it appeals to our human sense of urgency… and it works!

Hubspot conducted a survey and found that 45% of respondents said “scarcity makes them want to learn more about a product.”

And that’s just people who are self-reporting.

Indeed and Shopify list some scarcity tactics, and several of them can be applied to promoting your webinar for the purpose of increasing your webinar attendance rate.

Some of these include the following…

1) A Countdown Timer

You could decide that you want to close registration for the webinar at a particular date or time.

Then you can use a countdown timer to indicate when registration will be closed.

People will see the timer on the webinar registration page, so they’ll know that if they don’t want to miss the deadline, they’ll have to register sooner rather than later.

2) Early Registration Benefits

People love getting free bonuses!

You could throw in bonus content, such as a free ebook or a free coaching call, for the first x number of people to register for your webinar.

As long as your offer is enticing, this can help give people motivation to register right away, so that they can take advantage of the freebies.

3) Capping Registration

Another option is to cap registration to a maximum number of people.

You can list the “maximum cap” as low or as high as you’d like; just make sure this tactic doesn’t do more harm than good by limiting attendees!

If you do end up hitting your cap, you can retarget those who are unable to attend and point them to other webinars or content.

4) “Limited Time” Webinar

You could showcase that your webinar content will only be offered for a limited time.

(And you may or may not specify exactly how long your webinar will be available.)

Letting people know that your webinar won’t be available forever can help motivate people to make sure they catch it while they can.

5) Urgent Copy

In all of the above tactics, use urgent language in the copy that you use to promote your webinar.

Use language that speaks to the scarcity you’re trying to convey:

“

Get your seat now, because registration closes at 11:59pm EST!

“

FREE 1-on-1 coaching session if you save your seat TODAY

“

Only the first 100 registrants will get access to the webinar, so don’t wait!

Your copy should correspond to the tone of scarcity that you want to convey.

Use Text Reminders

You probably already use email reminders to increase your webinar attendance rate.

But what about text reminders?

Should you use texting to remind people about your webinars?

The Benefits of Text Reminders

We all know that everyone texts and that up to 98% of texts are read.

With that in mind, it makes sense to use the powerful medium of SMS as a way to get more people to show up to your webinars.

Take our own experience as an example.

For one of our webinars, we had a low show-up rate of 11%. After implementing text reminders, that show-up rate shot up to 68%.

That result makes sense, considering how prominent texting is!

Texting allows you to blast out a reminder with a link to your webinar—and that blast can show up right in front of people’s faces, on their phones.

They’ll see the message, and all that they need to do is tap the link to hop onto your webinar.

So you’re adding 2 layers of convenience: a notice conveniently on their phones, and an easy link they can use to access.

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As a side note, we also ran a test to see if asking for a phone number negatively impacts registration numbers for a webinar registration.

After asking for a phone number on our webinar registration form for a few months, we decided to test removing that field. And upon removing the phone number field, we actually found that our sign-up rate dropped.

The conclusion? Asking for a phone number did not negatively impact our registration rates.

How Do You Implement Text Reminders?

So how do you implement text reminders to increase your own webinar attendance rate?

You first need an SMS platform or tool (like Mobile Text Alerts). SMS platforms allow you to manage a database of SMS contacts and send texts.

Once you have a text alert platform, you can send out reminders such as the following:

“

Reminder: [Webinar name] starts in 1 hour. There will be a live Q&A at the end to get all your pressing questions answered. You don’t want to miss it!

“

It’s time to stop what you’re doing! [Webinar name] starts in 5 minutes. See you there! [Link]

You can also set up follow-up texts to send after the webinar, to encourage attendees to watch the webinar replay or follow whatever CTA you’d like them to follow next (such as purchasing your service):

“

If you missed today’s webinar, or if you want to catch it again, here’s the replay: [link]

“

Thanks again for registering for [webinar name]! Check out this new ebook so you can see for yourself how you can [benefit] - [link]

And the good news is that in many cases you can set up these reminders and follow-ups automatically, particularly if you use Zoom or GoTo for your webinar platform.

If Using Zoom or GoTo

If using Zoom or GoTo, you can integrate directly with your Mobile Text Alerts platform just by clicking a few buttons.

The platform can sync with your webinar software and automatically schedule text messages to send out to any registrants that sign up to attend your webinar.

You can customize what you want the reminder message to say, and can set up as many reminders and follow-ups as you’d like.

If Using Other Webinar Platforms

If you’re using another webinar platform, you can set up automations via the integration site Zapier.com, or programmatically via SMS API.

But even if you don’t directly integrate, you can still take advantage of SMS for your webinar.

All you’ll need to do is export your webinar registration list, and then import them into the SMS platform. Then you can schedule a text message and select the time that you’d like it to send out.

Presto! Better webinar attendance.

What Are You Doing to Increase Your Webinar Attendance Rate?

Your webinar attendance rate is a treasure trove of potential.

So what can you do to take fuller advantage of it?

The 4 tips mentioned in this post are just a few steps you can take to have the best webinar attendance rate possible.

It starts with getting more registrants. And then the trick is in getting those registrants to actually show up.

Because more attendees means more sales—and more sales means that you can provide more people with the value of the service that you offer.

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