If you’re struggling to get people to register for your webinar, then this article is for you. Recently, I was able to 6X the number of webinar registrations for my company compared to my predecessor, simply because I contact the right people. So in this article, I’m going to go over what you need before you start your outreach, how to position your outreach, and then give you a few ideas as to places and people you can go for reaching out and getting more webinar registration.
Know your target audience
The first thing you need to do when it comes to getting people to actually register for your webinar is to know who your target audience is. You need to have a clear understanding on what are their motivations and what are some of the challenges that they are facing as to why they would even tune into your webinar.
Then from there, what you can do is you can isolate for two or three of these problem points and write your copy around this when it comes to getting people to register. In other words, it’s only once you have a clear understanding of what exactly they are facing in terms of their challenges, that you’ll be able to actually write effective copy that will get them to register.
Once you have a clear understanding of who your target audiences for your webinar, you want to write effective copy. This is where you’re going to use some sort of tried and true copywriting formula to deliver your point. For example, you might end up using the pass approach and your webinar registration copy, where you’re first going to outline what the problem is that you’re going to tackle during the webinar.
Write effective copy
You’re going to agitate the problem a little bit more and then present your webinar as the solution. You can check out some of my earlier articles on copywriting and other related things to email marketing if you’re trying to figure out how to write some effective copy. What’s really important though, at the highest of levels is to make sure that when somebody reads your webinar registration copy, it’s clear exactly who it’s for, what they’re going to learn, and what they will get out of the experience from attending the webinar.
It’s also really nice to have a clear singular call-to-action to register for that webinar and include some scarcity in the case where you might be capping the number of seats or wanting to keep the webinar a little bit more intimate in size. Having some really clear copy goes beyond just your registration page, though.
For example, you need to map out for yourself what the email marketing copy is going to look like, what your messages to potential partners that you’re working with are as well as anybody else that you’re going to be sharing this webinar to in order to get them interested in registering for your webinar.
Okay. So now that we have a clear understanding of our target audience and at least some semblance of some marketing copy that we can use, it’s time to start promoting our message. Here are a few easy places that you can go when it comes to getting your initial registrations.
Email list
The first place that should come to mind is your email list. If you haven’t already started your email list, you need to start doing so as soon as possible. Your email list is typically going to be a list of people who have signed up to hear about updates from you or your business. So you should have some sort of freebie offer on your site where you’ve been capturing these emails, but in the case where you haven’t, what you can do is you can potentially roll up your contact list to see who you’ve emailed in the last year or so, and then ask them if they’d like to join your email list and then have some sort of opt-in offer for them to join your list.
Your email list is always going to be one of your first places to go when it comes to registering for your webinars because it is somebody that is to likely going to be a little bit more interested than just anybody else on the street.
Customer list
The second place aside from your email list is potentially your customer list. So this should be a little bit different, but essentially if you have a customer that is paying you on a monthly or annually or quarterly basis, you’re going to want to get in touch with them and then invite them personally to attend this webinar. The easiest way to do so is to position it like you are doing them a favor, as opposed to just sending them a bulk email message.
It’s really important that you give people the sense that you are extending an exclusive invitation for them to join you in this webinar than to just send out a bulk message. Once you’ve gone through all of your old customers or clients, the next natural place is to check out your prospects.
Prospects
So there are naturally going to be some people that you have previously talked to and trying to sell your product or service that you want to stay in touch with. So a great way to keep in touch with your prospect is to simply send them a message and tell them that you thought of them in planning this webinar and that they might get value out of this.
Then you want to ask them if they would like an invite to the webinar. In other words, instead of sending them something that feels like a really bulk message, you want to make your prospect feel like you chose them out of all the prospects that you’ve talked to in the last year to invite them to this webinar.
By doing so they will be more likely to respond to you. And then from there you can always send them the registration link after they’ve already expressed some interest in attending your webinar. Recently, I did this with a webinar that I was running in which we 6x the number of webinar registrations simply by flipping the funnel in terms of when we actually extended the invitation link for the webinar.
In other words, by simply taking a step back, sitting back on my chair and essentially waiting for them to reply back to my invitation to send them the actual registration link, I was able to significantly increase my conversion rate because it made them feel like I was looking out for them. This slight tweak in positioning made a huge difference in the exclusivity and the willingness or excitedness that my prospect had in joining me on this webinar.
So, make sure you try that out because it’s really important that you make the person that you want to get into your webinar excited about actually attending so that they’ll show up on the actual webinar, as opposed to just waiting for the recording later on.
Social Media Groups or Communities
To do so, one of the best places to go is to contact group admins of people that lead groups around the topic that your webinar is about. For example, you might go on Facebook and search for groups that are related to the topic you’ll be discussing, or you might want to check out a site like Meetup in which there are regular groups talking about this sort of topic. When you get in touch with these group admins, you’re going to want to take a similar approach in which you’re not trying to just blast them with some sort of message. Instead, you want to give them a clear reason as to why you think the members in their group would find your webinar interesting.
And then have them opt in to receiving more information before you actually extend the webinar invitation. By doing this, you’re going to allow this group admin to feel self-important because they are the gatekeeper for the information about this webinar. And also, you’re going to make them feel like they’re doing all of their members a solid, because this webinar they’re going to be providing is so information-packed.
Once you get the hang of contacting these group admins or identifying who these group admins are, you’re going to want to scale this process. So to do so, you’re going to hold on to hire a virtual assistant, to do some of this researching for you. This way the only thing you’ll need to do in the future is the actual reach out as opposed to the research process behind the reach out.
If you need help on that, I go over a ton of topics around how to hire and manage virtual assistants on my channel.
Ultimately, when it comes to reaching out to these groups, you’re looking to get rate of one in every four or one in every five that you are reaching out to. By doing , so you’re going to have an amplification effect in which each time these people are sharing it with their group, you can expect a good number of signups coming in from that group because it’s coming from that group leader or that admin, as opposed to just another group member.
Professional Associations
A lot of times you can find professional networking groups or professional associations that essentially are gathering places for people in the same industry or space. A lot of these professional associations are always looking for ways to give their members value because their members are paying an annual fee to stay in the know and feel like they are developing themselves professionally as a member of this group. And so when you are coming in and you are sharing your value-packed webinar, you’re going to be able to likely land on their social calendars as well.
And the reason why this is super helpful is because in my experience, I have found that once I have established a professional relationship with the association, every single subsequent webinar that I’ve run has also been shared with that entire group of members.
So in other words, I know for sure that once I have an established relationship with the social media manager of one of the associations, I’m getting access to another email list of a thousand to 2000 contacts that I can promote my webinar to.
Influencers
Once you’ve exhausted the professional associations, you can reach out to some influencers that you might have relationships with, or that you want to start establishing a relationship with. To do so, I recommend that you don’t come in from the angle of sharing your webinar, but actually looking to connect with that influencer first about what they’re working on and how you can potentially just help each other out.
For example, if they have some sort of regular recurring piece of content, like a podcast or a show, you might want to offer an introduction to somebody that you think might be interesting on the podcast. Or even offer yourself as a podcast guest and some ideas as to what value would be able to add to a podcast episode. Once you get time on the calendar, you would then be able to start building a more formal relationship with that influencer. And then naturally start to share more about your content calendar and your webinars in the future.
But it’s only once we’ve established some sort of existing relationship that we will start to take from that relationship and asking them to potentially share a webinar in the future or find some sort of way to compensate them for the shout-out for the webinar.
In the past, the easiest ways that I was able to establish relationships with influencers was to first offer them value months in advance of when I actually have an ask from them. So for example, to offer some sort of audit or a skillset that of mine that they might not have. And then after establishing some sort of relationship with them, a few months later, I would hit them up and offer them to invite a few of the people on their list to my next webinar or something like that. In other words, I was always positioning as I was doing them a favor by giving their fans or their followers, some sort of exclusive offer that was hard to come by.
3 Final Tips
We’ve gone over a ton of different places that you can go when it comes to getting people to register for your webinar. So here are some final tips to help you in closing the gap in those final days leading up to your webinar.
- Always make sure that you send a reminder message in case the other person did not follow up with you or close the loop as to when they shared it with their particular lists. A lot of the strategy that I’ve outlined today is based on the idea of network effects. In other words, it only works if that gatekeeper or that owner of that other list shares that invitation with somebody else. And so you need to make sure that they close the loop and actually send it out to their lists.
- Aside from following up with people, I would also recommend that you follow up with your own respective lists. Every single week, tons of people have tons of things to do. And so it can be really easy for people to forget about that email that you sent them earlier in the week that was first introducing your webinar. So to keep it fresh and keep it open for them to join in on this webinar, the easiest way to do so is to send a follow up for all of those that aren’t on your registration list the second time around that you are reaching out to everybody in your core lists.
- Lastly, when it comes to actually promoting things, I always recommend you give ample space and time ahead of your webinar to get registrations. At least two weeks minimum if not three weeks ahead of the webinar date is when you want to start your promotion.
Big takeaways
There are two things that I want you to remember when it comes to getting people to register to your webinar:
- The first one is to always make it feel like it is a gift when you are inviting somebody to your webinar. As opposed to just sending out a bulk message in which you have a register here link is way more effective for you to try out the two-step opt in approach that I shared with you earlier, in which you first tell them that you thought they might be interested in joining you on this webinar. And ask them for permission to send the invitation their way. Once they have that sort of opt-in, you will find that they will be more willing to register for your webinar.
- The second big takeaway is to always be looking for network effects. The power of virality really comes from when we were able to reach out to somebody and essentially see leverage from our efforts.
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