52% of marketers say that webinars are one of the top tactics for driving top-of-the-funnel lead conversions. 49% say that webinars are super effective at converting qualified leads.
But it’s not the webinar alone that seals the deal.
To convert webinar attendees into clients, you need to put in the extra work to follow up on your leads.
Why is Webinar Follow-Up Important?
As business leadership thought leader Bobby Umar explains, “Webinars are an excellent lead gen tool, a great way to deliver content and value for your audience. They are the type of content that starts future conversations for your work or packages.”
And the stats agree.
89% of webinar service users believe that webinars outperform other channels in creating qualified leads, and 72% say that webinars directly impact pipeline and revenue.
But if you don’t have an active plan to follow up with your attendees and registrants, you’ll lose opportunities along the value chain.
When you consider that 90% of professionals engage with webinars at least some of the time when researching purchases, it’s likely your webinar registrants are often potential buyers.
However, 85% of professionals specifically say that they want fewer sales pitches within webinars.
In this respect, you need to find another way to convert webinar registrants and attendees without being too salesy during the webinar itself. Your follow-up actions are a crucial way to convert these leads.
If you’re not proactive in engaging these hot leads, they’ll fall by the wayside.
8 Ways to Follow Up with Prospects After Your Webinar
It’s not enough to host a webinar and hope it converts your prospects. If you want conversions, you need to follow up.
Here are the best ways to reach out to your webinar leads to encourage engagement.
1. Segment and personalize follow-ups
When it comes to email follow-ups, segmentation is the number one tactic used by email marketers to boost engagement.
By segmenting your audience, you can personalize your emails to better appeal to what each group needs based on their behavior.
While segmentation boosts engagement, personalization is the top tactic to improve email performance.
On a basic level, you want to segment your webinar leads into those who registered but didn’t attend, those who attended but didn’t stay and those who stayed to the end.
That way, you don’t risk repeating information to those who already heard it in the webinar, but you can inform those who missed important points.
If you’re smart about it, you can even have registrants answer questions at the registration phase to help you better segment your leads later. Ask them their purpose for attending the webinar and what kind of industry they work for.
Use this information to tailor your follow-up emails to cater directly to those needs.
2. Leverage a Q&A session to personalize follow-up
The attendees that sit through your entire webinar are your hottest leads. If they were less interested, they would have clicked out of the session.
It’s a good idea to get to the heart of their individual needs so you can better personalize follow-up communications to target their requirements directly.
That's why 86% of webinar hosts use Question and Answer sessions.
Try adding a Q&A session to the end of your webinar. Not only will this help iron out any confusion participants may have, but it also helps you to get a better idea of what each person wants to know more about.
Listen to the questions carefully and then write specific, personalized follow-up emails to each inquirer based on these queries.
This will demonstrate your value and show your commitment to solving their individual problems.
3. Send an exclusive offer
Depending on the industry, promotions can boost conversions by over 3000%.
By sending an exclusive offer with a time limit, you can increase buying urgency among your qualified webinar leads.
You can frame the offer as a ‘thank you’ deal for attending the webinar.
Alternatively, you can offer personalized deals to each participant based on the information you received from them during the webinar Q&A session or from their registration forms.
Using quoting software, you can draw up a one-time offer that addresses specific needs and increases the urgency.
This type of software also helps with the revenue management of prospects that accept your offer.
4. Link to more value
Another way to nurture webinar prospects is to provide them with more value. This demonstrates that you have a deep understanding of the topic and industry and that you’re concerned with helping them understand, too.
This is an especially good technique if you know an attendee’s specific needs.
For example, say you hosted a webinar about productivity, and a webinar attendee had asked questions about relevant apps to use.
You could link them to your blog post on the topic, in this case, best productivity apps, to provide more information and show that you’re an authority in the field.
5. Offer a free strategy session
One of the easiest ways to further carry on the conversation is to offer a free strategy session.
By offering your time upfront, you signal your willingness to help clients. It also makes prospects feel as though they’re getting a bonus for attending the webinar.
This strategy session isn’t just a chance to nurture a lead; it’s also an opportunity to find out more about their problem so that you can figure out ways to personalize the value prop of your solutions to increase the likelihood of conversion. It’s a chance to prove your worth, like a mini audition for your services.
6. Send a survey
Surveys are one of the top webinar features used by hosts. In fact, 43% of webinar hosts use surveys as they help to get a snapshot of what your audience found interesting, what they need help with and how you can improve your presentation next time.
Follow up on your webinar by sending a quick survey to the participants to ask key questions that open the conversation further and lead them toward picking you as a solution.
Use this opportunity to find out more about the problem that the prospect is having and how helpful your webinar was in providing potential solutions.
This will guide you to the prospects that you need to focus on first. Survey respondents that explain their problems in depth and indicate that they found your webinar useful are your hottest leads. Concentrate on nurturing these prospects first.
7. Offer an on-demand recording
Just because a registrant doesn’t attend doesn’t mean they’re not a hot lead. They may not be in your time zone, or they may have prior commitments at the time of the webinar.
This is where on-demand recordings come in.
As it turns out, 43% of all attendees only watch on-demand webinars as they like to immerse themselves in the content on their own time.
In this respect, a follow-up email with a link to a replay of your live recording is a must-do. It dramatically increases engagement with those registrants who didn’t attend, and it gives those who did an opportunity to run over the information again.
Not only that, but it also gives you a chance to attract new registrants who sign up just to watch the on-demand webinar.
In fact, for leading webinars, around 70% of registrants who don’t attend will still view the replay. Plus, top webinars tend to experience an extra 27% of new sign-ups for the on-demand webinar.
Naturally, it’s a good idea to send an email drawing attention to the replay, but it’s also a clever tactic to post all on-demand webinars on your website. That way, this content can continue to act as a lead magnet to new prospects.
Take data center infrastructure management firm Nlyte, for example.
This software company has a dedicated page on its website for all upcoming and on-demand webinars so that prospects can sign up for new webinars and browse old content while they’re waiting.
Old webinars also attract new prospects who find the content through Google searches.
8. Don’t be afraid to call
The sales call isn’t dead. In fact, 57% of sales professionals are making more phone calls than before.
While email marketing is an efficient way to blast lots of webinar registrants at once, it’s easy for recipients to ignore your email.
A sales call creates a sense of urgency since the phone is ringing there and then.
When your registrants sign up for your webinar, encourage them to add their phone numbers.
You could make this compulsory, but it may lower the number of people that complete registration. However, being highly selective in this way means that those that do sign up with their phone number are more serious about your solution.
If the phone number isn’t compulsory, target registrants that gave you a correct phone number first. After all, you only give your phone number over if you’re truly interested in something.
The Bottom Line
Your webinar registrants and attendees are prime fodder for becoming customers. If you’re not active about keeping the conversation alive, you’ll lose your chance at clinching sales.
Personalizing communications and providing extra value are key ways to show that you’re a cut above the competition. Use your registration phase and webinar time to prepare your communication strategy by finding out extra information about participants so you can customize your post-webinar conversations.
