Email marketing is a big deal for webinar promotion, like inviting people to your exclusive party. Instead of an invite to the party in physical ways, this invite goes digitally into inboxes. Your webinar invite needs to stand out amidst such massive email clutter and make them want to be there.
Webinars can be a means to educate your audience, establish your expertise, and generate leads. Yet, if nobody knows your webinar exists, it’s like giving a speech in an empty room. Email marketing spreads the word, creates hype, and keeps the conversation going long after the webinar is over.
Key Takeaways:
- Making emails personalized for the recipients can do magic to increase both open and click-through rates.
- Through limited-time offers, deadlines, or any kind of scarcity, encourage them to take immediate action.
- The conversation shouldn’t end with the webinar. Keep the buzz alive and nurture your leads by sending follow-up emails.
Crafting Effective Webinar Emails
Webinars are a great tool for education, marketing, and engagement. But, truly, their success rate largely relies on getting people to attend. And that’s where effective webinar emails come into play.
Here’s how you can create emails that will increase your webinar attendance and engagement.
Start with a Compelling Subject Line
Your subject line is what your recipients see first. Make it count!
To get results, you need your email subject line to:
- Be short and sweet (40-50 characters)
- Create urgency or curiosity
- Clearly indicate it’s about a webinar
In other words, it needs to communicate value regarding the webinar while enticing the reader to click. For example, instead of “Join Our Webinar“, it should be “Unlock the Secrets to Boosting Your Sales by 50%.”
Action words such as “Discover,” “Learn,” and “Master” create urgency and also work as a promise of some valuable insight. However, one must avoid spammy clichés like “Free” and “Guaranteed.”
Create a Clear and Concise Email Body
Once they open your email, make sure the content is delivered. So, you need to implement these tactics:
- Create the best webinar title
- Start with a hook that grabs attention
- Clearly state the webinar’s value proposition
- Use bullet points to highlight key benefits
- Include speaker bios to establish credibility
- Keep it scannable with short paragraphs and subheadings
Another important aspect is the introduction of the speakers. Elaborate on their expertise and what they bring with them because that gives credibility to your event.
Include Essential Details and Designs
Design plays a role in the efficiency of your sales webinar email marketing campaign. Well-designed emails are more engaging but also help to solidify your brand’s identity through the design alone.
The first thing you need to do to design your email is to align the colors, fonts, and imagery of your brand with it. Images of the speakers would make the event more tangible and personal.
Visually, this would be where a call-to-action button takes over, with its contrasting color against the text to abruptly catch the eye of the reader. This would be large enough for easy clicking on mobile devices, as most of your users will open their emails on their phones. The clean layout should have enough white space to make sure the email is easily read and navigated.
Email Campaign Timing and Frequency
Timing and frequency are also significant in emails, having a great impact on the outcome of your campaign. Send too often, and you risk becoming a pest. Send too seldom, and you may just miss their window of opportunity, or they may forget you even exist.
Balance keeps your webinar audience engaged without overwhelming them.
Here’s how:
Email Sequence
A properly created email sequence is important and enhances the number of attendees to the webinars. Usually, it starts with sending a pre-launch email that creates anticipation. It is supposed to hint at the value the recipients will gain from the upcoming webinar. Therefore, they can mark their calendars before opening the official registration.
The next step would be the email sent to sign up, preferably 2-3 weeks prior to the webinar. Subsequently, webinar invitation emails would play the role of minimizing no-shows. These reminders should be mailed a week in advance, on the day before, and some hours before the beginning of the webinar.
Timing Strategy
Everything is about timing when you send those emails for maximum effect.
First, you send the email invitation for your webinar 2-3 weeks in advance so that there is some time for people to make necessary plans. This should then be followed up a week before the event with the first reminder to renew interest and then a final one the day before or in the morning of the webinar.
Second, emails should be sent at a time when your audience is most likely to engage. Studies indicate that the best times for webinars are mid-morning, around 10 AM. Then, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are the best days.
But again, it depends on the habits of one’s audience, which may vary according to the industry or region.
Frequency of Emails
While sending a lot of emails is essential for maximizing engagement, this can easily become bombarding. In which, usually leads recipients to unsubscribe, thus constraining overall effectiveness.
In most cases, you will want to strike a balance that keeps your webinar top of mind without overwhelming your recipients. You are going to need four to six emails in most instances that include:
- a pre-launch teaser
- one invite to sign-up
- two reminders
- a final reminder
- one follow-up email after the webinar
Each email in the series should introduce something different. It could be more detailed information about the webinar, a sneak peek at the content inside, or a value reminder. That way, you will keep your emails relevant and interesting for your audience throughout the campaign.
Segmentation and Personalization
In webinar marketing, few one-size-fits-all approaches are effective. Segmentation and personalization within your webinar emails will allow for much better results in terms of engagement rates, attendance, and overall success.
Let’s dive in to understand how.
Audience Segmentation: Targeting the Right Groups
Not everyone will be interested in each and every webinar. List segmentation helps you to send the right target groups that are highly relevant to your webinars.
- Interest-Based Segmentation. Segment your audience by interest or earlier engagements they have had with your content.
- Demographic Segmentation. One of the most tried-and-true options includes demographic-based segmentation on job title, industry, or company size.
Personalization Techniques: Making Your Emails Stand Out
Personalization is more than just pasting a name into an email. Yes, using names in the subject line and greeting can help, but real personalization applies to content. Personalized follow-ups increase engagement and conversion rates by up to 68%.
Some ideas may involve:
- Using the recipient’s name in the webinar invitation email body
- Considering reference to their company name or industry
- Tailoring a webinar topic based on interests or past behavior
- Highlighting different benefits for different segments
- Showing different speakers or topics to different segments
- Sending follow-up emails on the basis of the status of a registration
- Sending personalized follow-ups after the webinar
- Changing send times and webinar date formats based on a recipient’s location
For example, if the subject of the effective webinar invitation email is how to sell, you can craft it according to what the content will do for the recipient. This personalization will actually help the recipient sign up for the webinar.
Incorporating Visual Elements
Visuals, particularly in webinar emails, are powerful means of communication. They draw the attention of your recipients, convey a lot of information in a concise span of time, and thereby make the message more engaging and memorable.
Here’s how you can make use of visuals in your webinar emails.
- Include images of the speakers
- Add speaker headshots with brief bios
- Add a short teaser video or an introduction from the speakers
- Use videos for conveying complex ideas quickly and engagingly
- Use GIFs to inject some personality into your emails
- Create urgency through countdown timers
- Complement, don’t overwhelm
When done right, these elements can increase the likelihood of recipients taking action.
Implementing Call-to-Action
The call-to-action influences whether or not recipients do anything at all. Optimize your CTA to be clear, concise, and action-oriented.
Generally speaking, CTA buttons are more easily noticed and better clicked than others, especially on mobile devices. The advantage of using embedded forms is that they make registration one step more convenient for the recipient by allowing them to sign up directly from the email.
Incentives represent another viable means of driving the number of signups to the webinar. Offers such as early-bird discounts, access to bonus content, or entry into a drawing will motivate recipients to act now.
Adding value and urgency to the CTA will surely make it appealing. What’s important is giving something that your target audience would love.
Post-Webinar Follow-Up Emails
After your webinar is over, send a post-event email to all webinar attendees to thank them for attending. Let them know the recording is available for more viewing, and share your slides as well as other valuable content mentioned in the presentation. This will help them remember what you told them and think about you when they need assistance.
Moreover, don’t say “thanks” and go away. Keep the conversation going by continuing to send them more great stuff, such as blog posts, eBooks, or case studies. The more good stuff you give them, the more expert-like they’ll think you are.
Finally, ask for feedback. The feedback will help improve your webinars further. Invite them to future webinars or events. This will build a relationship with them and keep them coming back for more.
Final Thoughts
A well-crafted email marketing campaign lies at the heart of every successful webinar. If you have done some strategic planning regarding your email marketing, then lead conversions are certain.
From pre-launch emails to post-webinar follow-ups, every touch in your email campaign is vital for moving your audience further along in their respective journey. But even the best of the best emails can’t get by without the proper tools to make it truly work. That’s where StealthSeminar comes in.
With us, you will be able to automate your webinars from the sign-up process all the way down to follow-ups. Its strong feature set enables you to:
- Attract leads on autopilot. With an automated webinar email sequence and integrated marketing tools, StealthSeminar can help you easily attract, engage, and convert leads.
- Automatically drive sales. Allow StealthSeminar to work on automating the entire webinar process.
Basically, incorporating a strategic email marketing campaign with StealthSeminar turns your webinars into an easily integrated lead-generating tool.
