Working with individuals around the world with webinars gives me great insight into things that are making a big impact across many industries.
In this article, we are going to look at one of those big points of impact: how you should follow up with laser precision to maximize your webinar conversions. Because simply sending out an email and acting as if all webinar registrants are equal, is one of the most unprofitable moves a webinar presenter can make.
You will have people that registered but did not attend. People that attended momentarily. People who attended the majority of your webinar but never saw your pitch. People who saw your whole webinar who did not convert. And those who saw your webinar and took you up on your offer. You need to treat each type of registrant unique because… THEY ARE!
Pop Quiz: How often do you sign up for a webinar, don’t attend it, then immediately start getting hard pitched on the product or service the webinar sold? If you are like most, it is the norm. And if you are like most, you don’t purchase the product or service. And who can blame you? You have not consumed the webinar, don’t understand the value of what you are getting and therefore, cannot make a yes buying decision. And when you cannot make a yes buying decision, the answer is always NO.
Each Registrant is in one of five points of the webinar buying phase. And 3 of them are NOT a Buying Point!
Therefore you need to segment your webinar registrants by those five points. By properly identifying registrants based on their behavior, you can send laser-targeted messages that will increase the likelihood of converting them from a registered attendee to a client. If you don’t identify and segment these leads according to behavior, you risk looking like a rookie with mismatched messaging, losing your leads, and ultimately losing sales. In this post, we’re going to look at five important segments you should target with your webinars.
The Five Important Webinar Segments
Now, let’s look at the five segments you should be targeting.
- Webinar attendees who finished the webinar and purchased a product or service from the webinar.
Your clients – the people who converted on your webinar. Maybe those people applied for a strategy session, purchased your product or made a commitment to your service based on your webinar content. These people are the holy grail. These are the people you want to make a good impression with. The worst thing you can do to your customers is to keep them in your sales funnel and push a product or service to them that you’ve already sold to them. Depending on your funnel’s aggressiveness, you may taint your relationship with them or perhaps even drive some of your customers to requesting a refund. Especially if your product or service is related to business and marketing – it will tell your customers that they are working with someone who can’t properly handle their own marketing automation.
Action Step: Webinar attendees that purchased your product or service should be immediately removed from your sales funnel email list and added to a customer list. This way, you can focus on supporting your customers on their journey with your product or service, up-selling them to higher ticket products or services, or both.
- Webinar attendees who finished the webinar, but did not purchase.
The next segment to identify and target with custom messaging is webinar attendees who finished your webinar but did not purchase your product or service. These are the people that know who you are, the kind of quality content you deliver, and the nature of the product and service you are offering. You don’t have to introduce your product or service to this segment. Instead, you will want to hit them with some or all of the following types of messages.
Action Step: You will want to remind webinar attendees about the benefits of your product or service. You will want to remind webinar attendees about special bonuses that are available to them. Maybe extend a bonus offered during your webinar for a limited time or add a few new bonuses that were not advertised during the webinar but are available with your product or service. You may want to send them a list of questions that are frequently asked about your product or service and the answers to those questions. You can share them as questions that were asked by other webinar attendees that you didn’t have time to answer during the webinar. This will make them feel less salesy, even though they are questions and answers that should help overcome any objections your potential customers may have.
You will want to check in with them to see if they had any specific questions that were not answered about your product or service that you can personally reply to via email.
If you still don’t convert your webinar attendee to a customer, you may want to consider follow up webinars on a similar topic or putting them back into your main email list so you can move them into a sales funnel for a different product or service. The choice is yours.
- Webinar attendees who consumed the content, but dropped off before the product or service pitch.
The format of webinars are predictable nowadays. An introduction, some valuable content that fulfills the title and opt-in page of the webinar, a pitch, and a brief question and answer period. Once the content portion is over, unless they have some burning questions, people not interested in a pitch will drop off. With this segment of attendees, you know they know what kind of content you can deliver. You just need to deliver the pitch from the end of the webinar to them in your follow up email series. But here is the thing, most people will attempt to do that via email. This is a mistake in the vast majority of situations. Far better off to drive them back to the webinar.
Action Step: Therefore, send an email 7 days later and let them know you are going to be offering the webinar again due to demand. Remind them of the content you will cover, emphasize the last part of the webinar (that they missed) as well as the bonus gift that you give you at the end of the webinar (that they missed). Drive them back to the registration page and make them recommit to the webinar. Repeat that 3 times. After this point, if they don’t attend the webinar, you can follow up with webinars on similar topics or putting them back in your main list for other content/ offers.
- Registered attendees that joined the webinar, but only stayed for the introduction.
The people who drop off after the introduction or earlier are different from those who drop off after the content. At this stage, you could be looking at two issues. Either the attendee had to attend to other matters that took them away from your webinar, or your introduction somehow put them off.
Action Step: In either case, you can take the stance of assuming they just had something come up. With that assumption, you can see if they want to attend a new “live” automated webinar. If people in this segment did drop off due to a lack of time, they will likely take you up on the new webinar. From there, depending on whether they watch the webinar and purchase, watch the webinar but do not purchase, or only watch a part of the webinar, you can place them into one of the above segments accordingly.
If the person does not register for the new “live” automated webinar, you can make the offer again in 7 days. Do this follow up 3 times and then move them onto your regular email list.
If someone registered but didn’t attend the webinar at all, you absolutely don’t want to go straight into a hardcore promotion for your product after the webinar is completed. Effectively, you know this person is (or was) interested but maybe didn’t have the chance to see your webinar.
Action Step: Email them 7 days after the webinar and let them know you will be offering the webinar again. This gives the person a chance to soak up your valuable content and then get introduced to your offer on the webinar.
Do not just send them a link to the webinar. Make them register again. From there, depending on whether they watch the webinar and purchase, watch the webinar but do not purchase, or only watch a part of the webinar, you can place them into one of the above segments accordingly.
BONUS SEGMENT: Registered attendees who attended the full webinar, did not purchase, and unsubscribed.
When you offer valuable content in exchange for an email address and business lead, you always run the risk of having the lead consume your content and then unsubscribe from your list to prevent getting your marketing messages. You cannot email these people again from your list about the promotion related to your webinar. You can, however, reach them in a few additional ways.
If you export your unsubscribed leads’ email addresses, you can target them with remarketing ads on Facebook (using Custom Audiences) and Twitter (using Tailored Audiences). You will find detailed instructions on how to set up both with in my post on how to get revenue from webinar attendees that didn’t buy.
This will allow you to reach them again about your product and service without violating the terms of their unsubscribe since the last thing you want is to be reported to your email marketing service as a spammer. The key is in the messaging you use. You know that your unsubscribers are not interested in getting marketed to about your product or service – that is why they unsubscribed, after all. But maybe they didn’t realize the value of your product or service.
With this segment of people, you need to create ads distinguishing your product or service from the rest of the ones your unsubscribes have come across. Tie it in with the valuable webinar content you offered. Don’t let there be any doubt in the unsubscriber’s mind that they made a mistake unsubscribing and not learning about your product.
Is it too much? You might be wondering if the number of emails you send after your automated webinar is too much for your leads to handle. For many doing this wrong it is too many emails. I oftentimes see people slamming the heck out of webinar registrants. Not only those that bought, but also those that attended and even those that did not attend. They pitch VERY hard to get the sale. Like they are pitching to Cinderella and if they don’t get the sale by Midnight, it’s game over.
No one likes being hard pitched, if your goal is to create a long term, successful business your emails should be filled with valuable content and/or entertaining content. Pitch, pitch, pitch is going to burn your list and keep you from having long term clients. So sending out an email that is valuable/ and or entertaining once a week is fine. And at that rate, the truth is, if your leads aren’t buying, then you have two options. You can keep paying for them to sit on your email or marketing automation platform without taking action, or you can force them to take action. In an attempt to convert your leads, you may lose some of them. That’s ok. You can still reach them through advertising (as described above), and at the very least, you will stop paying for leads (inside your autoresponder/ CRM) that never plan to buy and be increasing your delivery rates by getting dead unopen email addresses off your list.
How to Segment Your Webinar Registrations and Attendees
Now that we’ve identified the five segments that you should be identifying and targeting with specific follow up email messaging, you are probably wondering how much work it will take to actually create segments with these different people for your automatic webinar. Well it is going to depend on the specific webinar software you are using. I’m familiar with StealthSeminar so I will talk about that.
StealthSeminar has auto-segmentation built-in. This means that you don’t have to find these segments on your own. The software will do it for you. In addition, if you are using a StealthSeminar plugin to your autoresponder or CRM (ActiveCampaign, Ontraport, InfusionSoft, Constant Contact, iContact, Aweber, etc.). It will auto-segment your webinar attendees based on the behaviors detected by the software and segment them inside those automation tools. Then those tools can follow up with laser targeted communication so that your profiting at your highest level. All you have to do is create the follow-up email series for each segment and connect the series accordingly.
You have the option of doing everything yourself if you prefer the hands-on experience. Alternatively, you can have StealthSeminar support set up segmentation automation with your email and marketing automation tool to make sure that your automated webinars are working to their full potential with your valuable business leads. Regardless of how you do the segmentation, feel free to use the Ronning Webinar Prosperity Blueprint Segmentation Flowchart.
In Conclusion
I hope that you understand the importance of segmenting your automated webinar registrations and attendees according to specific behaviors. By segmenting and messaging every registrant and attendee based on whether they attended the webinar, how much of the webinar they saw, and whether or not they purchased, you will be doing a couple of things. You will ensure that your customers stay happy. You will give potential customers the right messaging to continue them through your funnel. You will show them how intelligent you are with your marketing campaigns.
These three things will ensure the success of your automated webinars. Each and every time. And if you add the bonus segment in, you’ll even get the chance to convert leads that you would have otherwise just lost and possibly have never touched again.