How to Increase Your Webinar Show Up Rate

Show Notes

• Online webinars are a great way to communicate with and educate a large group of people, as well as a way to move people down the marketing process to the sales process.
• What prevents people from showing up to your webinar? They may not have had much motivation in the first place, they forgot, life got busy, or they don’t feel like it is as important as what they are doing in the moment.
• Keep the motivation high so people have a reason to show up.
• How do you keep your potential webinar attendees from forgetting about your webinar? Since the typical email open rate is only 20-30%, you are missing out on the other 70% of your potential customers if you simply send an email.
• A natural solution to increase your show-up rate at your webinar is to use a text to remind people about your webinar about 15-30 minutes before your webinar begins.
• Texts get people’s attention more than email.
• Before you send texts to people, you will need to make sure you have their permission.
• Once you send a text reminder you are guaranteed to increase your show up rate at your webinar.
• Not all text message reminders are equal. Be sure to deliver the link to the webinar location into the text message.
• You can suggest a native app they may need to use to watch the webinar on their phone.
• Make it easy for people to attend even if they are not in the ideal situation.
• Most mobile phones are a one thing at a time device, so if your message is compelling you will keep them engaged and not multi-tasking during the webinar.

Transcription of Episode

[00:00:00] This is Ryan Chapman with Fix Your Funnel, and in today's episode I'm talking about one way to enhance attendance at online webinars. Online webinars are a great way for you to be able to communicate and educate a number of people and move them down the marketing process into the sales process.

But, one of the biggest problems for anyone doing an online webinar is getting people to actually attend. While we might capture people in a good moment when they're very interested in learning more about what it is that we offer and we get them to register, traditionally we see attendance rates anywhere from 33 to 5%. Meaning, you're missing out on a large segment of people who said they were interested in learning more about your topic because they don't actually show up to your webinar.

What prevents a person from showing up to your webinar? Well, there's a whole host of things that can prevent them.

One is motivation may have not been very high in the first place. Number two is they forget. Number three is life happens. Number four is they don't feel like it's as important as [00:01:00] it was in the moment. So they have all these different things that can be happening. What can you do to actually prevent that?

To get someone to show up for a webinar, number one, we have to keep their motivation high, we have to be keeping top of mind for that person so that they'll be able to see the reason why they need to actually show up, maybe even rearrange their schedules so that they can be there on time.

The one that we're going to talk about today is, how do we keep them from forgetting that the event is happening at all?

Traditionally people have used email to be able to kind of jar their memory and say, hey, remember you have this webinar to attend, show up today. That is fantastic, except for, if you've been listening to this podcast for very long, you know the statistics on actual consumption of emails. It's in the 20 to 30 percent range.

That means if we have 100 people register for our event and we're sending out e-mail reminders, we're only going to get about 20 to 30 percent of those people that even see the reminder. Isn't that [00:02:00] an interesting correlation between the number of people typically showing up on webinars? Are we only getting the people that are interacting with our emails? For the other 70%, are they not even aware that the webinar is today because they never even saw it in their email inbox?

One of the natural solutions that people have found to kind of combat this and trying to increase their show up at their webinar, because, and let's put this into dollar terms, if you have 100 people show up on a webinar and you are able to help 20% of those people to say yes to whatever you're offering, then, if you could have 200 people in webinar, you can essentially double your sales.

The number of people you have on the webinar has a direct correlation to the money that you make from your webinar. Having more people on then, stands to reason, would make us more money. So, how do we get more people on?

The solution that people have found is to have a text message sent out to the person a few minutes, maybe 15 to 30 minutes, before the women are supposed to begin. This is a really powerful technique and people know it because they know that they don't miss [00:03:00] text messages. You get text messages. They show up on the front of your cell phone or smartphone and they get your attention. Whether you like it or not, if you send a text message out, it's going to get more attention than if you send an email out, so that can be very powerful.

Now before we send text messages to people, because it is one of the most intimate forms communication, we want to make sure that they're aware that we're going to do it so we don't tick anybody off. It's really hard to have a customer relationship with somebody who's mad at you.

If you want to have a good relationship with the prospective customer, you got to make sure you have their permission, so get the permission to send a text message. But, when you get that permission and you send that reminder, that is guaranteed to increase your show up rate at your webinars.

There are some little tidbits to be aware of when you're sending out a text message reminder. Not all text message reminders are equal.

Some people, when they send out text message reminders for the webinar just say, hey, the webinar starts in 30 minutes and maybe they reference themselves, maybe they don't, [00:04:00] but just doing that isn't going to get the job done. We don't know what the situation is of the prospective customer in the moment that they receive that text message. They may be in a place where it may not be convenient for them to look up the rest of the information about the webinar.

I always encourage people to find a way to deliver the link to the webinar location from the text message. Put that that link into the text message.

If you're using a scenario or some sort of solution that would give you the specific prospects link directly into that webinar so they can attend it, that's the ideal scenario, that way they can just tap on it and then get into the webinar, maybe a native app will be suggested for them so they can get into it. If I'm going to do that, I'm also going to make sure that on my page that I have when they register that I tell them they can download the native app to participate in the webinar on their mobile phone because I want to acknowledge the fact that they may not be in [00:05:00] front of a computer when the webinar starts and that they still may want to attend and learn the information that we're going to present there.

You want to make it easy for them to attend even if it's not the ideal situation.

I acknowledge that the ideal situation with the webinar would be in front of a screen, where they're not moving, and they have to stay. Desktop is the ideal situation for that to occur, although it does allow for multitasking which means they could pull up another website and beyond that just listening in the background.

The mobile phone, however, does have some advantages in that most mobile phones are a one thing at a time device. They cannot leave that app and continue to receive your message. If your message is compelling, you're going to keep them engaged and they're going to be focusing on what it is you're talking about instead of wandering off on to other topics. If that's your scenario, that's going to be the ideal.

The way that we increase our webinar effectiveness is to get more people on. The way we get more people on is to have a text message [00:06:00] reminder sent to them with a direct link to where they're going to participate in the webinar. If you do this, 15 to 30 minutes before your webinar, you're going to see greater results.

In our next episode, I'm going to be teaching you a method used by Frank Kern to double his sales from his webinars and we're going to talk to you about how he's able to accomplish that and how you can do the same thing. This is Ryan Chapman with Fix Your Funnel. Keep moving forward.