Increase Your Webinar Attendance for Five Dollars Per Day

Show Notes

• People often forget why the webinar was so important to them in the moment of registration.
• It is your obligation to keep your webinar registrants aware of why it is important for them to attend your webinar.
• How do you keep that motivation high to attend your webinar? You can send an email campaign to remind those registered to show up, but there are better ways.
• Better attendance at your webinar will result in more sales.
• Remind people of the excitement they felt when they registered by maintaining contact with them through social media, email, and text messages.
• Share multiple reasons why they need to attend. Their reason for attending might be different than the one you deem as most important.
• Create a list of hot topics and break them down to share via follow-up messages after your webinar.
• Five dollars a day is the minimum ad spend you can subscribe to use as an ad set on Facebook.
• Have a five dollar a day budget focused on people who are registered for your webinar.
• Use FixYourFunnel Sync to take your registration information and sync it to a Facebook custom audience. By doing this, you can target a custom audience of those who have registered for the webinar, but haven’t attended.
• You can create a series of messages that will show up in a cycle on particular days in Facebook that will communicate the same messages you would have shared via email, direct mail, etc.
• These messages can show up on Facebook continue to teach the person the motivating factors that will be addressed in your webinar.
• If you can do a webinar on the same day once a week, then this would be the ideal scenario because Facebook can use a different ad on the day of the webinar with the time of the webinar prominently placed in the ad.
• On the days leading up the webinar you can use the ads to share what people will get out of your webinar, other customer’s results, and why they should be excited for the webinar.
• One the day of the webinar use a specific ad with the information they need to get on the webinar.
• There are tools that will track who shows up to your webinar. Contact Fix Your Funnel for more details.
• You can then see who attended and who didn’t and market toward each group.
• Potential clients might register for a webinar 12 times before they will actually attend and make a purchase.
• You never know when people will be ready to attend or to purchase. Give them many opportunities to show up.

Transcription of Episode

[00:00:00] This is Ryan Chapman with Fix Your Funnel and in today's episode, I'm going to be talking about how, for five dollars a day, you can actually increase your webinar attendance.

In the last couple of podcast episodes, I've been kind of focusing on webinars and how do you extract more opportunity out of the same activity that you're already doing.

We did it by sending a text message to remind people to show up, then we did it by sending a text message to invite a conversation to deal with any concerns that someone may have had that weren't addressed during the webinar. Those two things are extremely powerful. Today I'm going to be talking about how, for five dollars a day or $35 a week, you can be increasing your attendance at your webinar as well.

One of the things that I mentioned in the first episode about webinars was the fact that one of the reasons that people don't attend after the registered is they forget why it was so important to them in the moment that they registered to attend. Meaning, life happened. Things came up other things became a priority, and they forgot about the excitement that they felt in the moment that they registered. [00:01:00]

It is not the obligation of the prospective customer to keep their motivation high. It's your obligation to help keep them aware of why it's important for them to attend your webinar and learn what you're going to be communicating so that they can make the best decision for them and, as a result, hopefully invest money with your company.

So, how do we keep that motivation high? Well traditionally, what I've seen a lot of people doing is, once somebody registers they start sending a little drip email campaign. While this may not be the most effective approach, it's certainly more effective than doing nothing whatsoever.

If you're currently not sending any emails between registration and actual webinar attendance, I encourage you to at least do that. It'll take you probably about 10 minutes to an hour depending on how well you know your topic to be able to create a few basic emails that might tell them the ideas. I'm going to give you an outline during this podcast of how I went about doing that for our company.

Just to give you a little bit of history, my brother and I [00:02:00] had a company that trained real estate agents on how to do short sales. We called it Short Sale Genius and in that, we would invite people to attend a three-hour free training in their city that we hosted at a local hotel. When they attended that, we would teach them for free for three hours and in the other three hours, we introduced them to an opportunity to do more with our company in terms of education and tools.

The number of people that attended had a direct correlation on the number of people that were willing to buy our tools. If we had more people attend our free training, we had more people buy our tools. If we had less people attend, we had less people buy our tools. This is corollary with your webinar because the more people you have attend the webinar, the more likely you are to sell more of whatever it is you're offering, the less people, the less likely you are to have buy. That correlation stands true.

What we discovered is, for our free event, because it was a free training, there was no money involved, that we had to make sure we kept motivation high for wanting to attend. In their scenario, they're going to leave their office, [00:03:00] they were going to take three hours out of their day, and they were going to spend it with us. This is a fairly big commitment. In order for us to make sure that they made that commitment, we needed to make sure we kept their motivation high.

Initially, what we did is we sent emails and then we soon discovered that that wasn't the most effective choice. We realized we needed to go multimedia. This business occurred between 2008 and 2010 principally. And in that time we didn't really have Facebook as a media to be able to work with, but we did have, in this industry, faxes. And so we would send a fax, if they registered soon enough we would send a direct mail piece.

In the later times, we sent them a text message using a short code because that's all that we have available at the time. We do all the things that we could to try and remind them about the excitement they felt when they registered so that they would have that excitement leading into actually breaking away from their normal routine and showing up at our event.

This same psychological process has to happen for [00:04:00] people to attend your webinar. You don't have the benefit of getting them out of their environment and into your isolated environment at a live event when you're doing a webinar, but you'd still have them showing up at a place in time that's out of their normal course of operations. They're not their standard ammo, so you have to think about, how do I keep people motivated enough to show up where I want them to be, when I want them to be there at the sacrifice of other events, activities, and attention that might normally take control of their life at that point? And because of that, we need to think about how do we get that information in front of them?

If you have valid reasons that they might accept and say, okay, yeah, that's that's exciting for me, I want to be there, I want to attend this event, then that's fantastic. That's the first place. You have to have something that's actually interesting to them that will keep them motivated. If you don't have that, that's through first place.

Once you have that list of things that are reasons that people might want to attend, and by the way, if you have four reasons, one of them may be the only [00:05:00] reason that the person shows up. The other three they couldn't care less about.

Being aware of that is really important because frequently, what happens is we take the one that we think is most important and we use that one as our one key on the piano that we play over and over again in our marketing. In reality, there may be a different one for four different groups of people that are interested in our webinar.

Being aware of those four different or three different main reasons that people are going to want to show up to our webinar is the critical first step.

The next step that we did is we broke up these topics that we knew people might be interested in, these hot buttons, so to speak, and we broke them up and put them into individual messages over the course of our follow-up campaign, which, like I said, included direct mail, faxes, email, phone call at one point, and also text message.

With that, we would then say, okay, how do we break down these messages, and we had four really big points that were reasons why people would want to attend, and each message [00:06:00] was isolated to one of those points. The temptation is to try and cram all four into one message, but you can't do that effectively.

If you've ever been to a speech or topic where the person covered a lot of different information, you come out a little bit confused and overwhelmed. But where people focus on one topic, you were able to really get it and you really understood it, it was really clear and you could repeat it to other people later. That's critical. They need to be able to repeat it to other people later because chances are, they're gonna have to justify being on your webinar to somebody. And we want them to be armed to be able to do that effectively.

Each of our follow-up messages between registration and actual event time, we needed to make sure that they were focused on one of these hot buttons. We would send all of those individual messages and put them in front of people, but we wouldn't count on any one of those messages to do all the heavy lifting.

We counted on one of them to do it for each type of person that was interested in that hot topic, if that makes sense. Now, [00:07:00] this is how we did it. But today, I'll tell you how we would do it.

This is where we come into spending $5 a day. The $5 a day is your minimum ad spend you can do with a ad set on Facebook. And what I would do for any webinar that I was trying to do today, is I wouldn't have that $5 a day budget focused on people who had registered for my webinar.

In this case, I'd use something like SyncSumo to take my registration information and sync it up to Facebook custom audience and that would target that custom audience who are registered people who have not attended, I'll tell you why in just a second. But I do that because if I get people who have registered but have not attended my webinar in this group, I can put in front of them a series of messages that I may have in a cycle or show up on particular days in Facebook that would communicate the same message that I would have done in email, fax, direct mail before.

I use [00:08:00] those, then, to be able to continue to teach the person the motivating factors that they're going to have addressed on my webinar in the next week or whatever time frame it is between registration and show up.

If you can do a webinar on the same day every week or every two weeks or however your cycle is for your webinars, then this is the ideal scenario. In this scenario, I can have Facebook target for me on the day of the webinar a different type of type of ad, and on that day, I'm going to put content in front of them that's going to direct them to the page where they're actually going to consume the webinar with the time prominently placed in the ad.

That way, my $5 a day during the six days a week that are not the webinar are day are getting the people pumped up about attending my webinar. What are the things they're going to get out of it, why they should be excited, what are people's results from having the information I'm going to give during the webinar?

Then, on the day of the webinar, it's, today's the day, [00:09:00] here's where you can attend. I'm going to use the time that day up until the time of my webinar to motivate the people to show up and attend.

If you do this, what's going to happen is, one, you're going to stay relevant and at the top of the mind for those people during the whole time between registration when they discovered you and the time when they actually get on the webinar.

Two, they're not gonna forget about the day of the webinar because when they get on to Facebook, they're going to see that in their news feed. Unless you have tens of thousands of people on each of your webinars, chances are, your budget is going to be right in alignment with $5 a day with the number of people who are in that bucket.

Furthermore, if the people don't show up at the webinar, and if you need help on any of this process, by the way, just let our company know, we can get directly to the resources. But there are tools that will track who shows up to your webinar depending on the platform that you're using and when those people show up to that webinar, they're going to be taken and put it into a [00:10:00] new group and that group is going to be used to exclude who sees these ads. The people that don't show up will then see the next day, after that webinar, the ads that are pumping them up on why they should attend the webinar.

So, if they did miss for some reason that was out of their control, or they just spaced, or they had a call or something, they're going to say, they're not going to be left out, which is typically what happens. They're going to be seeing these ads again and they're going to be reminded, okay, I got to show up and I got to attend and then they'll get on the next one.

If you don't think that's worthwhile, let me just share something with you from our history with our company that was doing training. We have people that registered 10, 11 times before they actually showed up. We also have people that showed up to our live training 12 times before they bought.

This is the exact same training, over and over again, until they finally said, okay, I've got enough here that I feel confident that they can help me, and then they bought.

You don't know when people are going to be ready, [00:11:00] so don't treat it like they have to get in one shot or they're out. Give people opportunity to get on that webinar, even if they registered and didn't show up, don't give up on them. Chances are, life got in the way more than disinterest got in the way.

If you use these techniques we've outlined in the last three podcasts, and you're doing webinars, I guarantee you're going to get a greater result than you are currently. This is Ryan Chapman with Fix Your Funnel. Keep moving forward.