Webinar Lead Generation: How to Generate Leads From Webinars
Jake Lizarraga
Evergreen webinars are powerful tools because you only have to record your presentation once in order to reap its benefits for months or years to come. This makes them easier to scale, less time-consuming, and capable of reaching a wider audience than live webinars ever could.
After analyzing and comparing hundreds of evergreen webinars over the past few years, we've decided to build this ultimate guide to help you understand the mechanics of building a high-performing evergreen webinar.
Our findings come from a combination of our own direct experience with evergreen webinars alongside the collective experience of our customers (based on the insights they’ve shared with us). We'll go over everything you need to know including:
Note: Our webinar platform, eWebinar, focuses exclusively on automated webinars because platforms that try to support both live and automated webinars end up with subpar automation features that are more of an afterthought. If you want to see eWebinar in action for yourself then watch our on-demand demo!
Let's dive in!
What is an evergreen webinar?
Evergreen webinars are webinars that are recorded in advance, published online, and remain relevant long into the future. For a webinar to be considered evergreen, it must cover a topic that'll always be relevant and should continue to be accessible to new attendees.
What evergreen webinars aren't!
Traditionally, evergreen webinars are simply static video recordings of a webinar but we at eWebinar operate under a different definition. We believe that true evergreen webinars must preserve the things that make webinars so effective in the first place.
Above all, this means giving attendees the ability to communicate with the webinar host in real time. That's why we made sure that our automated webinar software supports live chat (while still making it possible for hosts to answer questions even after the webinar has ended).
We also offer a selection of 20+ unique interactions that make our automated webinars more interactive than live webinars ever could be. To see how our live chat and interactions work firsthand, just join our automated demo webinar!
Evergreen webinar benefits
While there are many benefits to creating evergreen, the five most significant are:
Let's take a closer look at these key benefits of using pre-recorded content over hosting live webinars!
Saves you time
While creating an evergreen webinar might require a greater upfront time investment, you'll only need to record it once before publishing it online for thousands of people to attend in the years that follow. In contrast, live webinars are an ongoing time sink that you need to host repeatedly.
Evergreen webinars are especially valuable for presentations that you typically give over and over again such as sales demos or onboarding webinars. Instead of reciting the same script live, you can turn a one-time recording into an evergreen asset that prospects and customers can access at any time.
Easier to scale
Evergreen webinars are easier to scale than live webinars. When you host live webinars, the number of sessions you can offer is constrained by the amount of time you have. At first glance, hosting a one-hour webinar every day might seem like a reasonably achievable undertaking.
However, you'll soon realize that it takes an hour to get your webinar equipment set up and then another hour to put everything away after finishing the presentation — meaning a one-hour webinar actually takes up three hours of your time each time you run it.
In contrast, creating your own evergreen webinar makes your presentation available to attendees 24/7 even while you're asleep or out of the office. This is the only sustainable way to go from hosting a couple of webinars a month to offering dozens of sessions that accommodate hundreds of attendees.
Greater reach
Evergreen webinars can actually increase attendance because it's more convenient for registrants to attend a pre-recorded presentation than try to make time in their schedule for an upcoming live webinar that's weeks away.
For instance, evergreen webinars hosted on eWebinar get an average attendance rate of 65% compared to the industry average of 40% for live webinars. Some of our customers report much higher attendance rates of 90%+:
This combination of perpetual availability and higher attendance means that evergreen webinars offer far better reach than you could achieve by hosting a live webinar. More eyes on your evergreen content should be enough of a reason to create an evergreen webinar today.
Better reliability
Because evergreen webinars are pre-recorded, hosts get to avoid most of the technical difficulties commonly encountered during live webinars. This keeps video buffering, audio compression, system crashes, or power outages from ruining your webinars.
You'll also have better control over the first impression you have on attendees since evergreen webinars play the exact same presentation every time. This eliminates the unavoidable bloopers that occur when giving a live presentation over and over again.
Automated sales
Creating an evergreen webinar funnel allows you to generate leads, make sales, and onboard customers on autopilot. Once the automated webinar funnel is up and running, all you have to do is drive more traffic towards the top then watch as revenue comes out through the bottom.
This untethers the performance of your funnel from your personal bandwidth since you could have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of prospects moving through the pipeline on autopilot without the need for any manual intervention on your end.
More interactivity
Last but not least, it's important to note that evergreen webinars are actually more interactive than live webinars. This is because it's easier to make a webinar interactive when you're using a pre-recorded presentation instead of presenting in real time during a live event.
Modern evergreen webinar platforms let you insert interactive elements that encourage participation among attendees who are viewing your presentation. These polls, quizzes, and handouts make evergreen webinars so interactive that a live webinar would feel passive by comparison.
Furthermore, evergreen webinars also provide the luxury of being able to plan interactions ahead of time — instead of trying to trigger them live while also responding to chat and reciting your presentation. This results in a better attendee experience while requiring less juggling of the host.
If automating interactivity sounds too unbelievable then just watch our evergreen product demo (created using eWebinar) to experience an evergreen webinar for yourself and come to your own conclusions!
How to create an evergreen webinar
To create an evergreen webinar, there are seven steps you'll need to complete — using our webinar platform, eWebinar, to illustrate the process:
The sections below will walk you through each step in greater detail!
Note: The instructions below use our product as an example but the actual steps are similar on other webinar platforms.
Step 1. Upload a video
The first thing you'll need to create evergreen webinars is a pre-recorded presentation video. You can then upload this recording as a file, paste a link, or use our integrations with Zoom and Vimeo to import the video from your cloud storage accounts.
Step 2. Set up scheduling
There are three scheduling options to choose from when creating evergreen webinars on eWebinar:
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On-demand webinars. On-demand webinars let attendees join your evergreen webinar the moment they register. Alternatively, you can enable just-in-time sessions that are automatically scheduled to begin within minutes of a visitor landing on the website.
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Recurring webinars. Automating your evergreen webinars to run on a recurring schedule will help you capture leads who may not be available to watch your presentation immediately. eWebinar automatically adjusts the available timeslots based on the registrant's time zone.
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Interactive replays. Finally, you can enable replays that retain the same interactive elements and chat capabilities of a standard eWebinar session. Attendees will also be able to pause, play, and skip across the presentation as if they were watching a YouTube video.
Tip: Attendance rates are highest when you enable all three scheduling options. This makes it as convenient as possible to attend your webinar and leads to more registrants showing up as a result.
Step 3: Write email sequences
You'll need three types of emails to build a complete webinar sequence:
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Confirmation. Webinar confirmation emails tell registrants that their submission was received, verify that their registration was successful, and give them a chance to save the webinar date to their calendar (or click a link to watch immediately in the case of on-demand).
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Reminder. Reminders are crucial to ensure that registrants don't forget about an upcoming webinar they registered for. The best practice would be to send reminders one week, one day, and a couple of hours before the webinar starts.
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Follow-up. Finally, webinar follow-up emails can be used to gather insights from those who attended your webinar (through a post-webinar survey) and send replay links to no-show registrants who missed the webinar.
Note: If you're creating your webinar using eWebinar then every webinar template already comes with at least six pre-written emails so you'll only need to make minor tweaks before finalizing them.
Step 4: Insert interactions
Adding interactions — such as polls, quizzes, and popups — keeps your attendees engaged throughout the presentation which increases watch time as a result. eWebinar makes inserting these interactions as straightforward as dragging the playhead across the timeline and selecting an interaction to add:
Tip: eWebinar has 20+ unique interactions to choose from and you can even forward the response data to your CRM of choice!
Step 5: Configure chat preferences
Chat is where most webinar automation software falls short. Most platforms force you to disable chat when creating a pre-recorded webinar while others force you to attend every session if you want to be able to respond to attendees (which negates the time-saving benefits of automating your webinar).
Here's how eWebinar's chat system works:
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Automatic greeting. Attendees are automatically greeted by name as soon as they enter the webinar room. This draws their attention to the chat and encourages them to ask questions during the presentation.
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Instant notifications. Whenever attendees send a message in the webinar chat, the host and any assigned moderators will be notified through email, browser notifications, or even Slack alerts (if you have the integration enabled).
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Real-time responses. eWebinar lets you respond in real time by either joining the webinar session or replying to attendee messages through internal Slack channels. If no one's available to respond to an attendee, the auto-response will set expectations on when they can hear back.
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Asynchronous replies. If you respond to an attendee's question after the webinar presentation has ended then any reply you type in chat will automatically be forwarded to the email address they registered with.
Note: If you're already using another chat platform then you can use integrations with HubSpot, Zendesk, Intercom, or Drift to replace our webinar chat with a third-party chat system.
Step 6: Build a landing page
eWebinar's drag-and-drop landing page builder makes it easy to create a registration page that people can use to sign up for your evergreen webinar. You can also opt to embed registration widgets on existing web pages or add an eWebinar registration form within HubSpot, Leadpages, and Unbounce.
Tip: Webinar landing pages perform best when they have a descriptive headline, clear agenda, and speaker bios that establish host credibility. Explore 28 Webinar Landing Page Examples for inspiration!
Step 7: Publish your webinar
It's time to publish your webinar so that people can start accessing the evergreen content for years to come. Now that you're familiar with the process, it's time to create evergreen webinars for yourself or watch our evergreen product demo webinar to experience one firsthand!
Evergreen webinar use cases
Evergreen webinars can be applied to a myriad of use cases but the three most common (at least amongst eWebinar customers) are:
The sections below will show you how evergreen webinars ca alleviate the specific pain points in each scenario!
Customer success
Customer success managers spend the majority of their time on repetitive tasks like onboarding users and hosting webinars. As such, anything that automates user onboarding and customer training can save customer success teams countless hours.
Instead of making your CSMs host the same entry-level onboarding webinars multiple times per month, you could create an entire series of pre-recorded onboarding webinars and use them as evergreen assets to move new customers through their user journey.
The best part is that customer success managers will still be able to answer any questions that users may have during onboarding. They can even use the same platforms they already rely on for customer communication such as Zendesk, Intercom, Drift, and Slack without having to switch tabs.
This will free up your customer success managers to focus on other initiatives such as creating more advanced customer education content and engaging users directly. Beyond saving time, evergreen onboarding webinars also empower users to self-educate and learn about the product at their own pace.
Customer success case studies
Later's customer success team used to spend all their energy hosting 2-4 webinars in a month but now effortlessly host 100+ webinars every month and have seen their attendance rates increase sixfold:
Gem's customer success team has been saving over 1,000 hours every year since they started using eWebinar to automate their user onboarding process:
Sales automation
In order to close a single sale, you need to get customers to fill out a contact form, get on a discovery call with you, and then book a full-on demo appointment — all with the very real possibility of realizing that the product or service you're selling isn't a good fit for their needs.
This inconveniences your prospects while being a massive time sink for your company. By pre-recording your sales demo and turning it into an evergreen webinar, you'll effectively be able to generate revenue on autopilot.
After all, evergreen webinars can be used to both generate and qualify leads before you ever hop on a call with them. The best part is that you can still forward data from webinar attendees to your CRM software to maximize visibility while prospects move through the pipeline.
eWebinar has third-party integrations with top CRMs like HubSpot, Salesforce, and Keap:
Tip: You can also use our Zapier integration to integrate eWebinar with countless other CRM platforms!
You can then use our webinar analytics dashboards to see how each step of the funnel is performing, monitor registration/attendance/conversion rates, and see the total revenue generated by each evergreen webinar you've published.
Sales automation case studies
Jon Schumacher increased his attendance rate to 88% and tripled his conversion rate by building evergreen sales webinars with eWebinar:
Read the Jon Schumacher case study →
MAGFAST used automated webinars to generate $14 million in revenue without using any other acquisition channels:
Product demos
Demo webinars (also known as deminars) are ideal candidates for automation because you're usually just reciting the same script ad infinitum and you get the best conversion rates when reaching prospects at their peak moment of interest.
Getting prospects to watch your product demo when their interest is at its highest is far more important than whether or not the presentation they're watching is live or pre-recorded. Evergreen product demos also help you filter out any unqualified leads.
Anyone who's watched an hour-long evergreen webinar about your product and still decides to reach out after the demo ends is far more likely to close than a cold lead who doesn't know anything about the product.
Product demo case studies
Nectar created an evergreen webinar demo using eWebinar that got them 250 leads, five self-closed deals, and 8% of attendees booking 1-on-1 calls with the host:
Cloudstudious used to spend hours on daily sales demos to unqualified top-of-funnel leads before they started using eWebinar to automate lead qualification through evergreen webinars:
Read the Cloudstudios case study →
To see an actual evergreen webinar being used as a product demo, go watch our on-demand deminar right now!
What customers say about eWebinar
eWebinar may speak for itself but you don't have to take our word for it. Hear what real users have to say about our webinar software by browsing through our gallery of testimonials, case studies, and reviews!
Or watch the demo right above to see for yourself and come to your own conclusions!
Best evergreen webinar software
With various platforms to choose from, it can be hard to find the right software that suits your specific needs. To help with that, we've taken the liberty of compiling a list of the most popular pre-recorded webinar platforms and the must-have features you should look for!
Popular evergreen webinar software platforms
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eWebinar
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EasyWebinar
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Demio
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WebinarGeek
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EverWebinar
For an in-depth overview, read our full guide on the 5 Best Evergreen Webinar Software Platforms!
You can also check out our comparison guides on the best platforms for automated, pre-recorded, and on-demand webinars respectively:
Must-have features for evergreen webinar software
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Flexible scheduling options. Flexible scheduling lets you maximize attendance rates by making it as convenient as possible for your registrants to show up.
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Robust chat capabilities. Chat systems that let you respond to attendees both in real time and after the presentation has ended will ensure that every question gets answered.
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Interactive features. Interactions like polls, quizzes, and others increase watch time by engaging attendees while collecting valuable customer data in the process.
Watch our demo to see if eWebinar is right for you
We included eWebinar in the list above because we genuinely believe it’s the best platform for those who want to reap the automation benefits of evergreen webinars. You don’t have to believe us, just watch our on-demand demo to let the product speak for itself.
Conclusion
Armed with this newfound knowledge, why not make your first automated webinar sooner rather than later? Instead of hosting the same live presentation again and again, you could refocus your efforts towards producing the best webinar possible then driving as many eyeballs to it as you can.
Not every webinar needs to be converted to an evergreen webinar. For instance, news updates and panel discussions should still be hosted live. However, leveraging automation to create evergreen webinars for presentations you normally host repeatedly will boost results while saving time.
To see the difference between live and evergreen webinars, watch our on-demand deminar that we built for ourselves using eWebinar!
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