Webinars are a great way to draw potential customers into your sales funnel.
But if you want to turn webinar attendees into qualified leads, you’ll need a solid follow-up email marketing strategy. Don't make the mistake so many businesses do and ignore the potential of using this strategy for additional marketing! Crafting compelling webinar follow-up emails plays a major role when it comes to engaging and converting your target audience.
In fact, the overall success of your online event and the benefit you get from it long term depend on it.
To level-up the content marketing strategy of your upcoming events, we’ll take you through how to write follow up emails that drive results. We’ve got some great webinar follow up email templates you can use too.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
Let's get started!
Webinars are one of the most versatile marketing channels around today.
You can create customer onboarding webinars to orient new customers, marketing outreach webinars that amplify brand awareness and generate qualified leads, and sales webinars that demo your product to interested prospects. (Such webinars can be made even more effective using interactivity and automation.)
While every webinar has its own goal based on the webinar topic, your ultimate objective remains the same – inspire your target audience to take action after it’s over.
A well-designed webinar email sequence reinforces the call to action of your original webinar, includes webinar-related content or additional resources your target audience might find interesting, and asks them to share the webinar with their friends. The best webinar follow-up emails serve as essential touch points and feel like a continuation of a conversation that started during your webinar.
Through webinar email sequences, you can guide webinar attendees towards the desired call to action of your webinar, whether it’s signing up for a free trial, purchasing your product, or attending an upcoming webinar.
If you want to boost attendance rates for future events and convert potential customers into qualified leads, a 'one-size-fits-all' approach just won't cut it. You’ll need to personalize your email marketing and target audiences by segmenting your email list.
One effective way to reach out to audiences post-webinar is to segment them based on their behavior:
By segmenting your attendees this way, you can deliver personalized content that speaks directly to your webinar attendees’ unique experience. This will not only help improve your email marketing, but it also drives audiences further down your webinar sales funnel.
An effective webinar follow-up email subject line is one of the most important components of webinar follow-up email templates. It’s the first thing your recipients see and can dramatically impact your email's open rate.
Just like webinar invitation emails, personalized subject lines written in a direct tone of voice are more likely to stand out in your recipient’s inbox. Instead of subject lines that sound like they’ve been generated using automation (for example, "Thanks for attending [webinar title]”), keep your subject lines friendly and personal.
Your webinar follow-up email subject line should also be engaging, create a sense of urgency, and present a clear idea of the email content. Aim to keep it short and sweet, but impactful.
As a rule of thumb, make sure the gist of your subject line is captured in the first 9 words (or 60 characters), so enough of it is visible on a mobile device to communicate what you need to say.
Here are some good examples of webinar follow-up email subject lines:
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These examples give readers the sense of being spoken to by a real human. Using first names to personalize your webinar follow-up email subject lines will also prevent spam filters from moving your emails to the junk folder – as will avoiding the use of exclamation marks!!!
Now let’s take a look at some full webinar follow up email templates you can use.
The best webinar follow up emails use an engaging flow sequence that delivers value to recipients and reinforces your CTA.
Since each segment of your webinar attendees require a unique approach, we’ve created separate email examples for different target audiences.
Webinar registrants who signed up for your free webinar but didn’t show up have missed out on your CTA. When creating webinar follow-up email templates for them, make sure you share a link to a replay of the online event so they can catch up. After sharing the link you should also include your main CTA so that they’ll be incentivized to take action (either once they watch the webinar or read your email).
Subject: Missed { Webinar Title }? Catch the replay inside Hi { First Name }, We noticed you signed up for our webinar, { Webinar Title }, but weren’t able to make it. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! You can watch a replay of our webinar right here: { replay link } Here are some key resources we discussed during the webinar that you might also find helpful.
If you’re ready to take the next step, be sure to { CTA text and link } now! |
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Those who attend your webinar are your most qualified leads. They’ve stayed long enough to hear the value of what you have to offer and are most primed to take action on your CTA.
While you should also share a link to the webinar replay, the key focus of this email should be your main CTA. Highlight what action you want them to take first – whether it’s signing up for future events, following you on social media, downloading an ebook or starting a free trial of your product. You might also summarize takeaways and include any additional resources they might find helpful.
Subject: Thanks, { First Name}, for attending { Webinar Title } – What’s next? Hi { First Name}, Thanks for watching our webinar, { Webinar Title }. We hope you can now see what you stand to gain from { insert main value proposition of product or service }. To take full advantage of this opportunity, { CTA text and link }. If you’d like to revisit a part of our session or rewatch the entire thing, here’s a link to watch a replay: { replay link } And while we have you, here are the additional resources we discussed:
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Webinar registrants who left early were interested enough to join your webinar, but either couldn’t stay until the end or did not connect with the webinar content. (You can prevent drop-offs due to time differences or scheduling constraints by using automated webinars.)
Since they didn’t get a chance to hear your CTA, they will need a little more information first before taking action. You want to urge them to watch the full webinar recording as well as click on your main CTA.
Subject: { First Name }, looks like you had to leave early. Here’s what you missed. Hi { First Name }, We noticed you had to leave our webinar early. Not a problem! Here’s a link to the replay so you can catch up on what you missed: { replay link } After you left, we shared some bonus materials, which you might find useful:
What you really missed, however, is how to { insert main value proposition of product or service }. If you’re ready to take this next step, { CTA text and link } now! |
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When sending out these emails, make sure to personalize them. Save time by using email marketing integrations that will automatically populate first names and other merge fields.
Thus far, we’ve focused only on post-webinar follow-up. But an effective webinar follow-up email sequence is critical both pre and post-webinar.
Merely sending out webinar invitations is not enough to get people to attend your virtual events. Once you send out webinar invitations, you will need to follow up with registrants. Ideally you should send 2-3 follow up emails. Send a confirmation email to confirm webinar registrations and a reminder email, a few days before and another on the day of the webinar, 10 - 15 minutes before it starts. This ensures your attendance rate remains high, since many people forget.
After your virtual events are over, you should follow up with your webinar attendees three times. More than this could get spammy and put people off instead of priming them to come back for more useful content.
Make sure you continue to segment your audience into three groups: those who didn’t attend, those who attended and those who left early. Thus, you may end up sending out 9 different emails, 3 for each group. If possible, stop any additional follow-up once someone has taken action on your CTA, which can have its own email sequence.
Here’s what you need for an effective post-webinar email sequence:
At this point, you can move participants into your regular email marketing lists.
The best webinar follow up emails are personalized, extend the conversation of your webinar with your attendees, keep them engaged, and get participants into your webinar sales funnel.
Follow-up emails are a critical part of your webinar marketing strategy – so don’t neglect to properly craft and send them!
These webinar best practices are brought to you by eWebinar, an easy-to-use platform that allows you to turn any video into an automated and interactive webinar. Be sure to join our on-demand demo to learn more.