Webinar Lead Generation: How to Generate Leads From Webinars
Jake Lizarraga
An engaging webinar is one of the best ways to generate leads. However, webinar hosts often struggle with low attendance rates, subpar conversions, and audience members who tune out early. Read on for the solutions to all your webinar lead gen problems!
Specifically, we'll cover:
Let's dive in!
Already generating webinar leads but want to automate and scale the process?If your webinars are bringing in leads but you’d like to improve their ROI while reducing the amount of time you spend managing them, you can skip ahead to this section to see our four crucial tips! |
How do webinars generate leads?
Webinars generate leads by providing educational content that's valuable to a specific target audience. This allows you to build a database of prospects with their names and email addresses while simultaneously providing an opportunity to promote your product, service, or expertise during the webinar.
Benefits of webinar lead generation
While the obvious benefit is your ability to generate high-quality leads, there's more nuance to the return on investment that comes from hosting lead-generation webinars. Let's take a brief look at just a few of the benefits that you stand to gain:
Bulk lead qualification
Instead of manually qualifying individual leads, webinars allow you to qualify prospects en masse. In fact, it's more like prospects qualifying themselves since they'll be able to discern whether the product or service is right for them while they're watching the webinar.
If your offer doesn't appeal to them then they'll likely disqualify themselves as a lead before you expend any energy trying to close them. This ensures that only qualified leads make their way to the bottom of your sales funnel and saves you the time you would've otherwise wasted on mismatched prospects.
Another consideration is the fact that you'll often be dealing with hot leads when hosting a webinar since cold prospects wouldn't have registered unless they were already interested in some way. This influx of warm traffic increases the odds that you'll get a worthwhile number of conversions from your webinar.
Industry credibility
Aside from the raw revenue you'll generate from closing deals, hosting webinars also helps you establish credibility and come across as an expert in your space. This could help you land larger clients down the line who are looking for industry veterans with a solid track record.
You'll also boost your word-of-mouth marketing because more leads will be exposed to your content and start talking about you within their social circles. This makes it possible to leverage other people's audiences which can massively increase your reach.
You can even hand out additional resources during your webinar that further display your expertise and address specific pain points that your customers often face. These downloadable resources serve not only as a value-add to attendees but a viral lead magnet to anyone else they share it with.
Time/money saved
By generating inbound leads instead of prospecting through outbound marketing methods, you'll save a ton of outreach time. It's also easier to generate interest in a webinar than it is to spend hours on cold pitching your products and services directly only to get rejected or ignored.
Beyond time savings, you'll also save a lot of money by relying on organic content like webinars for lead generation instead of resorting to more expensive methods like paid ads. After all, you'd otherwise be paying around $2 for every click on Facebook ads and as much as $7 or more for each click on LinkedIn.
This may not sound like a lot at first but, once you try to scale the reach of your ad campaigns, you'll quickly find that it's far less sustainable than webinar lead generation. This is especially true for startups and SMBs that don't have a fully funded war chest reserved for their marketing and advertising efforts.
4 tips to improve webinar lead generation
1. Automate your webinars
Once you’ve hosted webinars that reliably generate quality leads, you can scale your efforts by recording the presentation and turning it into an automated webinar. This decouples the number of leads you generate from the time you spend hosting webinars.
After all, you’ll only have to record the webinar once and can then have thousands of registrants attend it in perpetuity. In other words, webinar automation serves as a force multiplier that increases lead volume while decreasing the time investment required.
As long as you have this type of automated webinar funnel, all you'll need to do is keep pushing traffic to the top of the funnel and watch revenue come out the bottom. Instead of dedicating all your time to hosting, you can re-focus your energy on promoting your webinar on new channels.
This strategy is especially effective for the types of webinar presentations that you host over and over again, such as product/sales demos and customer/employee onboarding. You’re mostly reciting the same script ad infinitum so why wouldn’t you automate it?
The idea that an automated webinar could be as effective as live webinars may have seemed far-fetched just a few years ago. However, webinar software has come a very long way over the past five years.
You don’t have to take our word for it since you can join the demo of our product, eWebinar, and come to your own conclusions. Our product demo was made using eWebinar which gives you the chance to experience an automated webinar firsthand while learning about our software.
2. Increase attendance rates
Let's look at a common scenario to demonstrate how increasing your attendance rate can significantly increase the results you get from your webinar. A good webinar conversion rate is anywhere between 30% and 50%. Let's split the difference and assume a 40% conversion rate.
The industry average attendance rate for live webinars is 40% meaning that for every 1,000 registrants who sign up for your webinar, only 400 attendees actually show up. At a 40% conversion rate, those 400 attendees would convert to 160 customers.
Now let's repeat the calculation using the average attendance rate for eWebinar customers which is 65%. This means that out of 1,000 registrants, 650 attendees would show up resulting in 260 customers at the same 40% conversion rate.
In other words, you get an extra 100 customers from every 1,000 registrants just by increasing the attendance rate from 40% to 65%. It's also worth noting that 65% is by no means the upper limit of how high webinar attendance rates can get.
We have customers who regularly report attendance rates above 90%:
This means that 9 out of 10 people who register for their webinars actually show up!
It's clear that attendance rates are the bottleneck for most webinar funnels but how do you actually increase webinar attendance? The short and simple answer is that you have to make it as convenient as possible for registrants to attend your presentation!
eWebinar customers are able to achieve attendance rates between 65% and 90% (or even higher) by automating their webinars using flexible scheduling options:
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On-demand. On-demand webinars make your presentation available right after someone registers. This eliminates the waiting time between registering and attending to ensure they don't forget about the upcoming webinar, lose interest, or skip it once they get too busy.
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Recurring sessions. Automating webinars to run on a recurring schedule lets people register for an upcoming session in the same way they would for a live webinar. The difference is that there are many more timeslots to choose from since the host doesn't have to host each one live.
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On-demand and recurring. eWebinar also lets hosts enable both scheduling options simultaneously. This makes it possible for most registrants to access the presentation immediately while still capturing leads who don't have time to watch it just yet.
We'd recommend enabling both on-demand and recurring sessions to maximize the convenience for registrants which, in turn, increases your attendance rates. To see what an automated webinar looks like firsthand, go attend our on-demand demo created using eWebinar!
3. Chat with your attendees
A big reason why live webinars are so appealing to potential customers is it lets them communicate with the host in real time and ask any questions they might have while watching the presentation. This gives hosts the opportunity to address any objections that might keep them from converting.
Unfortunately, many hosts trying to automate their webinars fall into the trap of converting virtual events into static videos without a live chat. This makes for a passive attendee experience that will tank conversion rates and dissuade audience members from registering for future webinars.
To ensure lead generation success, automated webinars must retain the live chat element in order to keep attendees engaged. Thankfully, eWebinar lets hosts keep all the live chat capabilities of live webinars while reaping the benefits of webinar automation like higher attendance rates.
Since it’s impossible to always be available to respond to chat, eWebinar gives hosts (as well as their moderators and sales team) flexibility when responding to webinar attendees.
You can choose bewteen:
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Responding in real-time through live chat. Hosts can respond to attendees while they're watching the automated webinar presentation to answer any questions that come up. Hosts and moderators are automatically notified through browser, email, or Slack whenever a message comes in.
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Responding asynchronously through email. If the host responds after the webinar has ended then their reply will automatically be sent to the email address that the attendee registered with. This ensures all questions get answered without requiring hosts to attend every session.
You can see the eWebinar chat system in action from an attendee's point of view by joining our on-demand demo webinar and asking us a question!
4. Make webinars interactive
Whether you're hosting webinars live or automating them, you should always strive to make the event as interactive as possible. Interactive webinars keep attendees engaged for longer which increases watch time as a result.
The thing is, it's a lot easier to make webinars interactive when you're recording them in advance rather than presenting live. Even as early as the planning stage, you'll have the unique opportunity to coordinate your interactive elements ahead of time so that they fit seamlessly into your webinar content.
For instance, you could write your webinar script in such a way that it organically segues into the polls you'll display. And it's not just polls! You could run quizzes, ask questions, or display helpful tips to enrich the attendee experience.
Best of all, the webinar data collected when attendees respond to these interactions can be forwarded to your CRM which helps you gather valuable insights, segment your audience, and nurture leads after the presentation is over.
In total, there are more than 20 unique interactions to choose from when creating your automated webinar with eWebinar. Furthermore, the eWebinar timeline editor makes it as easy as dragging the playhead to any point of your webinar and choosing which interactive elements you'd like to insert:
To get a sense of just how interactive automated webinars can be, watch our on-demand demo that utilizes multiple interactions throughout its runtime!
Conclusion
As you can see, a single successful webinar can send you hundreds of qualified leads on an ongoing basis. If you want to attract leads at scale then why not sign up for eWebinar to create automated webinars with higher attendance rates, interactive elements, and robust live chat capabilities!
It’s so easy to get started.
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