Actionable Steps to Get More Webinar Signups webinar

For today’s marketers, webinars can be a fantastic tool for attracting potential customers, informing the public about your company, and generating exciting conversations about the ideas and subjects that matter to your brand. 

Of course, to do any of that, you need people to actually sign up for your webinar. And, while a lot of webinar publicity will feel familiar, it’s important to remember that webinars are unique assets and will need to be advertised in unique ways as well. 

You’ve done the work and set up an awesome, informative webinar. Now make sure people see it. We’ve brought together thirteen actionable tips for getting more webinar signups

1. Choose content that’s on top of your customers’ minds

Sounds like a no-brainer, right? But just because it’s common sense doesn’t mean you can ignore it. Exciting content will help you collect more webinar signups — though it’s not just about finding an eye-catching topic. 

When choosing content for your webinar, make sure you know who your audience is, what they’re interested in, and how your expertise can provide them with relevant and practical knowledge. The content you present should be wide enough to have a broad applicability, but also specific enough to interest experts. 

If you’re still not sure what content will work best for your audience, don’t be afraid to look at some of the content put out by your competitors. This will help you brainstorm while developing a new and fresh perspective on the sort of content your potential client base is interested in. 

2. Invite popular and interesting speakers

Hosting a great webinar is all about finding the right speakers. If you’re inviting popular and interesting speakers, you’ll have much higher odds of attracting a large number of attendees. But what exactly makes an ideal speaker?

The best speakers are experts or thought leaders in their field who can provide valuable, actionable information to potential attendees. At the same time, expertise isn’t enough. Remember that a webinar is a committed viewing experience that can sometimes be longer than an hour. To keep viewers interested and paying attention, it helps to invite experts with strong and engaging speaking skills. 

As an added bonus, if your speakers have large social media followings or public profiles, you can ask them to publicize the webinar through their own channels — whether that’s social media, their personal or business email lists, and more. 

3. Provide a smooth sign-up experience

Even if a potential attendee wants to sign up for your webinar, they might not follow through if the sign-up process itself is convoluted, time-consuming, or just plain confusing. If you’ve put in the work to host an engaging and exciting event, the most important thing you can do next is provide a smooth sign-up experience. 

Taking advantage of a built-in RSVP feature like AddEvent’s makes sign-up simple and quick for your attendees. And once they’ve signed up, AddEvent’s calendar feature can help them easily add a reminder to their calendar, so they won’t miss the webinar when it goes live. Simplifying the technical aspects of signing up and attending a webinar will go a long way toward maximizing attendance. 

4. Start your promotion cycle early

It’s important to give yourself enough time to attract the audience you want for your webinar. A longer promotion cycle is key to guaranteeing you’ve reached every possible potential guest. In general, you’ll want to start promoting your webinar about 4-6 weeks before the actual event. It’s natural for sign-ups to be slow at the start of this period, with more than two-thirds of sign-ups generally occurring just 1-2 weeks before the event. 

However, giving potential attendees plenty of time to learn about your event and get excited about it is key. Starting early with your promotion cycle — including emails, social media posts, internal promotion, and more — is one of the easiest ways to boost your total registration numbers. Essentially, you’ll want to make sure your audience knows about the event as early as possible — and that they hear about it as often as possible. 

5. Use a countdown timer to create a sense of urgency

If potential viewers feel that your webinar is important, they’re more likely to attend. Creating the best content possible and stocking your event with exciting speakers is one way to create that feeling. Another simple way is to use a countdown timer to create a sense of urgency around your upcoming webinar. 

A countdown timer helps to create the feeling that potential attendees are running out of time and need to sign-up immediately — in other words, it’s a handy psychological trick that can help boost conversions. Plus, the countdown timer will also serve as another reminder of the date and time of your event. In general, it’s best practice to locate your countdown timer somewhere prominent, typically near the sign-up, RSVP, or add-to-calendar feature on your website. 

6. Drive sign-ups with email marketing

Email is one of the most reliable promotional channels, and you’ll want to take advantage of it while promoting your upcoming webinar. You can expand your email list by extracting emails from LinkedIn with tools like Linked Helper. However, it’s not enough to simply send out a few email blasts — successful email marketing means deploying key pointers and strategies that make sure you’re getting the most sign-ups possible.

For starters, make sure you’re doing whatever you can to personalize your email messages, including your subject lines. This will help improve open rates and, by extension, your total sign-ups. To make personalizing your emails easier, it’s a great idea to segment your email list into different demographics, which can then receive tailored messaging campaigns. And of course, for those who’ve already signed up, don’t forget to send reminder emails, which will increase the likelihood they attend the actual event. 

7. Choose the best time and day to host your webinar

If you want as many people as possible to attend your webinar, you need to make sure it takes place at a time when most people will be able, and likely, to attend. In general, early in the workday is better for scheduling webinars, with 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. being the most accessible times. Webinars hosted in the middle of the week are also more likely to attract attendees, with Wednesday and Thursday being the most popular days. 

It’s also a good idea to take into account who your target audience is and when they might be likely to attend a webinar. If you’re hoping to attract businesses located on the East Coast, for instance, you’ll likely need to hold your webinar at a time that’s convenient for them — not, say, 4 p.m. EST, when everyone in your target audience is ready to go home. 

8. Create a landing page for your webinar

So you’ve started promoting your webinar via email, social media, and other channels. You can pack plenty of useful information into an email or tweet, but you’ll still need to provide potential attendees a dedicated place where they can learn more about your webinar. That’s where a landing page comes in handy. 

Besides making the webinar feel more official and important, creating a landing page for your webinar will give you an easy location to dive into more depth about the event and the topics it will cover. You’ll also be able to promote your speakers and their backgrounds more fully, making the case for why curious guests should RSVP. Think of your landing page as the final opportunity to seal the deal — to that end, make sure your landing page loads quickly and offers an easy interface. The sign-up process should ideally present little to no user friction. 

9. Take advantage of social media for event promotion 

When it comes to promoting your webinar, finding ways to get the most out of social media is critical. If you have a large following on a particular social media site like Twitter or Facebook, that’s usually the best place to start. Keep in mind that you’ll have access to both organic posts and paid posts when advertising your webinar. Make sure to vary these based on performance to ensure you’re getting the most out of your campaign. 

Finally — and most importantly — make sure you know where to promote. Sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Eventbrite can be great places to promote your upcoming webinar and can provide streamlined access to relevant professional communities. Plus, they typically make it easy to target users who’ve liked or engaged with your content in the past. 

10. Boost your sign-ups with special video content

Looking to spice up your publicity a bit? Well-written text advertisements will do wonders for boosting webinar sign-ups, but if you’ve got the resources, producing special video content can be a great way to supplement your campaign. 

Short content is the name of the game, providing potential viewers with an interesting teaser that can hook their attention and interest. If your speakers are willing, you could have them briefly talk about the upcoming event and what they’re excited to discuss, and then disseminate these clips on social media. Either that or you could run highlights of a previous webinar that demonstrate your content’s quality and get viewers excited about the next event. 

11. Send a day-of reminder

You’ve put so much work into producing a high-quality webinar, but it’s not time to lay off the gas just yet. On the morning of your webinar, be prepared to send a day-of reminder via email to your registered attendees — you can even do a last-minute push through email lists and social media to try and snag a few last RSVPs. 

It’s not just about covering all your bases, though a day-of reminder is a great way to ensure everyone who wants to attend your webinar can. Emails sent on the day of an event can actually yield a higher conversion rate than most other promotional emails — not to mention, if you RSVP on the day of an event, you’re far more likely to attend than someone who signed up a month ago. 

12. Record your webinar and transcribe the content to create SEO-friendly content on your website. 

Once your webinar is over, it doesn’t mean all the hard work you put into it has to suddenly disappear. If you’re able, it’s a great idea to record your webinar while it’s happening. Not only will you have a high-quality recording, which is a valuable piece of content in itself. You’ll also be able to utilize the recording to produce smaller video clips and other content, which can then be used to promote future webinars and increase engagement.

Many people today think video content is the be-all and end-all, but if you stop there you’re missing out on plenty of great publicity opportunities. Take the time to transcribe the recording of your webinar — chances are, you’ll be able to find excellent soundbites and SEO-friendly bits of content in the recording that you can use elsewhere on your website or in future promotional materials. 

13. Encourage the participants to share the experience after the webinar

Of course, post-webinar promotion doesn’t have to be all on your shoulders. If you’ve just hosted an incredible, engaging webinar, chances are that your attendees are still excited about it, and will be more than happy to discuss it online or elsewhere. Of course, the idea to do this might not occur to them, which is why you should feel perfectly comfortable encouraging participants to share their experience after the webinar. 

How will participant reflections help webinar sign-ups? Consider this. You can hype up your own webinar as much as you want — and you should — but at the end of the day, that praise is still coming from the organizer of the event itself, which can be perceived as biased. If potential attendees can hear from real people who’ve checked out one of your webinars in the past and found it interesting, they’ll be far more likely to sign up for a future webinar.