Gabrielle Jeans’s Weblog

Take Other People’s Webinars

One of the best ways to improve your webinars is by taking other people’s webinars.  You’ll see them doing things you would probably never have thought of and the experience will give you new ideas.  If you have an investor presentation, it’s an especially good idea to view any webinars of anyone offering properties to investors.  These presenters are often investors themselves and so they have a keen sense of what to present (and not to present) to investors to get them buying.

Test The Webinar Registration Process

Before you start sending webinar invites to prospects or advertising your webinar links, do a test run through your registration process as if you were a prospect registering.  Make sure all the little details of the registration process are correct.  It’s very easy to forget changing a date or time from a past webinar within the process or make an error.  The slightest error can totally confuse your attendees, making them less likely to actually attend.

Send Your Registrants Reminders

Always send a series of reminders to your webinar registrants.  The more often you remind them, the more likely they’ll attend your webinar.  Send one reminder on the day of the webinar and one reminder on each of the two days before the webinar date.  Make sure they have the login information for the webinar well in advance of the webinar, or you risk having no one attending as they’ll typically think the webinar was cancelled.  You can also use these reminder emails to get more attendees.  Ask the registrants to forward the email to anyone they know who is moving in the next 6 months.

Vary The Days And Time You Have Webinars

It’s impossible to pick a webinar date and time that suits everybody.  Some people are continually busy during the day doing business but have free time in the evenings.  Other people often have free time during the day but always have family or other commitments in the evenings.  So vary the days and times you offer webinars and offer them frequently.  The more flexible you can be in this regard, the more people you’ll have signing up.

Make Your Webinars Interactive

You can make your webinars a lot more engaging, interesting and memorable by not making them one-sided.  Don’t do all the talking for the entire webinar.  Rather, at certain junctures during the webinar, solicit the attendees for input in some way.  For instance, some webinar providers offer a live polling function whereby you can ask attendees a question and they can respond ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ and the results are displayed and recorded for later reference.  Live polls can be a great way of getting attendees to testify about things you want other attendees to hear and believe in.