The webinar is a two-pronged marketing tactic – it brings in revenue from registration fees and educates viewers about your company’s products.
Customers pay you to sell to them. Most people don’t realize that each of these two pieces – the initial registration and the viewing itself – requires an independent marketing strategy. This is due to one simple fact: registration does not equal webinar attendance. You can bring in revenue from registrations, but if you want to convert those one-time registrations to loyal customers, you need to make sure that they show up for the webinar itself. This article covers Z-Health, a company that trains personal trainers, and how we helped them market a webinar that beat 100% attendance. Read on and learn how to make this work for your company.
Background
Z-Health offers many different certification classes for personal trainers and teaches those trainers how to reduce athletes’ pain and increase their performance. They’ve helped over 70,000 people feel and perform better and they constantly work with athletes affiliated with the NBA, FIFA, NFL, MLB, Olympics, and many other leading athletic organizations.
Z-Health came to us in need of a way to capture more leads and sell them into an introductory certification class, Essentials. This sale was important because after going through the Essentials class, customers report phenomenal results across the board. They experience Z-Health’s wow-factor and end up registering for most of the other classes Z-Health offers. Simply put, after customers are in the door, they quickly become loyal customers and avid fans.
Before we dive into the case study, we have to understand that personal trainers are a very particular breed with very particular needs. Their incomes are directly linked to the number of hours that they can work, so when they don’t work, they don’t make money. On top of that, to participate in Z-Health’s programs, they have to pay conference fees and travel expenses. Worse yet, some trainers have to hire other trainers to fill their positions when they have other commitments. For all of these reasons, it is extremely challenging to convince a new lead to sign up for the Essentials conference.
We wanted to create a campaign that would take pre-existing leads who had never bought from Z-Health and show them the wow-factor that comes with Z-Health’s expertise, inspiring them to make that first purchase. We developed a webinar campaign to accomplish exactly that. Our goal was to get the leads to know, like, and trust Z-Health, learn about the Essentials class, and sign up for it.
Our campaign was based on promotion through their website and email list, aimed at finding new leads and getting pre-existing ones to register for the webinar at WebinarJam. We set up a system to follow up with registrants and we saw an incredible rate of those registrants actually attending the webinar. Then, we gave them the option to request a phone call from a salesperson to discuss next steps.
Here’s a run-through of the campaign, including screenshots of important webpages:
Webinar Website Strategy
Our first step was to create a home base for the webinar’s publicity, a webpage that would show all of the important information and allow leads to sign up.
1. Landing page
The primary goal of the landing page was to convince viewers to register for the webinar.
2. Order page
The order page included a list of what the user would be able to expect from the webinar, in order to seal the deal.
3. Thank-you Page
On the thank-you page, we employed a few important strategies:
- We wanted to make it easy for registrants to add the event to their calendars, so we added 1-Click buttons. We also clearly highlighted the date.
- We provided them with contact information so that they could ask us any important questions.
- We gave them a link to download a training manual PDF to prepare for the webinar.
- We provided social proof so that they knew they made a smart buying decision: “We’ve helped over 70,000 people…”.
4. Contact page
After people attended the webinar and were sold on why they should buy into the Essentials course, they were directed to the Contact page to request a phone call from a sales person.
Promotion and direction to WebinarJam
In order to send traffic to the landing page and pick up leads, we used a promotion strategy with a few different components. Here are the platforms and tactics that we used:
1. Z-Health’s Website:
- We added a Hello Bar to the home page to drive traffic to the landing page.
2. Email sequence:
- We sent out 4 emails over the course of 7 days.
- Email 1 was sent on day 1 of the campaign. This echoed the themes of the landing page and informed the recipients of what they would gain by signing up for the webinar.
- Email 2 was sent on day 6 and was similar to email 1.
- Email 3 was sent on day 9 and began to introduce a sense of urgency, telling users that their time to sign up was running out.
- Email 4 was sent 1 day before the Webinar and told users that it was their last chance to sign up.
- People were removed from the sequence as soon as they registered for the webinar.
3. Facebook Promoted Posts
We promoted the webinar to Z-Health’s Facebook fan page. This helped drive additional traffic to the webinar landing page. A strategic by-product of the Facebook post was the social proof that came from Z-Health trainers endorsing Z-Health in the comment section.
4. Pushing a one-time opportunity
Until the day of the webinar, we told people that we weren’t sure whether a replay of the webinar would be available. This helped to boost our attendance.
5. Reminder Emails
We sent out a sequence of emails to people who had registered for the webinar in order to build anticipation and ensure that nobody would forget the date and time.
- Email 1 (below) was sent immediately after registration and gave the registrant information about accessing the webinar, gave tools to easily add it to an online calendar, and contained a link to a PDF with the training manual that would be covered by the webinar.
- Email 2 was sent 1 day before the webinar with the same information as Email 1.
- Email 3 was sent 15 minutes before the webinar and contained only the access link and a notice that the webinar would be happening 15 minutes later.
Here’s an example of a reminder email, Email 1 in this case:
Hey Jeremy,
Just a quick reminder that the Z-Health Live Online Training with Dr. Cobb you registered for is coming up on May 29th at 2pm PDT/5pm EDT (find your local time).
Use this link on the day of the training:
Live Online Training Link: http://webinarjam.net/webinar/go/10869/6a42ba0904
Be sure to save the date. Select the calendar you use below to have the date automatically saved to your online calendar:
Google Calendar
iCal
Outlook Calendar
Hotmail Calendar
Yahoo Calendar
If you haven’t had a chance to review the training PDF material, do so soon. Make sure to have it on hand for the Live Online Training. Click the link below:
Download Live Online Training PDF
We’ll see you on the 29th!
This campaign netted us some great results:
- Registered for Live Online Training: 324 @ $47/person= $15,228.
- Live Attendees on WebinarJam: 177
- Replay Attendees: 149
We decided to keep the social sharing options activated throughout the webinar, so several people who weren’t originally registered were able to join the webinar after it began, putting our viewing numbers above actual advance registrations!
Sales data relative to the webinar date:
Here, we see that the number of registrations per day peaked on days when emails were sent out: May 15th, 20th, 23rd, and 28th. We also received several sign-ups the day of the webinar, which is an important concept to remember. If you’re in the midst of a webinar marketing campaign and not getting the registration numbers you want, there’s a solid chance that those numbers will surge in the day or two before the webinar.
Some Review
Let’s pinpoint the main thrusts of the successful strategy we just discussed.
1. A well-crafted webinar website.
Landing and order pages that make a compelling case why the viewer should sign up.
A thank-you page that gives the user materials about the webinar and builds anticipation.
A contact page that builds the bridge between the webinar and the actual product sale.
2. An aggressive promotion campaign.
Making use of the company’s pre-existing email list to leverage their base.
Linking the company’s website to the landing page, also leveraging an asset.
Supplementing the main promotion pushes with paid advertisements.
On top of the structural reasons discussed in 1 and 2, here are two more reasons why we think that this campaign pulled such high attendance.
3. The webinar wasn’t free.
4. The leads thought that there would be no replay.
Webinars can be powerful tools for converting leads to paying customers, whether or not you operate in a field where that’s particularly difficult. Once you’re able to educate your leads and build a sense of trust, you’ll be able to sell them your products much more easily. If you’ve had experiences with hosting and marketing webinars, we’d love to hear what has gone well and what hasn’t. Comment below to let us know and please subscribe to our blog to receive future articles.
