How to Grow Your List with Webinars

There’s been a growing trend for webinars in recent years although they’ve been around since 1999 when ActiveTouch rolled out the first webinar service with WebEx Meeting Centre video communication.

There’s no doubt video has become the main attraction for over half of all traffic to websites. As a result, webinars are incredibly powerful in helping you build a responsive email list. However, to achieve success with webinars you must choose the right topic for your audience and deliver it on the most suitable platform.

In addition, you must put the word out about your webinar and work on getting as many registrations as possible. Registrations mean email subscribers. Not all subscribers will watch your webinar live so it’s important to offer a recorded replay of your webinar too as this will guarantee that they remain on your list and respond to your offers.

Webinars can be a great way to build credibility as you’ll be seen as an expert in your niche by your audience. Furthermore, running webinars can help you stand out from your competition, as well as helping you grow your list and increase your profits.

How to Grow Your List with Webinars

Pick Your Topic Wisely

Choosing your webinar topic needs some careful thought. It’s crucial that your webinar offers attendees helpful and interesting information. So, ensure it’s valuable enough for them to commit to spending an hour with you. You must make it worth their while; however, you don’t want to give everything away. If you do this, then they’ll have no reason to invest in your offers.

1. Ensure it’s Useful

Make sure the content of your webinar teaches or offers your ideal webinar attendee something that they can put into action immediately to solve one of their problems. Don’t make your topic too broad as you’ll find it difficult to deliver the fundamental information in the allocated time. However, you do want your content to be of massive value to your attendees. You want your content to appeal to them and have them wanting to know more so that they’ll stay on your list and hopefully become a paying customer.

2. Maintain Focus

I can’t stress this enough. Have you ever attended a webinar and the speaker goes off on tangents that are totally unrelated to the topic they’re presenting? This gives the webinar an unfocused vibe and can irritate the audience who’ve given up their precious time to listen to what is being said.

Keep your webinar content focused on that one specific point you want to teach your audience. Having your webinar mapped out will help you keep on track and prevent you from straying off your topic. By creating a definite structure for your webinar you’ll be able to deliver value and include all the valuable information you intended.

3. Use Your Current Content to Generate Ideas

It makes sense to carry out some research. Do you have specific content that is proving more popular? What content that you’ve shared is getting the most views, the most engagement and the most shares? This shows you what your target audience is most interested in and gives you an idea for the type of content you need to create for your webinar.

4. Do Some Research

If you haven’t built up an audience yet, then coordinate some research via Google to get an idea of who your ideal audience is and what they actually like. Check out experts in your niche and discover the type of content they’re sharing and what content of theirs is the most popular and attracts the most engagement.

5. Ask Your Audience

If you have a following on social media or an already established email list, you can create a poll and ask these people what type of subjects and information they’d be interested in hearing about on your webinar. You can also ask them to share the poll to reach a wider audience and this can result in you gaining more subscribers for your webinar.

When you select your subject wisely, you’ll gather additional interested subscribers due to them wanting to learn more about the topic you’ll be discussing.

Select Your Technology Carefully

Generally speaking, your audience will have their own ideas about the type of technology they like to use. However, you’ll want to present a slick, professional webinar experience and that will happen when you use the technology that you feel the most comfortable with and that you have experience using.

It’s important to have all the elements in place such as your website, the webinar software and autoresponder provider before you set a date for your webinar. In addition, make sure you work with a decent camera and microphone and test everything before you start delivering your content. Above all you want your audience to be able to see and hear you during your webinar.

1. Your Website

Now when you start considering running webinars you may decide to redesign your present website so that it’s more specific to your webinars. However, if you don’t want to do that an option would be to create a subdomain where you can organise and manage all your webinar related content. A subdomain is an extra part to your main domain name. It’s actually treated as a separate entity by the search engines. Your marketing efforts will be a lot simpler if you’re able to send your audience to a specific URL where they can easily sign up to your webinar.

2. Webinar Platform

It’s imperative you invest in webinar software that’s right for you and offers you all the tools and functionality you require to host your webinar. Make sure the software you choose integrates with the other technology you’re using such as your email autoresponder.

In addition, you want it to enable you to automate the whole registration process and list building process. There are many webinar platforms out there so it’s a good idea to do a bit of research to find one that suits your needs.

Here’s 7 suggestions to consider:

• GoToWebinar
• ClickMeeting
• EverWebinar
• Livestorm
• Zoho
• Bigmarker
• Demio

3. Autoresponder Software

It’s important to choose an autoresponder platform that is compatible with the other software you’ll be using. As well as allowing you to sequence automated emails and list segmentation you’ll want it to allow single-optins and include marketing tools and features.

7 examples for you to check out:

• Aweber
• ConstantContact
• SendInBlue
• ConvertKit
• OptinMonster
• GetResponse
• Drip

4. Quality Camera and Mic

Don’t risk your reputation by working with poor quality equipment. Not only will it put people off, but it’ll also prevent them from signing up to any future webinars you promote. Furthermore, you want the quality to be good enough so that you can reuse and repurpose each webinar you present to increase your list building opportunities.

Getting people signed up is only part of the process of growing your list with webinars. Essentially you want to keep them on your list by regularly providing useful, relevant, and great quality information. Information that they find appealing and that they can instantly relate to.

Prepare Your Autoresponder

It’s important to have your autoresponder in place before you even get close to launching your webinar. You’ll want to get a sequence of emails set up to remind your subscribers of the date of your webinar and get them excited about what you’re going to share with them. In addition, you can have emails in there that encourage them to share the event too.

Other emails to slot into your sequence:

1. Welcome Message

This is the message they’ll receive when they sign up. Welcome them to your community and thank them for joining your webinar. Remind them when the webinar will be taking place and give them a brief outline of the content. You can also provide additional information to help them get the most out of your webinar. Also let them know they’ll receive future messages packed with value, so they’ll look out for them.

2. Bonuses

Present some surprises in your emails before your webinar. For example, you could announce a high-profile guest presenter who’ll be joining you and provide information about them in emails leading up to your webinar. You could also direct your subscribers to the products or services of your guest presenter and tell them they have been gifted a special limited one-time only discount on them.

3. Reminders

Schedule reminders each day in the run up to your webinar. Encourage your subscribers to share the event with their friends and across their social media accounts. On the day before your webinar send out a reminder in the morning, one in the afternoon and one in the evening.

4. Replays

Not everyone who registered for your webinar will show up. Often, people’s lives get in the way. Send a link to the replay and give people 24 hours to take advantage of your great content and offers. This gives them a sense of urgency to watch and grabs their attention.

5. Relevant and Useful Content

Your subscribers are now part of your community and it’s essential to retain them after your webinar. Continue to send them relevant and useful information. By giving your subscribers valuable content you’ll build trust and they’ll be happy to stay on your list.

6. Offers

Make sure you find a way to include offers in your future emails. However, don’t oversell to your list. People don’t appreciate that and will unsubscribe if they feel they’re being bombarded with salesy emails. Try sending an offer after you’ve sent 3 information packed emails with quality freebies included. Remember to add details of any forthcoming webinars.

Crafting appropriate messages in your autoresponder will help you keep interested subscribers once they join and weed out unresponsive ones. When you’re providing your community with valuable content to inform, educate and entertain them, they’ll be motivated to share your content with people they know who’ll be interested. The good news for you is that they’re doing marketing for you and helping you grow your list.

Collaborate

Collaborating with others is a great way to speed up your list growing efforts. Joining forces and co-hosting your webinars gives you the opportunity to leverage other people’s audiences and lists too.

• Find a Partner

Look for people to co-host with you who’d serve your audience in a complementary way. This will help raise your profile and help create a buzz around your joint venture because they’ll market the webinar to their audience and connections.

• Host a Webinar Conference

I’ve been a participant of many webinar conferences over the years. They involve several speakers delivering over one day or even more. Each speaker markets the event to their own audiences, and it helps grow everyone’s list. They are usually paid events; however, the cost is kept low. Running replays of your conference is beneficial for gaining even more subscribers to your list.

• Repurpose Recordings

It’s a great idea to use a recorded webinar as a lead magnet or offer it as a content upgrade. In addition, if you have a membership site you can add your webinars to them to boost your content. Think up creative ways you can repurpose your recording. For example, create a report of your webinar transcript that educates and inspires your reader. Or edit it and use parts of it in advertising campaigns for your future webinars.

Market Your Webinars

Obviously, you must promote your webinar, and this requires a multi-pronged approach. It’s essential to share your webinar details on as many channels as possible. For example, talk about it on your blog, share the link with all your connections and ask them to share it. In addition, encourage sharing across social media. You could also run low-cost ads but make sure you’ve drilled down so that you know your exact target market.

If you already have an army of loyal affiliates, then enlist their help. You could offer your webinar as a lead magnet for your affiliates if you also have a profitable upsell opportunity so that they can make money.

Remember – people should leave your webinar having gleaned some great information that they can immediately apply to their own lives and situations. If they’ve given up their time, then they deserve to be rewarded.

To Your Success!