Email drives 57% of webinar registrations, period.
A webinar takes planning and coordination. Everybody knows that, right? The classic Who/What/Where/When and Why (WWWWW) should guide webinar development.
Your webinar’s success, in addition to good content and planning, rests on a solid email campaign that communicates the WWWWW with the right people at the right time.
For years I’ve tried to promote webinars weeks … and even months… in advance, hoping to generate early registrations. Open rates are good, CTR is not bad, but the early registration needle doesn’t move. However, that’s not to say don’t promote far in advance. According to GoToWebinar, registrations increase by 12% when the webinar is promoted at least 4 weeks in advance.
The optimum number of webinar promotion emails is 4.
Start your webinar promotion about a month before your webinar but expect little in the way of actual sign-ups at this point. Usually, the subject or pre-header is “Mark Your Calendars” at this point and the most you can expect is some level of awareness and interest tickling. And if you do it, an opportunity to do some incremental segmentation based on interest tagging for upcoming emails and webinars..
Promote again about 7-10 days before your webinar.
If there is an early sign-up discount, promote those 2-4 days before it ends.
Then send one more email blast to non-registrations (registrants should have received a confirmation email separately) the day before the webinar. (If the webinar is scheduled in the afternoon, have a last-minute sign-up for non-registrants waiting in their email boxes at 5 a.m.)
Trust me, this pattern works like Baby Bear’s Porridge.
Get the latest, broad-based email benchmark study.
According to Máté Zilahy, Content Partnerships Manager at GetResponse,
“It's interesting to note that 82% of registrants signed up for webinars within a week of the scheduled date, with only 6% signing up more than two weeks in advance. This suggests that the majority of the audience is looking for webinars relevant to their current needs or interests.”
To learn more about email-webinar statistics like Best Day/Time/Promo Email Open Rates, etc. download the 2023 Email Marketing Benchmarks by GetResponse. It’s a good report, one of the best I’ve seen.