5 Steps to Generating Sales Leads From Webinars Using B2B Email Marketing
A webinar, which is really just a web conference with audio narration and a slide presentation, is an excellent way to generate sales leads for your business. By simply offering valuable and benefit oriented (e.g. cost savings) industry information in an unbaised and short online presentation webinar format, you can attracte prospects for future internal remarketing.
If you can provide a well known guest speaker or company representative, a succinct and benefit oriented agenda and format your registration landing page well, you should be able to secure high lead conversion rates for your webinar.
1. Offer good unbiased webinar content
Content is king, and also is key to driving interest in your webinar. For example, you may want to provide insights into an industry problem, where your product happens to offer a unique solution.Choosing a punchy webinar topic backed up with an industry research is also important. Also, keep in mind these 3 keys to communicating successfully: 1) tell them what they will hear about today (e.g. the agenda), 2) give them the content and how it benefits them, and 3) remind them again what you just covered, and how you will follow up.
One website security client of mine had an extremely successful free webinar entitled "Hacking 101: How to keep your website secure". This title was punchy, and benefit oriented without being overtly sales oriented. When promoted via 3rd party opt-in email list rentals targeted to Chief Security Officers, the click to lead conversion rate was an incredible 50%! Basically 1 in 2 visitors to their landing page signed up to learn more.
2. Get a recognized guest speaker
Guest speakers can add generate real buzz and add a tremendous amount of credibility to an event. A videoconferencing client of mine recently held a number of webinars to generate leads targeting corporate executives across an array of industries. Their company brand was not very well known, so they not only had to educate prospects first on who their company was, but then also what their company could do for them. They decided to partner with CISCO Systems for their next webinar series - a well established brand name in the IT/Networking space. Their guest speaker was a senior executive from CISCO commenting on the exploding growth in video conferencing and the cost savings it can achieve. The click-through rate on email programs (both internal and 3rd party rentals) jumped over 100%, and their conversion rate from visit to lead was 40% - well above industry norms.
3. Know who your decision makers are
Knowing your target audience is key to attracting good leads, as well as prospecting using B2B optin email list rentals. Don't assume that C-level executives make all the buying decisions. For example, rather than a CIO making online storage solution buying decisions, they delegate to a more junior network manager or even administrator to conduct purchasing reviews.
US CAN SPAM Act Compliant (2004 law) optin email lists will provide typically job title and industry or SIC target options. I always recommend going for higher end B2B email lists (in the $0.40 to $0.50 US per email cost range) that are source from brand name trade publications (e.g. Network World, Architecture Today etc). With webinars, there is no need to target geographically, and so a job title select layered with a SIC or industry select is usually sufficient to pre qualify your target audience. Some lists even provide "hot line" or "recency" target selects, which means you can target only contacts who have subscribed to a publication in the last 3 to 6 months.
4. Keep it brief, get to the point
Webinars are not like in person meetings where you have a captive audience. Typically, webinars last anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes at most. It's important right away to show an agenda of what you will be covering and when. An online audience is very fickle and impatient. Use lots of graphs, charts and client case studies. Do not jump into listing off product features or you will lose your audience quickly.
5. Inform, remind, thank, and follow-up
Generating leads to a webinar is not a one-shot program, it is a process. Generally I suggest an initial targeting B2B optin email list rental 2 or 3 weeks prior to your event to gain interest and sign-ups from your audience. I often recommend also a remail of those same emails (on a rented list, or internal) the day or two days before the event. Most 3rd party email lists will offer a significant remail discount on hitting the same list again, but say with just a "reminder" in the subject line.
For those leads you've captured at your landing page, remind them again of the webinar on the day of the event with a short (text only) email with time and the agenda. A day or two after the event, follow up with a brief thank you email with links to the presentation provided as well as any relevant product pages on your site.You may even want to follow up by phone after the event for those who registered, but did not attend the webinar.
Related article: 10 Tips On Hosting A Successful Webinar
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