SPECIAL LIMITED SERIES: ===> WEBINAR Show-Up TIPS! <=== | BATHROOM Break #2 (COLLAB: The Marketing Millennials + Do This, Not That)

Welcome to a new special series called the Bathroom break. That extra 10 minutes you either have to listen to marketing tips or use the bathroom or both. But I don't recommend both. But that's your choice.

This collab is going to be super fun.

We have Daniel Murray from the Marketing Millennials and me, Jay Schwedelson from the do this, not that podcast and subjectline.com each episode in the series we are going to go over quick tips about different marketing topics. And if you want to be in the bathroom, fine, just don't tell us about it. Thanks for checking it out. All right, we're back here.

Daniel Murray and me, Jay Schwedelson for another part of the Bathroom Break series. And today we're talking about not just webinars but getting people to show up. For webinars it is tough.

You got them to register but show up rates are less than 50% on average for everybody. But there are little things that we could do to get people to show up. So Daniel, what do we got to do to get our show up rates higher for webinars?

One of my number one tips is having add to calendar. I think either it's an automatic ad to calendar or you have that button to say add to calendar.

I think both are good because there's also that new Gmail thing that when you add to calendar it says do you recognize the sender? And it might not add to calendar.

So I think you need to promote that they should add it to calendar after they register and as well as have a way if you can to add it to their calendar once they do register 100%.

And I think something that marketers sleep on is hounding away to people that registered, emailing them a bunch the day of. Marketers get afraid.

They think they're annoying people that registered and they also think that people that registered remembered that they registered because a lot of times unfortunately they don't add to calendars.

So what you need to always be doing, you need to do a day of send a day of email send to all your registrants and a lot of people try to do it within four hours. The best thing that you could do to have the highest show up rate is actually doing two day of send.

You send one within four hours of your webinar and then another one within 30 minutes of your webinar and say you are about to miss this. It'll radically increase your show up rates. And you can't be scared that you're sending too much because these people signed up for a reason.

They wanted to get the information. So Daniel, what else you got?

I think another thing I like to do is say they have a chance to have a special Q and A with the guests only on this webinar and we're not going to release the Q and A. So you only have a chance to talk to this person and ask them the questions live.

I think that is a great way to get people who really are interested in the topic to ask personalized question. I think a lot of content out there, you can't ask questions. So.

So webinars is a great way to be in front of a person who is an expert at a topic that you. And if you have a Q and A to ask some questions.

So if you say, hey, we also have a live Q and A for anybody who wants to ask questions, I think that's a great way to get people to come to your webinar.

I love that. And you know, in general, I think we're our own worst enemies, marketers, meaning that we make everything on demand.

Everyone now thinks when you register for webinar that you don't have to go, that they're going to send me the link afterwards when I miss it and I'll watch it on my own time, which nobody ever goes back and does. Right. We've created this world where you don't attend the webinar that you registered for.

So a tactic that works incredibly well to increase your show up rate, which I don't think enough marketers test, is having no on demand of that webinar and promoting it, saying if you don't come live, you're not going to get this content. Now some of you are like, oh my God, I can't do that because it's so important.

And this, that or whatever you, you could bring that content back three months from now and put it on your resource page and promote it as an asset.

But leverage this idea of FOMO that they're going to miss out because you're much better off getting people to show up and watch this thing than to just register to get the link and never look at it. We see that in pipeline and in sales all the time. So having no on demand is an incredible tactic to at least test adding.

That into your copywriting of scarcity, urgency, limited, limited time. I think using psychology with webinars of that, hey, we're not going to show this to anybody else.

You'll miss out on listening to one of the best marketers speak about X Topic or having A unique topic that hasn't been heard before. And you'll only hear this here. The importance of writing good copywriting on a webinar page or on your emails is just so underrated.

So many people just say in the hey, we're having a webinar on this day. Please attend.

But you need to write great copy to get someone to even click that button to want to come and pique the interest so much that they have emotions that they're going to miss out or they're going to. That they are special for attending this webinar, or they're going to get something so valuable that they won't get anywhere else.

I think you need to have that evoke emotion in those.

What you just said is so true. A lot of times marketers are not leveraging the content that they're actually promoting. They know that the.

That the webinar is about whatever topic or it has this incredible speaker, but they're not pushing it enough in their copy. And what they do push in their copy is crushing performance. What do I mean by that?

So, for example, if you promote your webinar with email and the first word in your subject line, which a lot of marketers do this, they'll say webinar colon, and then they'll have the topic. They'll literally start with the word webinar. Webinar is a boat anchor of a word. It just means boring. It means going to be time on your calendar.

People don't care. So Daniel's point, you want to remove the word webinar, for example, in your subject line and even in your headline.

And you want to say that thing that's going to get them the most excited, that's going to give them fomo, right? And then later, down in the body copy, in the registration button, you let them know, and this is a webinar that's going to be 30 minutes long.

You don't lead with the most boring thing, which is the word webinar, which depresses performance in every metric that we see, because it sucks. Nobody wants to attend a webinar.

I think another tip that I would say is look at where your audience actually is and then decide on a time to pick when your webinar actually is. I think a lot of people just say, oh, it'd be good to have a webinar this day at this time.

But for example, I just had a webinar and I put it during a lunch break. And a lot of people said, I came here during my lunch break. I came here during my lunch break.

I came here during my lunch break and I knew that because a lot of my audience was in a certain area and those people would come to this webinar.

So pick a time and during a lunch break or a break or a day that's more chill, like a Monday for most marketers, where if you have a marketing podcast, it's probably not a good day because marketers are swamped with marketing stuff. So don't pick a day where you know your audience would be probably busy or they don't have time to attend your webinar.

And don't buy into the garbage. To Daniel's point that certain days are bad, right? In terms of, yeah, Monday's gonna be rough, but Friday.

So many marketers have avoided Fridays forever. Cause they think, oh, Fridays, nobody wants to do anything. But.

But really what we've seen in all the data ever since COVID Friday has become this day where, like, you better yourself, you consume content, you have less calls, less meetings. So if you haven't tested having your webinars on early on a Friday, you can't do it Friday afternoon.

But earlier on a Friday, it's working incredibly well.

So don't just go online and say, oh, look for best practices and follow those, because nine times out of 10, they're old, they're legacy, and it's just a spread of misinformation. You got to test it for yourself and see what's going to work.

I think another thing going on, the point of you saying the word webinar is boring and it's sickness size boring. I think when you're promoting the webinar and I'm air quoting it, you can come up with different names for the series.

And one of the things I actually do recommend is making a series for webinars because then it tells people to show up at a certain time consistently. I think a lot of people when they come in starting webinars, they do one and it's one and done.

And people would forget if I was running webinars in Houzz, I would either have something monthly on a certain day that I consistently have going on. Because consistency is why people show up.

But they know that on every Tuesday, first Tuesday of the month, I'm having a talk about X, Y, Z, or every Friday we're doing a roundtable of something else.

I know I added kind of two tips there, but one, I would just call it something else, like, hey, this is the series for B2B marketers that XYZ that consistency and good naming helps people want to show up consistently to your to your event.

And you know what? I think everybody should rip off this podcast series right here. Look at what we're doing. We're testing something.

We don't know if it's going to work right. We are both releasing this podcast on each of our own podcasts, right?

As an initial episode, why can't you go and partner up with another company, record a webinar. You both release it as individual webinars, co branded. It's the same idea. There's always a million different things to test.

And so hopefully you're getting a lot out of this series. And if you like this stuff, check out the Marketing Millennials podcast. Daniel and his crew, they interview the best marketing people on the planet.

And you could also check out do this, not that for marketing. That's my podcast. Rapid Tips and stuff. And stay tuned for more episodes from the Bathroom Break.

I hope you weren't in the bathroom listening to this episode, but.