What We Learned From Planning, Marketing and Delivering Our Recent Webinar

We recently wrapped up our webinar on 6 Mistakes That Make Learning Programs Fail. Most of it worked as expected, some of it taught us what to do differently.

Here are 5 things we learned.

1. There are nitty-gritties to webinar platforms that make a huge difference

We evaluated many platforms: Zoho Webinars, WebinarJam, MS Teams, Go2Webinar, Webinar Ninja, Livestorm, Zoom Webinars, Demio, StreamYard, and more. Each would give us something the other doesn't!

Whichever platform you choose, here are key features we think you should watch out for most.

• Ease of adding event to calendar: If a webinar is not on people's calendar, their likeliness of joining will dim greatly. Our attendance rate was 43%. We think we could improve this VASTLY if Zoho (the platform we chose) had a better developed "Add to Calendar" feature. It's terrible right now. Zoho sends an .ics file on email and the participant has to go through multiple steps to add the event to their calendar - lots of friction, affects how many people show up massively!
  
  

• Ability to edit reminder emails: You want to keep giving your attendees a reason to join, and make sure it's top of mind. Great reminder emails are crucial for this. It's a basic need, and many platforms gate it behind one of their pricier tiers.
  
  

• Ability to join without downloading an app: Many tools we looked at required users to download an app; attendees couldn't just join with one click on a computer and or on phone. Key reason we rejected a lot of them, including Teams.
  
  

• Sending webinar recordings on email: This feature makes it super easy for you to handle the tedious workflow of downloading, uploading, and linking the recording.
  
  

• Great landing pages: We had a huge drop rate from our landing page; if our page was fancier, we think we could increase registrations. Spend time building a good landing page!
  
  

• Data on source tracking: If you market in multiple sources, it should be easy to check how many came from where. Luckily, Zoho did this well.

💡 Your Takeaway: Choose your webinar platform carefully. The small features make a big difference, and you may need to combine tools to get everything you need.

2. Unsurprisingly, our no. 1 source of attendees was our mailing list

Paid ads on Instagram gave us the highest no. of registrations, but very weak attendance rates. You should either have the budget to scale paid ads greatly, or rely on a strong existing follower base to drive registrations from IG.

LinkedIn was very moody about impressions on our posts when they included a webinar link. Expect about 50% impressions from your typical posts if you're promoting a webinar.

Our mailing list had a low registration rate, but a 75% show up rate!

💡 Your Takeaway: Grow your owned mailing list as much as you can, or have a paid marketing budget to increase attendance.

3. Our speed of delivery should have been slower

We learned this because of what close attendees told us later (some volunteered, some shared on asking).

💡 Your Takeaway: Collect feedback proactively. Without that, you won’t know how it went!

4. We inspired some program designers to push for relevance

Encouragingly, our core message was well-received.

How we know: Open-ended responses to our feedback survey named takeaways like "meet learners more," "situation-focused first," and "challenge the relevance behind a training." These responses tell us our ideas landed.

💡 Your Takeaway: Have a clear, single core message. If it lands, people carry it with them. Also, have a way to know if it landed!

5. Attendees gained a lot of value overall

How we know: It's in the numbers!

💡 Your Takeaway: Have mechanisms to make sure learners share feedback! Only the data will tell you if it was worth it.

All in all, we learned that a lot of components go into building a great webinar: positioning, marketing channels, the webinar platform, the experience we create, how we gather feedback, how we present our offer, and how we follow up. Every nitty-gritty makes a difference.

Want support from our team to plan, strategize, design, market, and evaluate your next webinar?