What We Learned From Running Our First Webinar

Recently, we ran our webinar, "6 Mistakes That Make Learning Programs Fail." We built it from scratch: the positioning, the promotion, the platform, the follow-up, all of it.

Some of it worked. Some of it taught us what to do differently next time. Either way, we learned a lot, and since we're in the business of helping others build better learning experiences, it felt only right to share what we found.

Here are five things our webinar taught us.

1. There are nitty-gritties to webinar platforms, and they make a huge difference

The platform you choose shapes far more than you'd expect. Here's what we'd look at closely next time:

• 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's "Add to Calendar" feature was better developed. It's terrible right now. Zoho sends an .ics file on email and the user 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 on a standard plan. It's a basic, near-universal need, but Zoho gates it behind one of its pricier tiers, despite us already being on a paid plan.

• 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. Key reason we rejected a lot of them.

• Sending webinar recordings on email

• Landing pages: We had a huge drop rate from our landing page; if our page was fancier we think we could increase that percentage.

• 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

Instagram gave the highest no. of registrations, but very weak attendance.

LinkedIn was very moody about impressions on our posts when they included a webinar link.

Our mailing list had a 75% show up rate.

💡 Your Takeaway: Grow your owned mailing list.

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.

5. Attendees gained a lot of value overall

How we know: Its in the numbers!

💡 Your Takeaway: Track whether you delivered real value. The numbers 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.