How would you feel if the webinar you put hours of effort into creating didn’t attract enough participants simply because you chose a bad day or time? You’d likely be disappointed that despite all your hard work, you didn’t take the time to research the optimal timing for your webinar. Believe it or not, there are indeed better days and times to host a webinar each week.
So, when is the best time and date to conduct a webinar? What are the reasons behind this, and does it truly make a difference? Dive into the article to uncover the rules and insights to avoid future mistakes.
Choosing the Best Time for Your Webinar: What to Consider
To pick the best time for your webinar, you have to consider first some basic issues connected with your audience.
1. Who is your audience?
Ask yourself a few questions: Who is your webinar for? Is it aimed at businesses (B2B) or regular consumers (B2C)? Are your attendees adults or perhaps teenagers? Knowing your audience is key. For instance, if your webinar targets individuals with non-traditional work hours or includes sole entrepreneurs or night shift workers, you may have more flexibility in scheduling.
2. What products do you promote?
Consider also the type of product or service your webinar promotes. For example, if you're discussing baby products, your main audience would likely be parents, particularly mothers with young children. Offering webinars on weekends or evenings when they have family support could be beneficial. On the other hand, if you're focusing on new technology or financial advice, your target audience might be business owners and entrepreneurs.
3. What is the time zone?
If your target audience is spread across several time zones, even several countries, the task of picking the best time to do a webinar becomes complicated. The best approach to solving this dilemma is picking a time of the day that would include most of your audience in one of the above time slots.
How to broaden your reach?
A good idea is to consider on-demand webinars. To do this, simply record your webinar and share the replay link with your audience. This allows a wider audience to view the webinar at their convenience.
Furthermore, you can utilize these recordings as a powerful way to generate leads. By setting up a landing page where visitors can register their email to access the webinar, you collect valuable contact information. This email list can then be used to send out marketing materials and updates.
For those looking to automate this process, there are numerous automated webinar software options available, such as LiveWebinar, as well as webinar plugins for those with WordPress sites. These tools make scheduling and tracking your webinars straightforward. Read more here.
In the following section, we’ll introduce the best webinar software that can help you reach your audience and generate leads.
Look at the data in your CRM to see where your customers are located.
What are the best days for webinars?
According to research conducted on thousands of webinars and their participants’ data, the best days for webinars are:
THURSDAYS
WEDNESDAYS
and TUESDAYS
Of these three, Thursday webinars show the highest attendance. Then comes Wednesday and, lastly, Tuesday. This trend is not a surprise. Midweek is the time of the week when our working mindset is at its peak.
Why are Monday and Friday not on the list?
The reason is simple: on Mondays, people are still adjusting to getting back to work after a relaxing weekend. What's more, Monday is traditionally a day to "catch up" on work, and on Fridays, people are too distracted by the upcoming weekend away from work. Hence, the popularity of webinars being conducted on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
But keep in mind, special occasions like national holidays also impact the best days for webinars. Don’t schedule your webinar on the Thursday before a long weekend just because it’s a Thursday!
On the other hand, the worst days to have a webinar are, as you may have already guessed, Saturday and Sunday. Don’t go scheduling your webinars on weekends when most of your target audience is relaxing in weekend bliss.
Avoid holidays and special occasions
Be careful with holidays and periods close to them. Scheduling your webinar during special occasions can greatly affect attendance. It's likely that fewer people will join your webinar on these days, and finding guest speakers might also be a challenge.
For example, the period from December 25th to January 1st is widely celebrated as the Christmas holidays in countries like the US, UK, Canada, and others. So, hosting a webinar during this time might not be the best idea since attracting an audience could be particularly difficult.
What is the best time of the day to have a webinar?
This may come as a surprise to some of you, but the best time to host any webinar is before & after lunch. These timings help you reach out to audiences residing in America and Europe. According to the report by ON24, 39% of webinars happen between 10 AM to 12 PM, and the best time for webinars is 11 AM.
But remember to leave out the lunch hour at noon alone when planning the webinar. In addition, it's also the ideal time if you have an international audience. Webinars between 10 a.m. and 12 a.m. allow you to avoid conflicts on both coasts of America, as well as allow you to reach Europe early enough.
To sum up - to maximize attendance, you need to host your webinar in the middle of the day. Of course, it will depend to some extent on your audience's schedules to determine the best time for your webinar, but you can try to schedule it for 11 a.m. If you need to cover multiple time zones in the United States, this is your best option. Otherwise, stay close to that period, as your audience may appreciate it too. It would be best to try experimenting with different times to find out what works for your audience. Depending on your audience's characteristics, you might want to run a webinar earlier or later.
What else should you consider when choosing the best time to have a webinar?
In addition to the above points, you should pay attention to data from your past webinars to understand when your audience prefers to join webinars. You can also communicate with the participants to get a better idea about their weekly schedules. You can even conduct polls and surveys within the audience to better understand their preferences.
Pick the best webinar software
LiveWebinar provides easy-to-use features to connect with your audience without much hassle. You can conduct surveys and polls and chat with the participants easily thanks to this cloud-based platform.
You can also easily provide your audience with on-demand, evergreen webinars ready to be attended by those who cannot attend live. Also, the registration process is straightforward and offers a multitude of possibilities to use such as easily customized registration forms, personalized emails with invitations, landing pages or a vast choice of analytical tools to measure the preferences of your audience.
Thanks to the above mentioned options, you can contact your attendees and adjust your content to what they need and look for.
Knowledge of the best time to do a webinar based on mainstream data, combined with the insights you gain about your particular audience through LiveWebinar, is an asset that you can use to reach a larger audience through webinars. So, the next time you plan a webinar, remember to pick a time slot backed by data that guarantees the success of your webinar.
READ ALSO: How to master webinar costs? Strategies for optimizing your budget and ROI
In conclusion
Our guide offers tips and advice on hosting a webinar at the right time and on the best days. While the data above does provide some intriguing insight into how to host a successful webinar, you need to develop your own specific strategy to make your webinar successful.
Your online presentations can attract high-quality leads and increase sales calls if you choose the right time and day. LiveWebinar will provide you with a fantastic opportunity to conduct online meetings and valuable tools for working with your audience. Check it out and set up a free account here.
Check also: best webinar software ranking!