You've put together a great webinar that you're excited about. But as the event approaches, there's a nagging question: will people who signed up attend? In webinars, it's a big deal if people show up because success depends on actual attendance, not just registrations. So, how can you make sure more people attend? How do you reach the right audience? Check out our latest blog post for tips on getting more people to attend your webinar.
Why is the attendance rate important?
The webinar attendance rate shows how many people who registered for your webinar joined in. This number is typically between 40 and 60 percent, varying by industry. In 2023, this rate was about 43.36%. Whether this seems low or high, it's less than half of your registrants. What can you do to improve this? Our post will explain.
Why don't people show up?
There are many reasons people might register but not attend your webinar, from personal issues like forgetting or being too busy, to more systematic issues such as the sheer number of webinars available, making people less committed to attending every one they sign up for.
Building a High-Quality Contact Base
This highlights the importance of reaching the right audience with your webinar offer. By targeting those genuinely interested in the webinar topic, you increase the likelihood of attendance.
For entrepreneurs, particularly those with business-oriented services, focusing on building a high-quality contact base is essential. This helps avoid random sign-ups and spam, which are unnecessary and counterproductive in any industry. How can you achieve this?
How to Acquire Corporate Emails Through Webinars?
A lot depends on the type of email address used to sign up for the webinar. Using an email created on a free domain (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) has technical consequences that affect email deliverability and may result in messages being marked as unwanted or spam.
The Curse of Free Mailboxes
It's estimated that in 2023 almost 49 percent of all sent email messages were classified as spam, with nearly 90% originating from free addresses.
What Lowers the Email Deliverability Rate?
Email deliverability to addresses on free domains is significantly lower due to the high volume of commercial spam they receive. These mailboxes are often targeted for spam distribution or created to take advantage of promotions, such as receiving an e-book or webinar invitation. Consequently, emails sent to these addresses may go unread or ignored, reducing the likelihood of successful communication.
What Makes an Email Address Reliable?
Emails sent from private mailboxes lack credibility for serious business correspondence. This is why business customers prefer using corporate email addresses.
Furthermore, by limiting registrations to corporate emails, the quality of leads improves. You gain insight into the company name and the individual's surname, facilitating research and enabling more meaningful connections with potential customers.
Therefore, if your goal is to engage business customers through webinars, enabling registrations that require corporate emails is the optimal choice.
How to ensure webinar sign-ups are from business emails?
How do you implement this in practice? How can you limit webinar registrations to only include corporate emails of participants?
LiveWebinar offers this possibility, which everyone can use easily. Thanks to the latest feature, "Allow Only Work E-mails," participants with email addresses from public email service providers (such as Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc.) will not be able to register for the webinar.
if you choose this option, your webinars will not have sign-ups from free email accounts. The rules are straightforward: in the field containing the required information for a participant signing up for the webinar, a note appears instructing them to enter a company email address.
Benefits of Limiting Private Emails
By restricting registrations to company emails, you can ensure that your webinars are filled with professionals who are truly interested in participation, potentially increasing the likelihood of them becoming your customers substantially. Additionally, you'll reduce spam, and the data and statistics regarding the webinar's effectiveness will become far more accurate.
Now let's look at some examples... And numbers that work wonders!
Here's a typical calculation based on real data.
One of the events we organized was a webinar on affiliate marketing for entrepreneurs and digital marketers: "Discover the Secrets of Affiliate Marketing." For this webinar, we did not apply any restrictions to company emails during registration.
A total of 528 people signed up. Finally, 224 participants showed up at the meeting. This amounts to about 42% of those registered, which is within the standard attendance rate for webinars. Not bad at all! We were pleased. How many people decided to go a step further and take advantage of the offer? We had 9 conversions. We were also satisfied. However, it turned out these numbers could have been much higher.
For comparison, at another webinar: “How to Improve Online Communication in an Organization,” we introduced a registration system focused on company emails. The numbers looked very different this time, and they were in our favor. See for yourselves.
Fewer people filled in the registration form than before, only 216. However, these were people more interested in the webinar content, as evidenced by the fact that a much higher percentage of registrants showed up. A full 147 participants attended. This gave us an attendance rate of 68%. The outcome exceeded our wildest expectations - we managed to establish further contact with as many as 45 of those attendees.
The most important conclusions are shown in the chart below.
These numbers are impressive and prove that it is definitely worth targeting people who are really interested.
If you want to see how it works and test this feature at your place - you are warmly welcome. You can do it here.