Webinars are one of the best tools to nurture and convert leads for businesses. Many businesses often use a variety of lead magnets and offers to get prospective customers to sign up and join a webinar. Although this is great, most businesses make the mistake of not following up with a post webinar email with their webinar participants. A post-webinar email gives you an opportunity to not only thank your webinar participants for attending but also give them next steps on what to do and lead them further down your sales cycle. In this post, we'll cover exactly how to write a post-webinar email that can help increase webinar ROI and turn webinar participants into customers.
Why write a post-webinar email?
After completing a 1 or 2-hour webinar, most marketers don't want to spend another hour writing a post-webinar email. However, webinars are one of the most expensive lead generation activities that a business can undertake and not following up with participants is a wasted opportunity. To host a single webinar, you need webinar software, the time of the host(s) and participants, webinar prep and more. A single webinar can cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Sending a simple follow-up email will help you maximize your webinar ROI and ensure you're capturing the demand created from the webinar.
Some of the reasons why you should write a post-webinar email include:
- To thank webinar participants for attending: A post-webinar email acts as a continuation of the webinar conversation. When you wait weeks or months to follow-up with participants, it can feel unnatural and forced. Sending a quick thank you email is a great way to show your appreciation to participants and further nurture that relationship.
- To give webinar participants next steps on what to do: Most people who attend webinars forget about it within 1-2 days. A post-webinar email gives you the chance to guide your participants and help them make the next step for their business. Unless you reach out to them after the webinar, they are highly unlikely to take a specific action that you want.
- To lead webinar participants further down your sales cycle: Post-webinar emails are a great medium to offer more value to your customer and lead them down your sales cycle. Your email can include an ebook, additional webinars, consultation calls, or a specific product that will help them solve their problem. This provides more value for your customers and establishes more trust to close a sale.
- To increase webinar ROI: Since post-webinar emails are very cheap for businesses, it's a great way to increase webinar ROI. By adding a CTA or offer in your post-webinar email, you can increase webinar conversion rates and generate more revenue from each webinar. This is not costly at all. It costs cents or a fraction of a cent to send an email that can generate thousands of dollars for your business. (check the example of a post-webinar by Gotch SEO on affordable SEO services)
Components of a post-webinar email
Before getting into how to write a post-webinar email, it's important to quickly cover the different components that make up a post-webinar email. The components of a post-webinar email include:
- Subject line: The subject line is the first thing that webinar participants will see in their inbox. It needs to be interesting and make them want to open the email.
- Introduction: The introduction is the opening of the email where you can thank webinar participants for attending.
- Body: The body is the main content of your post-webinar email. This is where you give webinar participants next steps on what to do and lead them further down your sales cycle.
- CTA: Your call to action is what you want webinar participants to do after reading your email. This can be anything from downloading an ebook or adding your business phone number to schedule a consultation call.
- Webinar recording: This is optional, but it's a good practice to include the webinar recording in your post-webinar email.
Steps to writing your post-webinar email
Write your first email drafts:
The first step in writing your post-webinar email is to start drafting your copy. Your copy includes everything in your post webinar email like your subject line, body of your email and your call to action. Most post-webinar emails are not long. You can keep your drafts between 150-250 words and that will suffice. Once you have drafted a few post-webinar emails, select the best 2-3 ones and start integrating your offer.
Creating an offer:
After you have a draft, brainstorm an offer you have for your participants. You can create an offer around what you want your participants to do.
- Do you want them to trial your product?
- Do you want them to get on a call with you?
- Do you want to give them a discount on your product or service?
Your offer needs to be something that will create value for your participants. Your offer doesn't have to be complicated, it can be something as simple as a free trial or a discount.
Creating a template:
Now that you have drafts of your email and your offer, you can start creating templates that you can use to send out to your email list. Since your email is personalized from your drafts and the offer is relevant to people who attended the webinar, you can use a template to add things like the first names, companies and other information about your webinar participants.
Here's a very basic template of what a post-webinar email can look like:
Subject line: Thank you for attending our webinar on {Webinar Topic}
Hello {First Name},
Thank you for attending our webinar on {Webinar Topic}. We had a great time and we hope you did too.
We'd love to continue our conversation and address any points mentioned in the webinar. If you'd like to move forward, we'd love to give you a free trial or consultation around {name of product or service}.
In case you missed it, here's a link to the webinar recording: {link to recording}
Cheers,
{Your name}
Use LiveWebinar to create your participant list
Now that you have your personalized templates, you need to send your emails only to the people who attended your webinar. A lot of people do this manually and it can take hours, but you can do this relatively quickly with LiveWebinar.
When you host a webinar with LiveWebinar, you can see the number of participants, their contact info and manage all of the operations directly from your dashboard. When the meeting ends, you have all of the data on your webinar participants. You can quickly download the data and create your participant list easily from LiveWebinar.
This will allow you to segment your email list and you can send your customized templates directly to those who attended the webinar. This allows you to save a lot of time instead of manually going through your email list and creating a new email segment based on the webinar.
Using marketing automation to deliver your template
At this point, you should have your customized templates and your participant list. First, it's recommended that you gather valuable data about your participants using a data appending service. These services can help you obtain next-level details to include in your database including phone numbers, demographics and more. Next, it's time to send emails to your audience. You can do this with a wide variety of marketing automations. LiveWebinar can help you use your favorite marketing automation tools by using the API interface. With just a few clicks, you can use your favorite marketing automation tools like MailChimp, HubSpot, ConvertKit, Slack and more.
Depending on the marketing automation tools you use, you can tailor your post webinar emails even more. You can add follow-up templates to your post-webinar email, reconnect with absentees from the webinar and add sales tools to book more appointments and close more leads. The possibilities are endless and you're only limited by your creativity and the different marketing automation tools you use.
Analyze your results
After you've sent your first batch of post-webinar emails, you can analyze their performance and tweak them based on the feedback provided. Check things like the open rate, click-through rate and conversion rate. These will give you a good idea of how people responded to your emails and you can use them as a baseline for your next webinar.
You can also look at the webinar recording to see how many people watched it and for how long. This will give you an idea of how engaged your participants were and you can use that to make your webinars even more engaging in the future. You can also repurpose your video content for SEO by taking snippets and adding them into other relevant blogs in your site.
In this analysis stage, the small changes will be what drives major improvements in webinar retention and email conversion rates in the future. Make sure to take some time to analyze your emails and webinar, so you can avoid making similar mistakes in the future. Remember, accurate reporting in marketing is essential to make data-driven decisions and achieve better outcomes in the long run.
The tips mentioned above will help you create the best possible post-webinar email for your audience. By using some or all of the email and webinar tips mentioned in this post, you can keep your webinar audience engaged and nurture those relationships until you finally make the sale. To learn more about how you can nurture leads after a webinar, check out this blog post.