Give Your Audience a Replay and Give Yourself a Raise
posted on
Webinar follow-up is essential.
People are so busy and so easily distracted, it’s not unusual to get attendance conversion figures as low as 10-20%. Even if you absolutelyROCK your indoctrination plan and get an attendance rate as high as 50%, you’re still leaving half of your potential customers spinning in the ether.
Why does this happen?
It’s one thing to ask a visitor to fill in a quick form to register for a webinar. But it’s a whole different animal when it comes to asking that same visitor to commit an hour or more of their already almost nonexistent spare time, on a specified day and time, to park it in front of their computer and be ready to focus on your event, no matter how beefy the content.
This is why you need to find out where they live and lasso them to their office chair.
Just kidding!
Maybe having a follow-up plan for the no-shows is the better, less “get thrown in the penn-y” option?
Yes. That probably makes more sense.
If you’re going to recapture some of those lost souls, there’s no better solution than a webinar replay.
A Webinar Replay… Really?
There’s an argument that says that offering a replay reduces attendance to a live event. If there’s a replay coming, won’t registrants blow off the live webinar and wait for a recording they can watch when it’s convenient?
For a handful of registrants, yes, sure.
However, there are also the people who are genuinely interested in your event but can’t attend because they have a life that just doesn’t flex to anyone else’s schedule. I mean, sure, you could dig your heels in and insist that if people are really interested, they’ll move heaven and earth to attend, but life doesn’t work like that.
Maybe I REALLY want to watch your webinar on how to soothe children into being less feral, but if your event is playing when I’m supposed be taking my kids to their karate class, I don’t have much of a choice but to miss out.
More than ever, putting on a webinar and insisting that it’s a one-shot deal, tough noogies if you miss it, is, well… not nice. What you might gain with scarcity, you’re going to lose ten times over by missing potentially-lucrative customers who can’t make it because they don’t get out of work until 8pm. People are living life at breakneck speed. Ease their pain, don’t add to it.
If you’re still anxious about the possibility that offering a replay will damage your live event figures, then don’t mention it until after. There’s no rule that says you have to reveal your marketing strategy. Just focus on promoting the live event, and only announce the replay after the fact.
*You might have heard the Bosses mention the merits of putting on a second, live encore webinar to capture more people – for example, hosting one webinar mid-week, then a second, repeat performance, over the weekend. If you can do that, great. However, you should still have a follow-up replay strategy for the people who are on vacation or had internet problems and missed out on both webinars.
7 Webinar Replay Tips
We’ve had webinars where as much as 75% of our sales came from the replay. For real.
You may or may not be surprised to learn that this does NOT happen by dumping the recorded webinar onto a web page and banging out a quick email to your list.
If that DOES come as a surprise, don’t worry. You’re not alone.
We know how it feels during the immediate moments after you wrap up your live webinar. Your nerves are shredded, the adrenaline rush starts to subside and you get the post fight or flight shakes. All you want to do is grab a bottle of wine, collapse into bed, and fall asleep watching Golden Girls reruns.
So, you quickly upload the Youtube recording to your site and write a half hearted message to your audience announcing the replay, just so you can call it “finished” and finally relax after weeks of hard work and prep.
It’s understandable, but it’s a habit you need to kick. Like right now.
First, if you used WebinarJam, and configured your settings properly, the Replica Replay is immediately available, exactly as it appeared live. Done. Boom.
If you didn’t…
A) You should.
B) There is no pressure to get the replay online immediately. If you haven’t mentioned that a replay is coming, you have breathing room. Take the rest of the night off and then take the time to properly review the recording and make any necessary edits tomorrow.
**Helpful Hint: Practice, practice, practice. Then, practice again. The more you practice and run test webinars, the better your live event will be. The better your live event, the less you have to mess with the recording.
Now, if you didn’t practice (shame on you :)), here are seven tweaks you should consider making to your recording that will increase your chances of making more sales from your replay… They are also good pieces of advice for polishing your live event.
1) Increase the pace
Your webinars should always move quickly.
How quickly? Fast enough that people can only just keep up. A brisk pace reduces the risk of viewers getting bored and creates a sense of urgency that feeds nicely into your eventual sales pitch. So, your first tweak should be to go through the webinar and remove any moments where things started to slow down… A pause in the presentation while you switched out a malfunctioning microphone. A couple of minutes of mindless small talk while you waited for your guest star to sort out their webcam (something that can be alleviated by…. You guessed it…. TESTING). Anything that broke the flow of your webinar should be snipped out to tighten up your performance.
And, just in case you weren’t aware of it, YouTube has some surprisingly effective editing options built right into their control panel. You can trim out sections of your video without having to mess about with any editing software or repetitive uploads.
2) Tidy up the Q&A
The “Question & Answer” portion of your webinar is always a mixed bag. Some questions from your audience will be right on point. Others, less so.
How much you trim is up to you but, as a general rule of thumb, keep the questions that allow you to talk about the features and benefits of your product or demonstrate your expertise, and lose the questions where people seem to have confused your webinar Q&A for their own personal forum for irrelevant commentary.
3) Add content from your Q&A
Sometimes, during the Q&A, someone will ask you a question about your product and you’ll mentally kick yourself for not mentioning it during your sales offer. Editing your replay gives you the opportunity to right that wrong.
Simply record a little extra video and splice it into your recording in the appropriate place. If you bookmark it, front and back, with a slide, the insertion won’t even be noticeable.
4) Sharpen your pitch
If your sales offer conversions are high, you might want to leave well enough alone. But, if your numbers were a let down, now’s your chance to change things up.
You can test different offers, price points, and payment options. Or, if the conversion rate was really poor, you could go whole hog and completely re-record the delivery of your sales pitch.
5) Edit slides
Typos might seem like a small thing, but a certain percentage of your audience will find them incredibly distracting.
For instance, I’m sure I’ve completely lost a handful of people because they can’t get past the misspelling in the previous sentence.
Hello? You can come back now! The typo was deliberate. I know how to spell “percentage”, really. Percentage. Percentage. Percentage.
See?
Good. So, fix any typos on your slides that you missed the first time around. And consider adding or removing slides if watching the recording reveals that you didn’t quite get the balance right.
I have to say it again…. If you test, you will mostly be able to skip this step and save yourself a great deal of work later. Just sayin’. And repeatin’.
Test.
6) Add more visuals
Review your webinar drop-out numbers (you’ll find detailed stats in your WebinarJam account) and look for obvious exit points where attendees dropped off.
Sometimes the problem is a slowdown in pace which can be fixed by making some edits. But if the information is too important to cut, try livening up the presentation in that segment.
Add more screen-captures, more social proof elements, more example images, more pre-recorded video, or anything else you can think of to add interest.
7) Add time stamps
This particular option is only relevant if you are embedding the recording on an outside site or membership portal and not using WebinarJam or EverWebinar for your replay.
Under your replay, have a list of contents for your webinar and provide time stamps so people can jump to specific points in your presentation. For instance, if your webinar features 12 strategies for strategically improving your strategy in… something… list the 12 strategies below the video player and state the precise time in the webinar when you start talking about each point.
Just in case it isn’t entirely obvious, this suggestion requires your video to have a scrub-bar.
************************************************
Not having a cohesive webinar follow-up strategy is, quite literally, leaving money on the table.
So, no more rushing a replay out just so you can call the job “done.” Take your time, make some edits, and put together a replay that adequately reflects your skill and is worthy of your customers’ time.
But, we’re not done. That’s only part of the story. Once your replay is ready, you need a solid communication plan to ensure you maximize attention on your efforts.
In “Part Two” of this article we’ll sketch out a simple but effective, three email series, that will put the sales cherry on your follow-up icing.
And a powerful bonus tip that is so obvious with hindsight, you won’t believe you’ve never tried it before.
