You nailed your webinar invite. Had excellent webinar attendance. And delivered an engaging presentation.
…Now what? How do you keep the conversation going?
NOW you send your registrants a webinar follow up email thanking them for attending. (Your webinar follow up email may differ for those who just registered vs. those who actually attended).
You don’t want to lose momentum for nurturing your leads, or missing out on valuable opportunities to create a relationship while you still have their attention. Registrants expect a followup and thank you email, so give them a great one!
What’s the purpose of the follow up? You gotta move your leads along to the next phase of the buyer’s journey. And the goal is to keep your contacts interacting and engaging with your company!
With so much value hinging on the success of this email, make sure you are creating a webinar follow up email that’s sure to land.
MeetingOne Webinar “Thank You” Examples
In the first part of this blog series, I mentioned that MeetingOne has hosted or worked on numerous webinars. As a result, we sent out a webinar thank you email for each and every webinar.
The results are always great. People are, of course, expecting them, so we have an Open Rate of just under 50%. Opens are the easy part. Even creating the subject line is easy: “Thank you for registering for/attending [EVENT NAME].” Whether you go with “registering” or “attending,” depends on if your webinar platform separates both lists. (A good platform accounts for the difference in the CSV list of total registrants it compiles. Easy sorting at that point.)
Seeing high Click-Through Rates is what’s critical here. A CTR means the content you’re offering up is desirable.
For MeetingOne, we see an average CTR of 19%. The average marketing email CTR creeps just above 4%. Again, we’re at an advantage: people expect and want these emails. But there is an art to creating an email that generates almost 5x the national average click-through.
One of the keys to our success: simplicity. Here are a few examples:
As you can see, the middle email (one of our most recent) had the highest CTR. In this instance, I believe the simplicity factored in. Too many CTAs can unintentionally discourage recipients from clicking on anything! (The email at left has 4 CTAs. The one at right, 3. And the middle only has 1.)
The other key to our success: including the right components. Keep reading to learn more about everything that makes a webinar thank you email click-able!
Build the Perfect Webinar Follow Up Email
6 Components of a successful webinar follow up email:
- Thanking them for registering/attending/participating
- Webinar Recording Link & Presentation Slides
- Webinar Takeaways
- Other Educational Opportunities or Items
- CTAs (Call-to-Action — a line of text or an image that invites someone to do something)
- Company Contact Information
The best way to keep leads engaged is to provide further educational opportunities, whether it be on your product or something that is important to them for their job. I know what some of you may be thinking, “But Joel, we have a small marketing team…even putting on this one webinar was a lot of work. We don’t have anything else to share!” Don’t stress about sharing. With a little creativity, so much information is already at your fingertips!
Examples of educational pieces to share:
1. Invite them to your upcoming webinars, or share a link to a previous webinar you think they will enjoy
2. Share an existing whitepaper, eBook or eGuide that your company put together
3. Reference a blog post that relates to the webinar topic
4. Invite them to view your learning and support web pages for more information (select specific web pages, don’t be too general)
What if you really don’t have any content to share? (Uh oh. Better get on that.) Link to relevant content that someone else created (just not a competitor!!).
These are just a couple of examples to keep them learning. Spend time researching content on the internet to see what could be the best fit as a next step. There’s no better “thank you” in a webinar thank you email than more free, RELEVANT content.
The webinar follow up email is ALL about the CTA!
Depending on the purpose of your webinar, you may want them to take action by:
- Requesting a demo of your product
- Contacting you for more information
- Downloading a trial
- Registering for an upcoming webinar
- Liking Social media pages, subscribing to your blog
- Downloading marketing materials [whitepaper, SlideShare, infographic]
- Signing up for newsletter or joining your email list
The call-to-action should enhance the purpose of your webinar, and bring them to the next step. Depending on where your lead is in their buyer’s journey the CTA’s will change. I recommend including no more than 2 CTAs. More than that can prove too many.
Keep the 80/20 rule top of mind.
80% of email content should be educational, fun, or informative.
About 20% can still be sales-y. Your simple follow up, with the above 6 components, will go further than you expect with the right planning.
Don’t forget: they attended or at least registered for your webinar because they wanted to learn something. You already have their attention, and they are expecting a “thank you”. So, you’re only hurting yourself by slacking on this important final step during your webinar planning. Not to freak you out, but forgetting the webinar follow up email is a good way to ruin the entire event!
Wish you could better engage your webinar leads?
Try the platform geared for driving engagement!
Keep learning with MeetingOne, and check out our other webinar resources:
- Increase your Marketing ROI with webinars!
- Learn the secret for putting on better webinars!
- Manage multiple webinar speakers with ease!
