Webinars are a great tool to use if you’re about to launch a new service. Often, we are so caught up in perfecting our webinar slides that we forget to actually promote the webinar and end up doing a few late night posts in Facebook Groups to try and get people to sign up.
Using email marketing strategically during your webinar promotional period will ensure that you not only have attendees at the webinar, but also successfully nurture them towards the launch. Here are some ways that you can use email marketing for your webinar (bonus points if you pre-schedule them too!).
1. Promote the webinar to your existing mailing list
Those subscribers on your list are the ones most likely to sign up as they are much warmer leads than people in any Facebook Groups. Send a special one-off email to your subscribers regarding the webinar and then remind them in any subsequent regular emails.
2. Thank you for registering
Often overlooked, this simple email can start the subscriber on a beautiful journey with you! Rather than just saying thank you and here’s the link to the webinar, consider using this screen time to introduce yourself, link to a video of you talking about the topic of the webinar, a free resource or blog.
Providing value and going the extra mile will help participants feel comfortable with you prior to starting your webinar.
3. Launch a competition
Many savvy people who run webinars use an email to participants to promote a competition. A competition connected to a webinar can have a twofold effect. One is to encourage people to attend the webinar live (this is valuable as social proof, as people can interact with you and each other), the other is to use it as a promotional vehicle (usually via Facebook).
As Facebook doesn’t allow you to tell people directly to like a post, share, comment or tag, the way around this is to tell people to do it for you via email! By giving your participants a link and funneling them to a particular promotional post you’ve already posted on your Facebook page, Facebook will increase the organic reach of that post as it thinks that it’s a valuable post as people are interacting with it.
The incentive for your participants to like, share, comment or tag is to go into the draw to win something – either a free thing of what you’re launching or something else of high value.
4. Reminders
These emails are perfect to schedule beforehand. Don’t bombard the participants but set a reminder email for 24 hours and 1 hour before the start time. Remember to include links as well as reminders about any competitions that you may be running.
5. Post webinar follow up
After recording the webinar, you need to send the participants an email with the link to the recording and confirmation of the winner of the competition that you ran.
Most importantly, you need to remind everyone of your launch offer, and how long they have before the promotional period ends. A scheduled reminder just before the end of the promotional period would be useful as well.
One of the most important tools of a successful webinar launch is email marketing. Don’t be afraid to use it to your advantage. In particular, think about how you can schedule these emails as early as possible in the launch process so that you can spend more time preparing for your success!
If you’re looking for support throughout your launch, get in touch with us. We can help you by creating images, writing Facebook posts, writing and scheduling emails as well as preparing branded slides for your webinar.
