7 Surefire Ways To Increase Your Webinar Attendance Rates

I run a Facebook group called Webinar Wranglers 🤠.

It’s a place to get help, share ideas, talk webinars, & have some fun. (You should totally join it if you’re running webinars.)

It’s a closed group and new members have to answer a question to get in. The question is “What is your biggest webinar challenge?”

One of the most frequent answers I get is “Increasing webinar attendance rate.”

Let’s have a look at some surefire ways to boost attendance. Read on to…

  • get a ton of proven tips to increase attendance for your webinars
  • ensure you stay clear of the one piece of terrible advice I’ve seen some “experts” share
  • learn what’s even more important than attendance rate and how you can use it to sell out your webinars
TIP #1

Pick the optimal day & time

The main reason many people aren’t showing up live for your webinar is really simple: They don’t have time.

Most people don't attend a webinar because they don't have time. Duh!

Duh, right?

When I was still at GoToWebinar my team and I analyzed over half a million of our customers’ webinars¹² and we found what in most cases end up being the best day and time to host a webinar.

If your main goal is attendance, shoot for 10am or 11am local time on Tuesday, Wednesday, & Thursday.

In the US, the best time of day is 10am or 11am PST / 1pm or 2pm EST.

Have a look at the charts below for the detailed analysis.

Note that these numbers are averages. They’re the optimal starting point, but you should experiment with different weekdays and start times to find which combination drives the highest attendance for your specific audience.

You can use this webinar reporting and analytics template to track results.

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TIP #2

Host the webinar more than once

If you dig into why people “didn’t have time to attend your webinar” you’ll find that scheduling conflicts are the key driver.

They already had something else scheduled in the slot you picked for your webinar.

That’s why simply offering an alternative time slot can dramatically increase attendance.

You might even double it if you’re lucky. That’s what happened to Larry Kim.

He hosted a webinar that far outperformed the average, so he decided to run it again.

The result: Larry got the same number of (different) people to attend the second time around.

Unicorn Marketing for Webinars

The takeaway: Offer at least two different time slots and vary both the weekday and the start time. (To save your team from exhaustion, reserve this trick for webinar topics that are proven to perform).

TIP #3

Remind Three Times For Optimal Attendance

The further out you start promoting your webinar, the lower your attendance rate will be (btw., the average attendance rate for marketing webinars is ~37%. Here is some more data on what a good attendance rate looks like).

The urgency just isn’t there anymore. Maybe the topic was timely when you sent the original invite but now something has changed and the webinar isn’t quite as relevant anymore.

Or your registrant simple can’t remember. 

So make sure you remind them. Most webinar platforms come with automated email reminders and the team at Wild Apricot has tested the optimal reminder sequence.

Here’s what they found:

Impact of Email Reminders on Webinar Registrations

The general best practice based on that insight is to remind three times:

  • 1 week before
  • 1 day before
  • 1 hour before
TIP #4

Get more webinar attendees with text message reminders

For even more effective reminders, consider using text alerts.

Research from text message provider Call Loop shows you can expect and increase of about 7%.

It’s also a great reason to ask for a mobile number when people sign up.

Call Loop integrates with GoToWebinar. Other webinar platforms like WebinarJam even have text messaging built right in.

TIP #5

Offer An Incentive For Webinar Attendees

Yup, you could just bribe them 😉

This works similarly to a content upgrade you’d use to generate email subscribers on a blog. 

You select a meaty guide, template, or workbook, that is related and relevant to the topic of the webinar. Then you promise that asset as a freebie to anyone who will attend live. 

Make sure you mention the offer in both your email invite and on the landing page.

We’ve had great success with this technique on webinars with a prominent speaker. We’ll give their best eBook away to attendees or will raffle out copies of their latest book.

TIP #6

Get Registrants to "add to Calendar"

Good Webinar Confirmation EmailOne thing I almost forgot to mention: Make it easy for your audience to add the webinar to their calendar.

Many webinar tools have that functionality included but it is a bit harder to pull off if you use marketing or email automation tools.

If in doubt, let your webinar tool send the confirmation email.

TIP #7

Why Webinar Attendance Rate Is Overrated

Don’t forget that there are two ways to increase attendance:

  1. Yes, you can try to increase attendance rate
  2. But you could also focus on driving more registrations

From my experience, it’s better to generate more registrations with webinar promotion than to obsess about attendance rate.

You have limited control over increasing attendance rate. You’ll always run into calendar conflicts and survey data shows about 26% of registrants only sign up because they want access to the recording. They prefer watching on-demand and you’ll never get them to show.

That means there is a hard limit to how far you can increase your attendance rate. On the flip side, however, there is no limit to how far you can scale promotion.

Looking at the top 100 webinars analyzed in this 2017 study confirmed this.

Of those, only 42% achieved an attendance rate above average.

The remaining 58% under-performed in terms of attendance rate but did a great job at driving registrations.

The one thing you should NEVER do

There’s one piece of bad advice I’ve seen around the web that I want to discourage. 

Some people recommend you should only make the webinar recording available to those that attended.

I think that’s a HUGE MISTAKE!

Again, 26% of registrants say they’re only in it for the on-demand version. That’s just their preference.

These are sign-ups you’ll miss out on if you announce that only attendees get the recording.

There’s an even more compelling reason, though. Great webinars are all about education and value. Ensuring every potential viewer has access is simply the right thing to do if you want to truly build a relationship with your viewers.

What are your thoughts?

And are there any tips that have helped you get a better attendance rate?

Let me know in the comments below!

About the Author
Daniel Waas
Daniel Waas

Over the past few years, I've put on over 500 webinars and had a chance to analyze more than half a million sessions run on the big webinar platforms.

Now I run my own online event consultancy and am on a mad mission to end all dull webinars by sharing the best of what we've learned so you can skip the learning curve and turn your webinars into an instant hit.

Outside work, I’m a geek at heart who loves LEGO, sci-fi and the occasional video game. If talking B2B for hours is your thing please get in touch with me on LinkedIn or Twitter.

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