Do you find your webinar attendance rate lacking?
Not sure why you end up talking to a half-empty room?
You’re not alone.
Luckily, I have some solid benchmark data to share – differentiated by use case and based on the analysis of over half a million webinars run on GoToWebinar.
Here are the average attendance rate for last year:
For lead gen & brand awareness type webinars attendance rate increased from 37% in 2017 to 44% in 2018.
For customer onboarding & employee training we saw an average show rate of 53%.
For town hall, all-hands. & department meetings we saw an attendance rate of 65%.
Why Attendance Rate Is A Huge Distraction
I’ve not met a single webinar organizer who isn’t concerned about their attendance rate.
I think that obsession with attendance is one enormous distraction. Here’s why:
Of the top 100 most-attended webinars hosted analyzed in a 2017 report, only 42% had an above average attendance rate.
So what did the other 58% get right? They focused on promoting their event and drove large numbers of registrants.
The webinars I host frequently have show rates below 35%. Am I upset? No!
If I manage to get 4,000 registrations (like we did for a recent slide design webinar), a show rate of 35% still nets me 1,400 attendees. And that puts me in the top 100 webinars of the year.
Oh, and did I mention that 26% of your registrants have no plans of ever showing up? Yup. We ran a survey to attendees and found that 26% say the reason they don’t show is that “I wanted to watch the webinar on-demand on my own time.”
So stop fretting about your attendance rate and instead put your energy into promoting your webinars (hint: this link has some great tips ;-).
And if you’re still 100% set on raising your attendance rate, make sure you pick the best time & day to host your webinar and try text message reminders for a potential 7% better result.
What's The Show Rate of Your Webinars?
How does your webinar attendance rate stack up by comparison? And if yours compares favorably, have you found any tips on how to keep your show rate high?
Would love to see your results! Please share them in the comments below.
