Secrets for Runaway Webinar Success (Based on Data from 350,000 Webinars): Daniel Waas on Marketing Smarts [Podcast]

They had so many people that had registered that [attendance rate] didn't matter. The best time to host a webinar sometimes depends on your topic (04:25): "[A] question we get all the time is, 'What's a good time to host [a webinar]?' But the surprising answer is, sometimes if you do something specific, another time might work well for you. One-fourth off the people who registered for your webinar were never planning to attend live (05:19): "About 26% of people say they sign up only because they want to watch the recording. Seriously, trying to improve your attendance rate isn't going to work (even with mobile reminders) (06:19): "The road that leads you [to webinar success] is doing promotions really well, because attendance rate, you don't have that many ways to impact that, even if you do send reminders. You'd think that text reminders would have a big impact. "So focus on the people that make it there, and it doesn't matter if they make it there live or watch the recording. Daniel and I talked about much more, including what the data revealed about the timing of your promotions, the attendance rate you should be hitting, and what days work best for maximizing webinar attendance, so be sure to listen to the entire show, which you can do above, or download the mp3 and listen at your convenience. This episode brought to you by GoToWebinar: GoToWebinar makes it easy to produce engaging online events. This marketing podcast was created and published by MarketingProfs.

Just as people will hasten to say “email is dead,” they often malign webinars as an outdated tactic—particularly those who enjoy making sweeping statements like “this will be the year of livestreaming” or “this is the year of the podcast.”

The fact is, this is the year to do whatever your audience responds to, and many audiences still respond well to webinars.

Fully 73% of marketing and sales leaders surveyed by InsideSales.com indicated that hosting webinars is one of the best ways to generate quality leads. Of course, some webinars are more effective than others. Luckily, getting the maximum return on your webinar investment can be as simple as following a few simple tips drawn from an analysis of other successful webinars (in this case, 350,000 successful webinars, to be precise).

GoToWebinar recently released the Big Book of Webinar Stats, loaded with insights into webinar trends and best-practices. For the TL;DR set among us, I’ve invited Daniel Waas, director of marketing for GoToWebinar at LogMeIn, to discuss the data from that study and ways you can use the findings to create the optimal webinar for your business.

It turns out, there really is a best day and time to conduct your webinar, and specific guidelines for the timing of your promotional efforts. Daniel gives up the goods on this week’s episode of Marketing Smarts!

Here are just a few highlights from our conversation:

Don’t focus on improving your attendance rate, focus instead on promoting your webinar to attract more registrants (03:22): “A lot of people get hung up on attendance rate, but what the data showed was that, in a lot of cases, attendance rate wasn’t really that important. What mattered more was how successful people were at promoting. So if you were really successful at promoting, when we looked at the top 100 webinars, 42 of the top 100 had a really poor attendance rate, yet they were among the most-attended webinars overall because they did a stellar job at promoting…. They had so many people that had registered that [attendance rate] didn’t matter.

The best time to host a webinar sometimes depends on your topic (04:25): “[A] question we get all the time is, ‘What’s a good time to host [a webinar]?’ And the answer is 10 AM Pacific/11:00 AM Pacific; those are good times to host. But the surprising answer is, sometimes if…

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