Although webinars are a relatively new technological development in the big picture, centuries-old wisdom can still shape the way you approach producing and promoting them.

I think that most webinar promoters would agree that getting people to register to attend is one of the most challenging aspects of the whole process. If you had to sell a prospective attendee on your webinar with your registration form alone, how would your registration copy perform? What if that was your only shot to convince a prospect to sign up for your event?

Would it work?

Thankfully, this is not usually the case. You’ll probably have multiple opportunities to win your audience over. But let’s pretend for a few moments that you could only touch the prospect once. If you had to take him from introduction to registration on a single landing page, how would you do it?

An Ancient 3-Hit Combo

Aristotle’s Rhetoric is the original tome on persuasive communication. Over 2 millennia later, it’s still considered to be one of the best works on the subject. The philosopher describes the three major components of persuasion: ethos, pathos and logos. Let’s apply these principles to kick your registration copy up a notch.

Ethos is your ability to convey personal credibility. That’s first and foremost on the agenda. No one pays attention to people who are “just talking.” You must prove that you know what you’re talking about and that you’ll be able to help the reader obtain what he’s looking for.

On your registration form, don’t assume that everyone knows you and your history. Or that they read the invitation email before they clicked through. Give evidence of your expertise. Your prospects will want to know about your many years of experience, your hundreds of satisfied customers, and all the awards you’ve won.

Make the strongest possible statements about why you are an authority the reader can trust. Without credibility, nothing else you say will matter.

Pathos is passion. Have you ever noticed that passionate speaking moves those that hear it, even if they don’t agree with what’s being said. As human beings, we can’t help it. Emotion begets emotion.

Listen to Mark Cuban talk about his Dallas Mavericks. It’s hard not to be a fan, even if you don’t like basketball. His pathos is contagious.

A registration form needs to be more than a place to collect information. Pretend you won’t get any other chances to share your enthusiasm. Don’t make the mistake of being too reserved. It’s not unprofessional to speak with feeling.

Registration copy should not only express passion for the topic being addressed, but it should also seek to evoke an emotional response in the reader.

Logos is the root word for “logic.” It is the use of persuasive arguments to appeal to the audience’s rationality. Pathos strikes at the heart, while logos shoots for the head.

We know that purchasing decisions are mostly emotional. People buy what they want. But the marketer or salesman that can give them rational reasons to justify their emotional choices will be incredibly effective.

Logos tells the reader why signing up for your webinar is a smart idea. Lay out every benefit and make every big promise that you can honestly make.

Don’t forget: benefit bullets are attractive to the eye. They are a great way to call out your logical “reasons-why.”

Putting It All Together

Ethos, pathos and logos build on each other, working together to form a compelling psychological magnet for your target audience.

Ethos is most important at the beginning of the registration copy.

Logos uses that foundation of credibility to win the battle for the mind with persuasive, rational argument. You’ll use it to form the majority of the body copy, right down to the call to action at the end.

And because you’re passionate about the theme of your webinar, pathos should naturally infuse the registration form. Don’t hold it back!

Aristotle didn’t have access to the internet, telecommunications, or even electricity. But he still has some keen insights into getting increasing webinar registrations.

Donnie Bryant is a results-driven copywriter who hails from Chi-town who’s crazy enough to think that getting someone to take action to attend your webinar requires the same discipline. Learn more about DB here.

That’s an experienced marketer chortling at the term “content marketing” every time s/he meets someone who think they’ve bumped into something new.

The truth is many marketers have long held to the idea that marketing should have some real value, real substance.

“Content marketing” is the popular colloquialism of late, and while over the years many other terms have meant the same thing, as Juliet opined of Romeo, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” And it is popular with good reason:

Today’s consumer is in charge, and their favorite means of informing themselves is search.

Juliet, meet the webinar program.

Webinars offer distinct benefits which I’ll not recount here, but webinar programs actually achieve a “force multiplier,” a physics term that suggests that a combination of tactics produce better results than those tactics individually.

To be sure, I’ve met some folks who simply knock it out of the park with individual webinars (which isn’t “wrong”), but when webinar programs meet content content marketing, some additional benefits occur.

Eight ways webinar programs can create more value

1. Approach: single webinars are often “one-offs,” while programs better enable overall content marketing strategies
2. Style/form: single webinars usually are one-size-fits-all, while programs better enable multiple webinar types targeted to the needs of the sales cycle
3. Promotion: single webinars tend to be interruption-oriented “direct to registration” events, while programs also enable webinar-to-webinar promotion and SEO-friendly aggregation
4. Content: single webinars often try to cover much content, while programs make it easier to cut through the noise, targeting different audiences with topical precision
5. Risk: evaluation for single webinars is often “all eggs in one basket,” while programs mitigate occasional underperforms with a portfolio approach
6. Leverage: promotion always takes time and effort, but in a portfolio, many efforts can be complimentary, enabling force multiplier effect over time
7. Metrics: single webinar reports happen in isolation, whereas evaluation of trends, relative topic value, and changes in registration and attendance response rates come to light when comparing more than one
8. Leads and data: too many individual webinars focus on “just a name/contact info” lead generation, missing an opportunity to gather deeper data and progressively profile audiences over time

If you’re curious, the “how to” for transforming webinar programs into content marketing powerhouses is something I’ll cover in this webinar. *See* you there!

Finding an audience to speak to is challenging. It’s also vital and often overlooked. You want to reach as many people as possible so you cast your nets wide.

But that can actually reduce your success. The secret?

Write a one-person invitation.

Let me show you what I mean. In 1080Group’s market, we target organizations with high stakes in designing, delivering, or managing powerfully engaging and compelling webinars (or webcasts, or online presentations, or “synchronous computer mediated communications”). That potential audience (and breadth of our clients) includes people in sales, marketing, training, HR, inspirational speakers, political leaders, and the list goes on.

What kind of message would you deliver that includes all those people? How to deliver a “great webinar?”

Maybe.

Not.

I think a few might attend, but why would they attend my webinar instead of all the others sporting the same generic name? You could try tweaking the headline to see if you might be able to entice a bigger audience, but that’s still not the “power of one.”

Here’s an example with Sherri. Just Sherri.  Let’s start by getting clear about knowing her.

Sherri is an instructional designer for a large software company with a large customer base to train. Her problem:  how much her trainees retain and apply directly affects whether customers use her company’s product. If they don’t use her software, the IT department labels it “shelfware.”

There goes the renewal.  And the bottom line.

Sherri and her team are not in a position to crack the whip and insist that her audience submit to taking a test and proving that they know the content. She can’t force them to do anything, so the content needs to inspire informed action, the visuals need to make them want to watch and engage with the instructor. She needs to trainees directly associate successful use of her software with their own success and, as a way of getting there, learning what she’s there to teach them.

Here are the two powerful truths in the power of one:

One, specificity sells.

In today’s short-attention span world, most potential audiences don’t have time to go hunting for meaning. Your headline needs to cut through the noise and, as best you can, say “I’m talking to YOU, I understand where you’re at, and I’ve got a practical solution for you.”

So what if we address Sherri’s needs in a webinar called “7 ways to help your audience remember your webinar content.”

Do you think anyone else will come?

Two, there’s a difference between target market and actual market.

Just because you speak to a single person doesn’t mean that’s the only kind of person who shows up. Roger tells a story of a firm he worked for in yesteryear who defined their target market as “a 51 year old white male with six-digits of investments in the market who trades in their own portfolio at least six times a month.”  Obviously not all their clients were 51 or men.

In the case of Sherri, I think we would see people from sales, marketing, training, HR, and the list goes on. When you’re looking for an audience to speak to in your webinar, try talking to one person. You’ll find that one person is bigger than all the people who could benefit from your webinar message.

What do you think? How do you go about targeting your audience?

To be fair, sometimes crap happens.  And to be doubly fair, I acknowledge that two minutes late doesn’t seem like much when you’re in person.

And a confession:  when you’re online and your early arrivers are looking at their computer clock and start typing “hey, is this thing starting!?” and “hey, how unprofessional to start late!” into the questions panel at one minute past my gut reaction isn’t full of love and joy.

But, here’s another way to start late and get by with it.

—-> Put it on your opening slide.

Less perfect is a phrase like “We will be at approximately 11 am.”  But you’re off the hook.

I prefer being specific with “We will begin at exactly 11:03 am.”  But then you better do it.

Like I said in a previous post about one way to do this, since a good chunk of your audience is logging in a few minutes late anyway, this gives you a chance to get more of them into the ‘room’ and more of them will hear the opening welcome/instructions.

And while we’re at it, here’s one thing I’ve tried that didn’t work.

While the Sr. Dir. of Marketing at Corvent (as a co-founder I had liberty to try new things), I tried actually advertising our internal webinars with start times like “11:03 am.”

Problem?

Nobody noticed, remembered what they saw or read their confirmation emails or all of the above.  #Fail.

Start late without pissing anybody off by stating it clearly on the slide attendees see when they join your event.

He asked:

“I have been asked by my Marketing colleagues to send a seminar invite every week for 6 weeks. That would mean 6 weeks leading up to the event the customers would get an email reminding them of the event and hoping to gain more registrants. I manage and am gatekeeper of our database. I am the final point of call on all of our email marketing and I tend to have the best visibility of the number of emails sent to our customers. The majority of our audience receive an email every week, without any seminar or event invites. It is my opinion that 6, one a week for 6 weeks, is too many. I would be interested in your thoughts and opinion?”

David, the big difference between your question about invitations and the previous post about reminders is the nature of the opt-in.  Clearly for webinar reminders, folks have opted-in to hearing about that event, and most of the time the expectation is that the opt-in has a lifespan of that one event.  Given the information you’ve shared, I’d likely lean toward your perspective of caution.

Here are some questions I’d consider:

What was the pretense under which people ended up on your email list?
If it’s to hear about offers and events, that’d be very different than if they’re expecting a newsletter with how-to tips.

What is the nature of the email they’re used to getting from you?
For instance, is there a way to add an event invitation into a newsletter (even prominently) rather than making the invite an explicit pitch for your webinar?  Are the list members opted in with their primary email addresses and used to seeing your emails routinely?  Are they using their “santaclaus@genericemailprovider.com” address that they only check every few weeks (in which case a long list of invites in their inbox will look excessive)?

Is your webinar invite part of or in addition to the weekly email they already get?
The answer to this question is an important one as it is the difference between adding a promotional message to what they’re already getting versus doubling the quantity of emails they receive each week.  Quantity is a big part of tolerance and fatigue.

Is the proposed webinar invitation different every week, or it the same email promoting the same thing over and over?
…which leads to the next question…

Does your organization maintain multiple lists for multiple purposes?
While I’m not a huge fan of automatically opting people into new lists, I do think it can be done with integrity.  For example, some organizations have one list for the newsletter, another for special product offers, another for event announcements, etc.  You could create a new list just for webinar invites and duplicate your email list there.  I’d make it clear that this its own unique list, but the benefit to you is that if they unsubscribe from the webinar invites list, you’ve not lost them on the newsletter list (though I would, however, use  forms that gives them the option of choosing which lists they opt into and out of, including ‘all’).

Have you considered testing?
It might be worth testing the marketers’ request, tracking results against a control group.  Comparing an increase in webinar registrations (the positive) against unsubscribes (the negative) might give some great insight against which to evaluate what action to take with the rest of your database.

Overall, I tend to think the golden rule rules…are you truly providing them value or just pitching more of yourself?  All our prospects and customers realize we all need to reach out, but I tend to think they can tell if our intentions are good.  I’m on several lists that literally send email several times weekly, but there’s value to be gained in between the promotional notes.  We each have tolerance for this stuff like dealing with commercials on television.

All my best, and thanks for sharing.  If you have a chance, please share an update with our readers!

Hmmm… as you’ve heard me say before, “It depends.”

And I think the question is “What is your market’s tolerance for email?”

The good thing about a webinar reminder email is that nearly everyone realizes that it’s event-based.  In other words, it’s not going to come in ad infinitum.

Here are three things to do:

Ask
It’s pretty simple to add a query to a registration page or end-of-event survey.  Questions that have low intrusiveness (e.g., how many reminders do you like, when do you want them, what’s you’re preferred day/time for webinars) have a good chance of getting honest, useful feedback.

Test and observe
Does your webinar solution have an opt-out feature?  Ironically, many don’t (and DUH, they registered for the event, but nothing surprises me these days).  But many do, and you might test and observe.  If you increase the frequency of reminders does your ‘unsub rate’ go up too much?  Obviously you’ll have to make a judgement of what ‘too much’ is, and that should be relative to improvements (if any) in attendance rates.

Determine the value of a live attendee
If you can’t test/observe, I’d probably make a guess at how valuable it is for your organization to have registrants actually show up.

The reality is that for some organizations they don’t care.  They’ll give lip service to wanting people to attend, but the way they act is that if they get a name and contact info for follow up, they’ve done their job.

If it’s important to have registrants become attendees, I’d err on the side of more (versus fewer) reminders.  Here’s why:

1.  They’ve already opted in
2.  As mentioned, it’s a finite project.
3.  If you do too much, people will let you know.
4.  We get more email than ever.  Even the most interested folks in your webinar find that their good intentions slip down to the bottom of their email pile.  Frequency improves your chance of cutting through the noise.

Rule #1:  know your audience.  Rule #2:  Don’t assume an email cut will through the noise.  They’ve opted in.  Have integrity, but don’t be shy.

To get a pre-release copy of the report, participate in the survey.  It should take you about 5 minutes.

“What do you find most beneficial, formal surveys or Q&As with the future audience?”

Fair question, Roger, but I’m not sure I’d call one better or best, I’d call them different.

Formal surveys are good for a few things.  One, it’s easier to quantify data, cross-tabulate one response set against another for deeper insight, etc.  For instance, you might ask yourself “of those respondents who expressed X on question 3, how did they answer question 6?”  As with anything, formal surveys come with some tradeoffs.  They might take longer to develop.  You will likely only have a fraction of those invited respond, meaning you’ll need to be inviting enough to generate a sample size that’s statistically relevant.  And you’ll have to balance between length (“I’d love to have answers to ALL these questions”) and what you’re going to need to do to get responses (would YOU want to fill out a survey that would take you 30 minutes?).

That said, there’s one other key challenge:  being able to ‘read between the lines’ and respond on the fly.

That’s where a few conversations with your future audience can be gold.  Someone might tell you something over the phone that they’d not put in a survey.  Or you might be able to infer meaning from their tone of voice.  In addition to being able to ‘read between the lines,’ your dialogue very often will lead you to learn things you didn’t even think to ask in a more formal survey.  Often this leads to you asking additional questions to explore something else.

Conversations are also good when you want to explore something less tangible.  For instance, imagine that you know that your product/service has a positive impact on clients’ process but you know clients often have different policies and procedures and processes.  Creating a formal survey that roots out the insight that you can use is difficult at best.  The tradeoff with conversations, however, is that they take time, let alone if you want to have a number of them.

Without knowing more specifically what Roger does and how he does it, I’d probably suggest a combination of tactics.  Some initial conversations would likely deliver insights that would help create a more effective formal survey, but I wouldn’t stop there.  In-event polls or end-of-event surveys are awesome tools for dialing in the relevance of your content, too.  Consider asking a question or two that would specifically assist you with dialing in your invitation messaging to those things that your audience is most likely to take action on.

Remember that what you think is important is (mostly) irrelevant.  Your audience will take action when they perceive your webinar is relevant to them.

Fast forward more than a decade – the pain of much of the project management of producing a web seminar has been eliminated by conferencing service providers integrating those tasks into their wares.

But at least one thing as suffered:  the presentation of benefits.

A rule of thumb for the question of “how many registrants will show up to my webinar” has long been “a third” or “a third to half.”  There are a lot of factors that go into that, and that’s another blog post another day.

The problem with automation, however, is that most often promoters don’t take one extra, valuable step:  including in the reminder email some copy that reminds registrants of why they signed up in the first place.

My exhortation:  take one extra step.  Take the content you put on your registration page, or at least the bullet points below the “Attend this webinar to learn:” and copy it into the reminder email(s) that will hit your registrants’ inboxes.

Here are a couple reasons:

1.  Just because they registered three weeks ago doesn’t mean they are fully in touch with the motivation that got them to register when they get the “don’t forget this webinar at 10am tomorrow” email.

2.  Hopefully your event title is descriptive and compelling, but if that’s all you wanted and needed, you wouldn’t have written additional copy for your registration page.

3.  If anybody pushes the “forward” button (often a desire of marketers!), the person receiving the email will have more to motivate them.

Go beyond “what” in your reminder emails.  Remind them “why.”

Huh?

Now to be fair to the creator, I do need to disclose that this email was a confirmation email – that one that comes to you after you’ve registered for an event.

But here’s the problem:

Two weeks from now when I get a reminder for the event (often a day before the webinar), what will that communicate to me?

The SAD truth is that most web conferencing and webcast providers don’t include your promotional content or event description in the automated follow up emails.

So here’s my question to you:

You KNOW that only a portion of those that register attend (very loosely a third to half).  So if your message is important for them to hear, why wouldn’t you want to improve your odds in this statistic.

To do that, I think a confirmation or reminder email should reiterate to your audience the benefits of why they should show up… stuff that’s typically in the invite or registration copy…

…but isn’t in a headline like “Survey Results.”

This gets us back to the power of the title.  IF you’re like most folks, you’re using the automated confirmation and reminder emails that come from your webinar solution provider.

Which means you’re missing out.

Make sure your webinar title is descriptive, laden with benefit(s).  This post isn’t a “how to write headlines” so much as a plea:

Tell me, in your webinar title, why I should give you an hour of my precious time.