The industry has come a long way.  When I started we coded registration pages from scratch in HTML and pushed reminder emails manually.

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.”