Web seminar promoters are missing a big opportunity:  post-event emails, IF they go out, are rarely strategic or campaign driven.

What’s the value of any given communication?  To advance someone a nudge more from Point A to Point B.  Anything else is just noise and a disservice.

 Here are some ideas for getting strategic…

• ONLY use ‘sorry we missed you’ or ‘thanks for attending’ as a starting point, one of personalization that starts the conversation in the right place.  To the negative, avoid looking stupid because you sent all registrants something saying ‘you recently attended our webinar…’
• Align the purpose of the communication to the purpose of the web seminar.  Turn lurkers into prospects?  Develop thought leadership in the midst of a long sales cycle?  Increase adoption of your product through education?  Get specific.
• Create a call to action, and the associated content, that is relevant to the aforementioned purpose.  Should you send a link to a recording or not?  Should you include a pdf of the slide content or not?  There is no one-size-fits-all answer.
• Think ‘campaign.’  How does this event, and then these communications, fit into the bigger picture.  Could you invite recipients to another webinar?  Could you say ‘thanks for attending, and BTW, there’s a customer conference in your area soon’?

A couple other tactical tidbits…

• Don’t send out the presentation slides.  Really good slides from great webinars make really bad handouts (see my other posts if you don’t know what I mean).  If you want to really take advantage of the content, create a one-page handout summarizing the key points that someone will actually hang onto and refer to later. 
• Before investing time and effort in recordings, think about the nature and life of the content?  Is it going to stick around and be useful for driving to the traffic to the archive, or is it going to evaporate in a few days and be dead weight?  Does getting a link to the recording in a post-event communication delay that communication?  Given it’s value, is that delay helping or hurting?

Don’t create more noise.  Use post-webcast emails strategically.