Have an exit survey

Ask your registrants questions while you still have their attention with an exit survey. Many webinar platforms have exit surveys as an in-built feature, but if yours doesn’t (or if you just don’t want to use it), you can create your own and include it in your follow-up emails.

In this survey, ask the viewers to rate the quality of your webinar, both in terms of production and content. Getting feedback on what users thought of your content, as well as asking them what topics they’d like you to cover next, will help you shape future content, making it more relevant to your target audience.

Send follow-up emails

Create follow-up emails similar in style to those you sent out to promote your webinar - one for those who attended and another for no-shows. It’s important to send these out as soon as possible, as leads go cold quickly after a live event.

Create an on-demand recording

Many platforms allow you to record the presentation and export a video file, which you can then use to generate more leads. It will take more time - but you can take the opportunity to edit, cutting out out any technical glitches or fumbles from your speakers during the event. Upload the video to your site and encourage users who didn’t sign up originally for the live webinar to register for an on-demand recording, adding extra leads towards your total. Include a link to this video in your follow-up emails to all those who originally registered for the webinar, allowing them to watch it if they didn’t attend the live event, watch it again, or share it with colleagues. You can also upload the presentation slides to SlideShare, and include links to the on-demand recording in a further bid to generate registrations.

Prepare a lead nurturing programme

Once the dust has settled, you can start to evaluate your leads. Create a lead follow-up process, so that high-value leads can be contacted first, and then hand them over to your sales team. In addition to the standard lead data, such as job level, company name etc., add the information that you gathered during the webinar, for example whether or not they attended, the answers they gave to any polls that were run or any questions they directed towards the speakers. After our webinars, we like to offer attendees an extra piece of educational content, such as whitepapers, that they can opt-in to receive for free. This helps evaluate which leads are warmer, as those who opt-in are more likely to be invested in the subject area of your content.

Webinars do not work for every business, but for many it is an effective method of generating high quality leads of individuals expressing interest and investing time in a topic core to your sector. By providing high-value content, hopefully in association with a market-leading client in your sector, you will build your own brand value as well as providing Sales with a good number of engaged prospects!