How to Drive Free Paying Registrant For Your Webinar Events

How to get $1-$10 webinar registrants for free or Why it makes sense to provide an offer before your webinar event…

You’re planning a new webinar. You’ve chosen a hot topic that you’re sure will bring in registrants, set up your event for a time when most registrants can attend, invited your guest speakers and outlined a powerful script.

When that’s all done, there are still questions to be answered. At the top is whether or not you’ll get a strong ROI for your efforts. Even if you manage to get registrants for less than $1 each, will that be a low enough cost to ensure a profit margin?

Here’s another question: what do Star Trek, the old west, and cutting-edge technology companies have in common?

You already know the answer. They’re willing to go into uncharted territory and try something new.  Using this blend of courage and creativity can pay off big, and you can use this same tactic to boost the ROI you get from your webinar events.

It starts with timing.

Many webinars are developed with the idea that sharing content will help get company products and services in front of people who might actually buy them. Basically, webinars are lead magnets. Toward the end of the show, webinar hosts often introduce special offers geared toward making sales, and 20-40 percent of the registrants become qualified leads.

Here’s how you can shake things up: why not make a special offer BEFORE your webinar begins?

Think of it this way. Your webinar sits at the top of your sales funnel, attracting leads that can trickle down to actual purchases. At the top, it’s just as easy for prospects to bounce off the rim as it is for them to slip inside the funnel.

But what if there was something extra-special at the top that made sales funnel especially inviting? Like honey on the rim of a cup, the webinar would seem sweeter to registrants and have a particular new sticky-ness to it. Once you hook your registrants that way, they’re more likely to want to see more.

Adding value to your webinar events is like spreading honey on the rim of your sales funnel.

Your first step is to create an offer that strategically adds value to your webinar event before it starts. The more value you can add, the sweeter the deal will seem for your registrants.

For example, if you’re offering something that’s truly valuable to your audience, like a workbook or a preliminary video that gives them a head start on your webinar, they won’t blink if you charge them a little bit of money for it.

In marketing, sales funnels often have tripwires with fees as small as six or seven dollars and bumps, which are small upsells that can cost around $45. Why not use these same strategies as you build your webinar funnel?

The benefits outweigh the efforts you put in.

Spending a few hours putting together a workbook or shooting an informative video that’s aligned with your webinar topic is a small price to pay for both social and financial ROI.

For example, many people who register for webinar events forget why they registered before the webinar date. Only 36 percent of registrants attend the webinar events they sign up for. That significantly decreases your chances to convert them into qualified leads.

If you could capture their attention with a special offer before the webinar, they’ll be more likely to remember it, because they’ll already be engaged. By the time your webinar arrives, they’ll be fully invested in the content—and perhaps in your company, as well.

Encouraging your registrants to make a smaller purchase with you before the webinar automatically puts your audience in a purchasing pattern with you. This increases the likelihood that you’ll be able to sell bigger-ticket items to them later or that they’ll latch on to your goal offer at the end of your webinar.

One more benefit: the small amounts of money you charge for your up-front offers can offset the advertising costs for your webinar. It bumps up your ROI immediately.

So what do you have to offer?

Your up-front offer will depend partly on the content of your webinar and partly on what you can reasonably pull together to support your webinar topic. Here are a few tripwire and bump ideas that you can generate without too much trouble:

• A quick video Q&A with one of your guest speakers can be a powerful tripwire or bump, especially if you list some of the unanswered questions that will be covered more fully in the webinar.
• Spend ten minutes creating an outline for a few workbook pages to go along with your webinar.  Take another ten minutes to format the questions and ten more to make your workbook pages look great. Half an hour in, you’ve got another effective tripwire that will get your registrants thinking about your webinar topic in advance.
• What does your guest speaker have to offer? Compile a short PDF or e-book format of the guest speaker’s most popular blog posts and offer it as a tripwire. This allows you to tap into your guest speaker’s platform to gather more registrants, as well.

Take a few minutes to brainstorm other ideas based on your webinar topic. Remember, the idea is to add value to your webinar event. Even if your offer seems small, pack it with the information that your registrants are looking for, and they’ll feel understood, appreciated and amenable to things you might show them in the future.

There’s only one question left.

How are you going to promote your offer before your webinar event?

There are a few ways you can do this. Pop-ups following registration or even a special invitation on your thank you page can do the trick.

This is where you put your offer out there—an option to schedule a call before the interview, an opt-in for a scarcity offer that they can redeem at the end of the webinar, or one of the tripwires and bumps you created.

Whatever you choose, you’re building both trust and ROI.