Webinars have become ubiquitous in 2020. They have proved to be an effective strategy to keep the business running and engage users and industry partners as the world economy strives to survive a global pandemic. Establishing new business leads, pushing up sales, finding new business ideas and innovation, and staying relevant in an ever-evolving world are just some of the results of a successful webinar. While most companies and businesses have been running webinars for quite some time now, they fail to maximize their offerings. Webinars offer a low-cost solution to marketing needs and generating new business leads, it is still a time investment that one has to consider. The value creation requires effort, and if the return on this investment is not churning out numbers for a business, it is about time that a company revisits its strategy.
Several companies have turned to data-driven decision-making over time. These results have helped companies take a focused approach to problem-solving. Data-driven decisions call for clearly defined success metrics to evaluate business growth. To maximize utility and efficiency, webinars’ success can also be measured across specific metrics. While these metrics would differ for each company depending on a multitude of factors, some fundamental parameters are pertinent to every business’s success. Finding a sweet spot in a high performing high impact webinar matrix is every business’s ultimate goal. Below are some metrics that will pave that way for your company.
1. click-through rate
Ever since the advent of Google Analytics and tools like Hotjar, companies have become proficient in understanding their consumers’ behavior on each landing and subsequent pages using behavioral analytics and website heatmaps. These analytics are driving precise results for companies. One such metric is the use of click-through rate to measure webinar success. Click-through rate compares the number of people who registered for your webinar with the number of those who landed on the registration page. One can derive several insights from this page, including the registration- attendance ratio, the effectiveness of your registration landing page, and the quality of your message and its value proposition for your target audience.
If your business is struggling to achieve the desired click-through rate, it is high time to step back and see whether you are targeting the appropriate demographics, offer any value addition, and maximize user experience/interface principles on the web. An excellent CTR is of 34 to 50%, while an underperforming CTR is below 25%.
2. lead generation
It is crucial to use multiple channels and define various metrics to fully capture the success of a webinar. If click-through is high, but registration is low, it suggests a couple of things such as registration page, not ‘attractive’ enough, uninteresting topic, and overall demographic value. Attendee ratio of more than 50 percent is considered excellent.
A way to encourage a higher attendee ratio involves high impact changes. These include offering a google calendar invite on the registration page, a reminder email of webinar countdown, etc.
3. audience retention
While click-through rate and registration to attendee ratio have value and importance, the real deal breaker is audience retention. Losing your audience in between a webinar is a company’s worst nightmare and a massive elephant in the room that needs to be addressed in real-time. Audience retention metrics measure how well your webinar kept the audience interested in your business. It is a measure of whether your company delivered the quality expected of it, whether the technical issues at your end were addressed efficiently, and your overall brand’s level of thought leadership. It’s helpful to look at attendee counts at 15-minute intervals throughout the webinar.
There are several analytics that can be deployed to assess audience retention. One effective way is to measure number of attendees at different intervals to see where the drag occurred. Was it the introduction that put off the audience? Was there a decrease when you hit the 40-minute mark? Maybe your presentation isn’t as concise as it should be, and you should consider trimming it down.
4. customer engagement
Customer engagement is an important aspect of webinar planning. From attracting users to register for a session to avoid any dropouts during the session, it is important to make full use of the webinar tool that you are using. We often miscalculate the digital literacy of our intended audience. In order to make a user fully comfortable in a session, it is important to make the user feel comfortable with the webinar screen and features. To maximize engagement, inform attendees that they can use the chat feature to ask questions. A company can also incentivize attendees to voice their opinions or concerns during your broadcast. For Zoom, different tools such as yes, no, thumbs up, and +1 features can come in handy.
This has become ever more pertinent as humans lose physical interactions during COVID. Sitting in front of a screen can be boring and makes a person feel lethargic. Hence, small exercises, warm-up discussions, and ice-breaking sessions can bring that oomph to a webinar. Such activities can be coupled with different Q&a sessions to assess real-time engagement and interest of attendees. Discussions can then be improvised during a webinar to let the audience hear what they want to hear.
5. follow-ups
A webinar cycle doesn’t end as the session ends. In fact, it is a stepping stone to generate business leads, innovative ideas, and a wider customer base. The post-webinar journey is extremely important as it gives a company concrete metrics to measure its outreach success. This can take the form of online polls, surveys, feedback. These actionable insights will give companies with solid metrics to improve on.
Businesses can take a step further and encourage engagement by providing these webinar recordings on-demand. This would encourage long-term, sustainable user inflow, and lead generation. It is also an effective strategy to reach out to all those who registered but weren’t able to attend the session.
