You have strategically planned your topic and content, you had an awesome presentation, and now it’s time for follow up — to see your real return on investment. As we have learned, you can’t just show up, present, and think you had a successful webinar.
You should use the tools available to create the best follow-up, and overall experience for a webinar attendee. After hosting a webinar with Insightful Accountant, we provide the registration and attendee list, Q&A report, and polling report. These are key to your webinar follow-up.
The attendee list shows all the registration information and sorts by who attended. You have access to their names, emails, organization, phone numbers, and any other custom questions you may want to ask. We always ask “how many employees are in your firm?” and “how many clients does your firm serve?” but if you were trying to get information like attendee’s job titles or something else, we could always add that question in as well.
In your follow up you can use customization and send a targeted email to those who did attend with a “thank you for attending” message, and “sorry we missed you” to those who were unable to attend. Go ahead and attach the presentation as a PDF and the webinar recording. That way those that joined can go back and re-watch, and those that were unable to attend at the specified time have the opportunity to watch whenever they want.
Reward your potential customers! If you want to offer a special promotion to those who registered, or attended, the follow-up email would be a great place to highlight it. Make them not only aware of your company, but interested, and ultimately invested. Offer a free eBook, a guide for “how to,” a special coupon, or a limited time offer — they may be more apt to buy.
Check through the Q&A report and be sure to reach out to everyone that asked a question during the presentation. Address the questions that were unable to be answered during the webinar first. Answer to the best of your ability, point them to the direction of someone that can help, or let them know that you don’t have the knowledge or resources to give them an answer. No matter what — acknowledge the question.
Even those that had their question answered could receive a simple message like “Great question during yesterday’s session, please let me know if I can be of any further assistance.” This could really turn a regular webinar into an experience where the attendee feels special and possibly more comfortable speaking with you, and/or learning more about the product or service. Even if this “touch” doesn’t result in a “sale,” it is a pleasant interaction, and the attendee will have a good feeling about you and your company.
Polling results can be awesome for lead generation, or just as some company insight. In a one-hour webinar, it is wise to sprinkle a few polling questions throughout to keep the audience engaged and for your own information. In part II, we told you to ask questions of your audience to learn more about who they are, the work they do, and the customers they serve. Decide what you want to find out from your audience and ask! You can gain valuable insight like pain points, popular software (possibly for integrations), how often they use a certain process, what could be automated, etc. Use the results to understand your audience and plan for your business (or even just your next webinar).
Congratulations! After methodically planning, presenting, and following-up with attendees, your webinar is complete! Thank you for following our successful webinar guide.
