Chris Bisson – The Webinar Success Formula

“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your slides are or how persuasive your close is, when it comes to creating a kick-butt webinar that generates sales, it comes down to a few core things”

If you’re currently utilizing webinars to generate sales and sign ups for your home business, then today’s advice from Chris Brisson, of CallLoop.com, will certainly help move your results in an upward direction. Chris was recently featured on Rich Schfren’s “Strategic Profits” blog where he layed out a simple 7 part process for sucking the highest profits possible from each and every webinar you host.

Get the overview in Chris’s infographic below and then scroll down to review his 7 part process in detail…

The Sign Up Stage

The sign up stage is the first part in your Perfect Webinar Funnel and the main goal is to get as many people as possible to sign up or register for your webinar. There are three key things to do in this stage:

1# Single Focused & Compelling Hook

If you’re familiar with the AIDA formula (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) than you know how important creating a compelling hook is for getting lots of registrations. Let’s face it, for someone to show up a webinar it has to be worth it for them to take out the time and attend.

If you’re webinar is titled, “How to Win at Business”, you’ve got some work to do.

Personally, I’d rather watch paint dry.

If you have a tough time coming up with a compelling title and headline for your webinar, head over to cracked.com and scroll through their witty headlines. You can also check out 7 Ways to Create a Seductive Webinar Title. Create a list of great headlines and then get to work. Spend some time re-writing and crafting your title for your event based on these proven winners.

It’s not uncommon for a simple switch of your webinar title to double your registrations. If there is one thing you want to test, it is your webinar title.

2# Ask For Minimum Info

Now that you’ve gotten their attention with a compelling headline, the last thing you want to do is send them to a page that’s asking for 15 pieces of information. I see this all of the time with larger “corporate” companies and it’s killing their conversions.

There’s no need to ask for gender, company name, address, city, state, or other useless fields unless you plan on doing something with that information now and give them a reason WHY.

The more information you ask for on your registration page forms, the less signups you’ll get. Don’t turn them off with data entry overwhelm.

At a minimum, ask for their email address. The next best is to ask for their mobile phone number to later send them a reminder text. This shows you care and want to give them every opportunity to show up at the right time.

To take it a step further and make it even easier for them to signup, if they are coming from your existing list, try pre-filling your registration form with their name, email, and phone number so all they have to do is click the register button. Using this simple strategy we’ve been able to increase our conversions by 27%.

3# Social Sharing

When’s the best time to ask someone to spread the word about your webinar?

If you guessed, “after they register,” than you must be a pro.

Your thank you page is one of the most important pages in your webinar funnel. Give your new registrants icons and links and prepared content so it is simple to spread the word across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms. This can give you an easy viral way to get more traffic and generate more leads into your funnel.

This prepared content is easy to customize by choosing the title, image, link, and descriptions of what’s shared on these channels; use Facebook’s Open Graph and Twitter Cards to optimize to get the most clicks possible for maximum traffic.

Show Up Stage

One of the biggest mistakes many marketers make is depending too much on one channel to drive their attendance. There are two key things to do in this stage:

4# Stack Your Communication Channels

Do not be at the mercy of your webinar platform. For example, if you’re using GotoWebinar, you only have 3 emails that you can send to remind your registrants about the event.

If you’re relying on GotoWebinar’s email system to remind your registrants to “show up”, you’re better off buying lotto tickets.

With Gmail filters, promotions tabs, and every other GotoWebinar customer sending the same email it easily gets lost in the shuffle causing dismally low attendance rates.

The key is to STACK your communication channels. Don’t stop with just email. Don’t be dependent on just one channel, but multiple ways to remind your people about the webinar. Send a text, a voice message, maybe a personal phone call. People will be happy to have you help them when you ask for permission to contact them and send a webinar reminder text message.

5# Double Your Attendance with Voice & Text Messages

What’s 160 characters, gets a 98% open rate, and virtually every phone on the planet can receive these?

I think the title gave this one away.

See, even though people signed up for your webinar, they just forget or got distracted. They’re not in front of their computer, they didn’t set their calendar, they didn’t get your email (or it went to spam), or for whatever reason – they just didn’t show up.

Question for you.

Where is your cell phone right now?

It’s most likely within 15 feet of you at all times. Mine is in my pocket as I write this at Starbucks. The proximity and immediacy of a webinar reminder text message is actually welcomed by your webinar registrants.

Jeff V, one of our clients had a problem. His was getting 500 people to signup for his webinars every week, but only 50 were showing up. Once he started sending voice and text message reminders to them, he instantly saw a 38% increase. This increased turned out to get him a 612% ROI.

Not too bad.

MORE People = MORE Money

Pay Up Stage

In addition to providing stellar content, the pay up stage is the reason you are doing the webinar. To get to the next level the folks who sign up and who show interest will absolutely take you up on your offer. There are two key things to do in this stage:

6# Got a Replay?

A few weeks ago, I got a call from my friend who was complaining to me about he only got 2 sales from his webinar. After talking to him about the presentation, the number of registrants and attendee’s, I asked him…

“So, did you send out the replay?”

He responded, “Ummm… a replay?”

He “forgot” to do that.

I went on to explain to him that he should always go into his webinars knowing that not everyone will attend, but the no-shows and even those who could only stay for a portion of the webinar will want to see a replay. The replay follow-up brings more customers to Pay Up.

Without fail, every single time I host a webinar, the emails start flying in…

“Can you send me the replay?”

I’m not alone here.

So when you get on your webinar, be sure to record the event. GotoWebinar has a built-in recording or use software like Screenflow or Camtasia to record your screen and audio so you can provide the replay.

Here’s an example of an actual webinar that I hosted a few months back.

Before the Replay
As you can see, it generated 4 orders on the webinar for a total of $5,490 in sales. Not bad for one webinar.

Now let’s take a look at the numbers after we sent out the replay combined with a 72 hour deadline to take action.

After the Replay
With the replay, we were able to generate an extra 7 orders and additional $8,685 in sales, giving us a total of $14,075 in sales from just one webinar.

Do webinar replay’s work – HECK YEA!

7# Segment no shows, bailed early, and saw offer

This is the secret that separates the big boy business owners from the small timers.

The days of speaking the same way to everyone on your list is long gone. If you wanting to double your conversions, segmenting your registrations into a tailored sequence designed just for them is the true secret to webinar success. Again, the follow-up sequence brings more customers to Pay Up.

If you’re using GotoWebinar, after your webinar is over you can download the “Attendee Report” to see each person’s length of stay and sort them into one of three appropriate categories and send customized message to them.

No Shows

These are the people that signed up but just didn’t show up. So the best way to approach these people to is drive them to the webinar replay so they can get the information. Rather than shove the product down their throat, it’s best to provide them the information so they can make a decision on whether the offer is right for them or not.

Bailed Early

These folks jump on the webinar, but for whatever reason they hop off early. You want to also provide these people a sequence which drives them to watch the replay so they can get the information that they missed to make a decision to buy.

Saw Offer

This segment is the group of people who have stayed on your webinar and have seen your offer. Meaning, if you hosted an hour long webinar and at the 45 minute mark you lean into your close, and they stayed on for 55 minutes, than they would go into this segment.

These are your HOT LEADS! If you have a sales team or plan on making follow-up phone calls to them – start with this group first. They’ve seen everything and have shown the most interest and may only have one or two questions that need answers to close the deal. – Original article