Case Study: Results from an Email Webinar Invitation

A few weeks ago we did a webinar about our Salesforce.com integration. It went great. We use GoToWebinar, a pretty cool product. Check them out for yourself.  I asked Kara who ran the webinar here at VR about some of the metrics that surround using email marketing to drive people to register for and attend the webinar. Here's what we came up with.

We posted a link on our site, the VRU area of our site, a week or two before we did the webinar.
We got 208 clicks.

We then did a newsletter out to a targeted list of users in our database.
Total sent:      2700
Total opens:     766 (28%)
Total clicks:     152 (5.6% great click rate!)

Total clicks for the entire webinar "2-week campaign":     361 clicks
Total people who registered for the webinar:                   153 people (42%)
Total attendees the day of the webinar:                             75 (49%)

I think these are some really great numbers for us to start benchmarking our webinar series to test out new things.

Here are a few things I think would be really great to test going forward:

• Start mailing earlier, 2-4 weeks, and do a re-mail of the original campaign to the non-responders.
• Put the specific webinar link on the home page (right now we have a "general VRU" description.)

You might want to use our metrics and see how you compare. If you've got any ideas on how we might increase our rates, let us know!

Comments

[Russel]

Our company has been holding webinars for a year now with varying degrees of success.

Better marketing on our behalf would help improve this, but from a technical point of view we have introduced the following:

Automated emails sent out
1.) a Thanks for Registering email (incl a link to the event and a link to download a vcs file to add the event to your Outlook calendar - VERY USEFUL)

2.) A reminder sent 6hrs before the event

3.) A followup email - Thanks for attending (incl. a pdf document attachment relevant to the webinar)

Of course using VR we managed to track and determine the best times for distributing invites (Tuesday mid-morning) and when to hold the webinar (no more than a week after the invites went out. Anyone who hadn't registered within the first 48hrs isn't going to).

We also do a follow up invitation to the non-responders, as well as to those who registered but didn't show up.

If it wasn't for VR we wouldn't have known how to determine the success of our campaigns. Thanks guys!

[Janine]

Marty - GREAT comments. Everyone should look at these and apply these amazing ideas. Thanks!

[Marty M. Fahncke]

Very interesting info...thanks for sharing it!

Three things I could suggest to improve your numbers:

#1 List your event with one of the specialized Webinar directories, such as SeminarAnnouncer and Conference Call University (www.CCULearning.com). Both will list your session for free.

#2 Announce your session as early as possible. The earlier you tell people about it, the more likely they will be to have an opening on their calendar.

#3 Send several reminder emails, including the day of the event. In each email, add benefits of attending to reinforce the attendees motivation.

I'll be watching to see how your numbers improve if you try these ideas!

[Joshua Feinberg]

Hi Edward,

Great feedback and here's a quick update. We're in the process of reviewing our 2007 product roadmap goals and the ability to suppress by list, campaign, date range or even domain is something that we'd like to wrap into the campaign launch process. We're looking to release this out sometime in Q2 '07.

Let us know if you have any more questions or requests.

[Janine]

For Edward - I'm going to ask Josh our VP of Product to answer this one...Josh?

[Edward Leigh]

"... and do a re-mail of the original campaign to the non-responders"

Something that I have been requesting for the past couple of years now is the ability to add exclusion lists to e-mail campaigns: i.e. mail everyone on List A (all prospects) who is NOT on list B (people who have already signed up).

It's a tedious process building a new mailing list of non-responders for each mailing.

When might we see this being added to VR?

Thanks,

Edward Leigh

[Eran Livneh]

Click rate is indeed great! Can you post the actual e-mail invite so we can what you did?

We do quite a few webinar promotions for our clients. Here are a few things we found out:

1. Repeat invitations help increase registrations. We usually start the promotion 3 weeks in advance and send 2-3 rounds of invitations (removing those that registered from subsequent rounds).
2. We let people know that the webinar will be recorded so they can register to get a link to the recording if they cannot make the live event.
3. We send lots of reminders to those that registered. We have never received a complaint or an opt-out on these reminders, and many times people actually bother to write back and let us they appreciate them.

Thanks,
Eran Livneh
MarketCapture