5 Practical Tips to Host Your First Webinar and Make Thousands of Dollars in Sales

 

Webinars are one of the most lucrative sales and marketing strategies there is. In fact, they’re especially effective with high-ticket B2B sales.

Teaching your audience something useful creates authority and trust, and if you’re willing to give upfront value by teaching something practical, the rewards can be massive for you.

Even hosts running their first-ever webinar have generated over $2,100 in sales for a 1-hour webinar.

And because of their high conversion rates, some people can make up to $17,000 in sales with less than 100 webinar attendees.

Here are five practical tips that I’ve learned over the years on how to host your first successful sales webinar.

#1 Promote Your Webinar

Once you’ve scheduled your webinar, you have to spread the word. Promotion for your webinar can generally be divided into 2 categories – off-site and on-site.

Off-site promotional channels:

Off-site promotion is just what it sounds like — promotion that happens away from your website.

This can come in many forms and is probably where the majority of your efforts should be focused. After all, the goal with a webinar is to make sales, and that likely means reaching new customers.

There are four main forms of off-site promotion that you should focus on.

Your Email List: If you’re collecting emails on your website, that’s an ideal place to start promoting your webinar. These people are already warm leads, and they’re the most likely to attend your webinar.

Social Media Groups: Join relevant Facebook and LinkedIn groups in your industry, and write a 4-5 sentence info-post.

Your post should include one useful tip and link to your webinar registration page, where you’re going to expand on the topic further.

Guest Podcasting or Blogging: This is similar to posting in groups, but just in a longer format.

If you’re not great with writing, you could pitch your topic to a podcast. During the podcast, give a sneak peek into the topic and emphasize that you’re going to expand on it in your upcoming webinar.

On-site webinar promotion methods:

Off-site is great, but don’t neglect the traffic you already get from your website. On-site webinar promotion methods are all about converting your website visitors into webinar attendees.

Webinar Registration Call-to-Action: To really maximize webinar registrations, you have to make the webinar registration call-to-action easily visible on your website.

Most webinar platforms allow you to grab a registration widget code snippet you can easily insert into your website.

Exit Intent Pop-up: These are pop-ups that appear just as a visitor is about to leave your website. If your website is using WordPress, there are many plugins you can use.

Reminder Email Sequence: Registrants don’t mean anything if they don’t arrive. So, don’t neglect automatic email reminders to make sure they show up.

Most webinar platforms have this functionality already built-in, so it’s just a matter of configuring the email message to make the topic attractive.

#2 Promote Engagement in the Webinar

Your webinar is about to go live, and your attendees have shown up expecting to gain some insight and knowledge about a topic you’re an expert in, what now?

If you’re selling a course or a product, make sure your audience is on the same page about the problem.

Before you offer your solution, tell a story that makes them remember and recognize they have the same problem.

Give them the high-level, step-by-step formula of how they can solve that problem. It’s even better if you can show a glimpse of it on the webinar.

The most persuasive webinar experts do this perfectly — they show each step of the way, and they make it appear doable for anyone.

Then they guide the audience with questions by asking them to do something interactive. For instance, “Type ‘1’ into the webinar chat if you think that’s doable.” Typically, at least 10 people will do that. Immediately, the chat is filled with ‘1’s, and it appears easy to everyone.

Here’s an example of a highly engaging webinar recording.

Divide the process of solving that problem into five chewable, bite-sized bits they can easily follow (like this article, for example). Every time your attendees engage with you by typing something and agreeing with you, they get more invested.

This is the good old “Yes” Ladder sales technique in a modern format.

#3 Use Video Testimonials

Social proof has long been one of the best methods of sales persuasion. And webinars offer a powerful way of leveraging that with video testimonials.

An effective way to persuade your current webinar attendees is to have satisfied customers from the past join the webinar.

When you explain the value of your product or course, there’s still a question in your audience’s head, “Can I really trust you? It’s just your opinion. I want to hear someone who has actually bought it.

Invite your past satisfied customer to share their webcam and microphone and give them 1-2 minutes to tell their story to your attendees.

Most webinar platforms allow you to invite an attendee as a temporary speaker.

This works best if it’s live, but it helps if you’ve roughly agreed upon what they’re going to say to promote your course/product.

If none of your past satisfied customers can join, ask them to make a short video (1-2 minutes). Most webinar platforms nowadays allow you to upload the video directly into the platform as you’re setting up the webinar. Then you can just launch it at any time during the webinar.

#4 Know When to Launch Your Call-to-Action

You’ve delivered great value to your attendees. You’ve shared practical and actionable knowledge. But you can’t possibly teach everything during a single 1-hour webinar.

That’s when you offer your attendees an opportunity to learn more and get the full package — the whole deal.

The whole webinar will be leading up to a point where you make the offer.

Most modern webinar software have a pre-configured call-to-action that can feature:

  • An image of the product/course
  • An attractive call-to-action button
  • A countdown timer to create urgency

But the look of your call to action is a lot less important than the timing of it.

Do it too soon, and the buying temperature is not hot enough, and it will devalue the offer.

Do it too late, and you won’t have enough time before the webinar is over.

So, when is the right time to launch the offer?

When you’re about 75% through the webinar, that means if it’s a 1-hour webinar, launch your offer at 45 minutes.

Leave time to deal with objections

After you’ve launched the offer, it’s the ideal time to address your prospect’s objections. Your attendees have roadblocks in their heads, and you need time to address these.

After the offer, you launch the Q&A part of your webinars. That means giving the whole audience a chance to ask questions. This is where you’ll see where the main objections are. Address them confidently and thoroughly. Odds are that many of your webinar attendees have the same objections.

If you manage to clear them up and prove that your course or product is valuable, they’ll have the call-to-action right there.

#5 Never Forget the Follow-up

Not all your webinar sales are going to happen during the webinar. In fact, most won’t. With B2B products/courses, odds are that the consumer and the decision maker are different people.

That’s why after the webinar, you should send a follow-up with enough materials to help your attendees persuade the decision maker. Think of them as your internal champion.

Another reason you should always have solid webinar follow-up emails set up is that, on average, 28% of webinar attendees only want to watch the webinar replay, which is sent to them after the live webinar event.

But don’t worry about having to individually send emails to every attendee. The follow-up process can be entirely automated. Just like you’ve set up the webinar reminder emails, you can also set up the webinar follow-up emails.

To make your follow-up emails convert to sales, there are five things you need to include:

  • Key-value propositions (I’ve found bullet points work great)
  • Your slide deck (perhaps a version where there’s more text on the slides)
  • The webinar recording (your webinar software will generate that automatically)
  • Clear next steps you want them to take (encourage them to buy the course)
  • Something that gives a little push (e.g. limited time offer, extra resources)

Webinars Hold Huge Value

To summarize, webinars have proven to be an effective B2B sales strategy because of the highly personalized interaction, audience engagements, and the fleeting effects of a live event.

Host a webinar on a topic you feel confident about, and if you deploy all these 5 practical tips, you’ll create grounds for a successful, long-term webinar sales strategy.

Like with most things in life, practice makes perfect. So, don’t spend too much time planning. Just start.

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