Leveraging Webinars For Sales and Customer Retention

Webinars have gained notable popularity in the last couple of years. That popularity skyrocketed with all the things going around COVID. Freelancers, entrepreneurs, and companies are more and more, realizing the power of being able to communicate to big audiences efficiently. 

Companies are using webinars to hire and educate new employees. They are used to communicate with suppliers, manufacturers, and clients. 

But there are two roles where webinars exceed the expectations. It is acquiring new clients and improving the customer experience. In this post, we will cover these two topics. 

Webinars as a Sales Tool

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The ability to speak at once to tens, hundreds, or thousands of people is something that can make every salesperson excited. With various webinar platforms, this had become accessible to many teams! 

We are all fighting for the attention of potential clients. Landing pages provide you just with a small part of it. While they can, of course, still sell, having hundreds of people personally listen to what you have to say on a webinar will yield completely different results. 

Let’s have a look at several points on how to conduct a webinar that will convert leads into clients.

Create an avatar of your client

I know that you heard it many times before. But still so few do it. Having a combined image of who your client is will help you to understand how to communicate with him/her properly.

• Gender
• Age
• Education
• Profession
• Personal Traits

These may be the starting points to create your avatar. What problem does your potential client need to solve? Why did he/she register for your webinar?

Having this outline on one piece of paper will help you to visualize the potential customer. Not only will it help you to run the webinar, but it will also become a valuable tool for your team members who will conduct their webinars. 

What problem are you solving? 

Concentrate on a problem that your webinar will be solving. Topics like “2021 Update” will not get anyone excited. 

Have a look at PayKickstart’s revenue accelerator webinar, it immediately starts with a strong claim – that it will help you double the value of each customer. Given the main audience of Paykickstart, that is exactly what they are interested in so it will ensure a high participation rate. 

Every part of your webinar (right from the start) has to have the sales message in it. Your webinar has to ring-fence a problem and then, that problem will be solved by the product or service that you provide.

Be consistent

Your ads, landing page, CTA – it has all to be in sync. The message that you are giving to your potential customer must stay consistent. Each text they read right from the moment they see your brand for the first time – must be in line with your overall agenda. 

Whenever you break the line of communication with something else, you are losing a bit of trust and possibly a notable part of those leads that you worked so hard to get. 

From the first moment, you are creating and developing a story that you are planning to solve with your service, maintain that story. To simplify here would the main steps: 

1. Do you have this problem (ad)? 
2. This webinar will solve this problem.
3. Your product/service. 

Invitation

You would usually have two types of participants.

• The ones that are registering through your landing page, as they come from various traffic sources (Organic, Referral, Paid)
• Attendees to whom you will reach out through email. 

First, let’s speak about those who you will be actively inviting. While the structures of invitation email templates are beyond the scope of this article, we would like to talk a bit about the sequence. 

In the first outreach email, you would usually send an invite. Some subscribers will register for the webinar. After 5 days send another email to those who did not respond yet, to ensure that you get as many leads opted in as possible. 

On the day of the webinar, you may also send a reminder email, informing the attendees that there is a webinar today on which they are registered and that you are looking forward to talking to them.

Optional – before you start with your email sequence, you might also send a “save the date” to potential participants. That will allow you to have one more point of communication without looking too spammy.

For the ones that registered already through your landing page, a simple registration confirmation and an email on the day of the webinar will be enough. 

Send the program of the webinar beforehand.

In your communication with your potential visitors, make sure to include the main bullet points on topics that you plan to cover. It will establish a clear path for the presentation that awaits them. 

It will also help to set the tone of the presentation and your potential customer will come a bit more prepared to take in the sales pitch that you prepared for them. 

Having that said – do not send the whole presentation in advance. It will result in many not attending (as they will already know everything). Conversions dropping, as it will be missing that personal touch that we try to achieve on webinar sales and all in all a bad webinar. 

Webinar sales pitch

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With your invitations and consistent communication in place, you had set up a great environment for the pitch. Now let’s dig deeper at the actual structure of the pitch itself. Webinars are all about the personal approach, so you will have a chance to apply all your leadership qualities to make sure that the audience listens to you. 

1. Introduction

Sometimes it is difficult to get going right from the start. Also, you are not directly interacting with your audience, so you have to rely on yourself to feel out the situation. 

In this first phase of the webinar, you should briefly welcome everyone and slightly touch on the main topic of the discussion. 

This is also a part where you will talk about yourself or your company to establish the brand/authority. Attendees need to know why they need to listen to you.

It does not have to be anything extra long – that would just seem too artificial. For example, in my case, I would just say that I have been in digital marketing for over 8 years, building projects X and Y. That is it. 

The less is more in this case. Establishing your area and level of expertise will organically lead to the next point.

2. Problem

It does not have to be an actual “problem” it may be a situation that you know your attendees are in. 

At all times remember that nobody cares about the product. What they care about is how this product (or service) will help them to solve the situation that they have. How will it help them to get where they want to be.

Let’s presume that the service that I am selling is onsite SEO (optimizing your website for search engines). Would I start explaining the importance of H2/H3 or keywords that you need to use, or how to improve site speed? 

No. Because that would be my job as an onsite SEO specialist to know that and do that for my clients. 

Rather I would speak about how difficult it is to get ranked. Competition is huge in every niche. Google is dominating the search and therefore you have to take care of all the small details to make sure that Google does not give you any negative points.

I would explain that even if you have great content and even some valuable links (that took you ages to build) point to your great article – bad onsite SEO can delete this work. 

This will help you to establish a level of rapport with your potential clients. You must show that you know their struggle, that you‘ve been there several times and you know the way out.

After I would talk about some obvious and less obvious points of difficulty to rank high on Google, we would move to part three. 

3. Solution (the Offer)

At this point, you‘ve established your brand and also played down the foundation of the problem that everybody on this webinar is having. Now it is the moment when you convert. 

Transition with a couple of case studies of the projects that were completed in the past. They should show the problem (or the situation) that you were describing in the previous parts of the webinar narrative. 

Let’s follow with our onsite SEO example. I would follow up with a presentation of the traffic metrics of some of the clients. Showing the state of their website before active on-page SEO and after. 

One of the things that work well is showing that a lot of work and resources can go to waste if not used properly (in this case if the onsite SEO is lacking in quality).  

Already in the case study, you are starting to illustrate how your product or service has helped to solve the problem. No need to emphasize this too much, remember that our primary objective is to show how our potential clients can reach their goals. Our offer is just a tool to get there. 

Case studies will present you with an opportunity to talk about the main benefits and how the whole process works. 

4. Questions and Answers

When you are working with a bigger crown it is always better to have the Q&A sessions at one particular point in your webinar. 

Otherwise, you will constantly receive questions and will not progress. Right after the case study (or even during), you may start taking the questions. Some of them may apply to many attendees so it is better to cover it and remove all doubts from your viewers. 

5. Call To Action

When this is done, do not be afraid to ask for your leads to take action and become clients. At this point, we got through the whole process and it is time to convert. 

You may suggest that there is a special offer for the attendees, but most importantly (after showing them how your product/service will help them to get where they want to be) ask your attendees to try it out. 

6. Followup 

At this point, you are already done with the main program. So the last thing to do is to consider a follow-up. You may want to send the presentation in emails or offer further personal consultations or other webinars (depending on your product or service). 

Webinar as a Customer Retention Tool 

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We discussed how you can use webinars to expand your customer base and work with your potential clients more closely.

Now let’s have a look at another important aspect of webinar use and that is customer service or rather customer retention with the use of webinars. 

Invite Interesting Speakers

Webinar services allow you to invite people from every corner of the world, for a fraction of the price of a live event. This opens a huge variety of potential speakers that can participate in your webinar.

Inviting a speaker that is valuable in your market or could be otherwise interesting for your audience is one of the quite simple things that will have a great impact on the loyalty of your customers. 

Recurring Webinars

You might want to consider a weekly or a monthly webinar related to your market. Having each month a webinar that will tackle a particular problem that your customer may have (be it with your product or in their line of business) will keep clients engaged and make them come back for more information. 

These webinars can also be used as a way to further market the uses of your product, showing how it can solve other issues that the clients may face. 

Re-use Webinar content

Some of your clients may not be able to attend the webinar or did not register the information about it happening.

Send out a recording of the webinar, or just a presentation that was used. This will make your clients feel more in the loop of things. Also, this will make sure that you are building a relationship, rather than just being an anonymous supplier of a service.

Provide case studies

Having one of your clients make a quick webinar telling about his/her experience may improve your relationships with your customer base more than any other elaborate (and possibly expensive) marketing tactics.

Those can again, be recorded or repackages into blog posts.

Create a library

With many webinars on their way, you may want to think about your information resource that would service your clients. 

Webinar library is one of the great examples of how this can be applied. Each webinar that you had, carefully categorized and uploaded into your learning sections. Some can be public, some can be private just for your clients. 

Having such a resource builds authority in your niche and also the trust that you enjoy from your clients. 

Summary

Webinars are a versatile tool that can be used in many aspects of your business. You can use it to get more leads. After, use it again to convert them. And when that is done, webinars come in handy when you will try to do your best to keep your customers happy. 

As work from home is becoming an increasingly hot topic in many industries, the use of webinars will be further expanded and bring even more efficiency for both sides!

Vlad Falin

Vlad Falin is a founder and blogger at Costofincome.com, where he writes about digital business tools and gives tips on how to start your online business.

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