Used by many organisations, webinars can be a powerful addition to marketing strategies, providing an additional communication channel to stay connected with customers and prospects without having to host physical events.

Webinars can also be an effective way to open up new markets and generate viable leads with a clear interest in your product or services. However, many organisations go to the effort of hosting webinars, but don’t always have the time, resources or processes in place to properly follow up with attendees after the event – and this can mean missing potential sales opportunities and diminishing your ROI.

Webinar follow up tactics and best practices:

At TCB we firmly believe that every contact we have with potential customers offers an opportunity to engage with them more deeply and discover more about their current or potential future needs.

So, our MD, Andi Catt, is here to talk you through our tried-and-tested approach and how this goes towards maximising the ROI from webinars for our clients.

FOLLOW UP WITH EVERY CUSTOMER

It’s a sad and unavoidable fact that a good percentage of those who register to attend a webinar can’t attend on the day. But we’ve always believed that if a prospect was sufficiently interested to register in the first place, this is a buying signal. For this reason, we always recommend that any webinar follow up includes all registrants - those who attended and those who registered but didn’t attend, including both the cancellations and the ‘no shows’.

ALWAYS INCLUDE AN ‘OPT-IN’

Webinar registration provides a legitimate opportunity to gather data from potential customers for future communications, which of course, includes webinar follow ups. That’s why, it’s vital to have good data capture at the point of registration. This should include an opt-in for communication, an email address and, crucially, a telephone number for the most effective follow up approach.

KEEP TRACK OF TIME

When you’re planning your webinar strategy, choose a platform that’s configured to report on the time delegates spend on the webinar, as this can provide invaluable intelligence when making the follow up calls.

Knowing how long attendees were engaged with the webinar, means we can then manage the conversations differently between those who sat through all or most of the webinar, and those who dropped off early.

GIVE ACCESS TO THE WEBINAR RECORDING

Whether they couldn’t attend the event on the day or want to share knowledge with colleagues, recordings of the webinar should be made available after it’s aired. This way you’re maximising the exposure of your content, but you can also make this content gated for new users, gathering additional data for relevant prospects in the future.

OFFER THE WEBINAR IN ADDITIONAL FORMATS

Participants may want a visual takeaway from the webinar in case they missed any key points or want to share it with colleagues. So, during the follow-up call it can be helpful to offer them the webinar in an alternative format like a PDF copy of the presentation deck or a link to a transcript of the webinar.

FILTER EXISTING CUSTOMERS, COMPETITORS AND DISTRIBUTORS

It’s important to filter through the prospects to separate out existing clients, competitors and distributors/channel partners.

We’d exclude competitors and distributors from our call list and some clients prefer to follow up with existing clients themselves. Where we’re asked to call clients, we’d adapt our approach accordingly.

TAILOR YOUR FOLLOW UP CALL APPROACH

To build rapport with prospects, it’s important to tailor the approach depending on whether we’re calling someone who attended, someone who attended and dropped off or someone who didn’t attend:

Attended: we call to establish if they had their questions answered, asking for feedback on the content and whether they’d like us to email a copy of the presentation. In addition, we engage them with a few questions about their role and how the topic of the webinar relates to their role, as well as whether they’d benefit from a brief call with a sales manager, or technical sales manager for technical queries.
Dropped off early: we politely enquire why they left the webinar early, such as connectivity issues or an issue with the content, as well as offering to send copies of the presentation and/or a link to the recorded webinar. As always, we try to learn how the topic relates to their role and responsibilities, offering to arrange a brief call with sales or technical colleagues. If they inform us the topic isn’t relevant to them, we ask if there are other relevant colleagues, they could refer us to.
Didn’t attend: we ask whether this was due to a change in diary priorities or if the topic is no longer of interest. We then proceed as above.

RECOGNISE ALL BUYING SIGNALS

With all our webinar follow up calls, our business development executives are skilled in recognising buying signals. Key to this, is recognising that technical questions and pricing requests are buying signals and they should be promptly passed to the client for urgent attention.

SPEAK THEIR LANGUAGE

When the audience is international, where possible, we’ll follow up in the native language - even if the webinar was delivered in English. At the initial stages of building engagement with prospects, we find that speaking with prospects in their native language is more effective and builds better rapport. We make this possible with a team of native speakers, who can converse in over 20 languages across the globe.

Do you want better ROI from webinars?

If the answer is yes, then we’re here to help.

At TCB, we can help you optimise your webinar ROI, by carrying out the follow up calls for you, working as an extended part of your sales and marketing team. This not only takes the hassle out of the process, but you’ll also enjoy some additional benefits too:

Time saving: conducting follow up calls takes time. The level of tenacity needed to reach prospects in the early stages of the customer journey needs multiple call attempts. For busy marketing and sales representatives with other priorities this isn’t always a realistic possibility, but, for our dedicated team, it’s their primary focus.

Flexible resources: most organisations host webinars every few months or sometimes less, so having the option to enlist support with follow up calls from professional business developers as and when you need it gives your marketing strategy more flexibility.

Language barriers: as we mentioned above, it can be easier to engage prospects in their local time zone and language, which isn’t always an option with internal resources. However, when you partner with TCB, you’ll have access to a team of native speakers in more than 20 languages, helping you to boost your chances of engagement.

If you’d like to find out more about the services we offer and how we can help your business grow, don’t hesitate to get in touch. You can reach us by phone on +44 1489 669500 or send an email to info@thecallbusiness.com.

How to Get Better Results from Webinar Follow Up