11 ways to elevate your webinar promotion and increase attendance

Luckily, there are plenty of simple and cost-effective webinar promotion strategies to guarantee a Zoom room full of webinar attendees (and none of them require you to promise gift bags full of cellphones and puppies).

In this article, we’ll take you through 11 growth marketing ideas that you can use to increase webinar attendance. But first, let’s talk with the glue that holds it all together: the registration page.

The most important part of your webinar marketing strategy is to have a registration page that all your marketing efforts are pointing to. This is the destination where attendees can land and sign up for your webinar.

With MailerLite’s drag & drop builder, you can create standalone landing pages or even build a completely new website to promote your webinar (if you need more than one page).

An optimized webinar registration page contains:

• Details on what the webinar is about

• Speaker information

• Date, time and timezone are prominent

• Registration form is on the page (no extra clicking)

• Payment gateway for ticket purchase (for those of you launching a paid webinar)

For tips on creating a registration page with a high conversion rate, check out the article below.

👉 Tip: The best time to promote your registration page is eight days before the live event, as 54% of webinar attendees sign up around that time.

The webinar promotion example below from our customer, tailwind, includes all the components for a great webinar landing page. The descriptive and bold header title explains what the webinar is about, the bullet points sum up the content, the author bios make it more personal, and the signup form is on the page.

After attendees have signed up, you can send them a confirmation email with all the details directly, or inform them about your next steps on the page itself.

Once you have your registration page up and ready, you can start driving traffic to it by using one (or all) of these strategies.

There’s a reason email marketing is listed first, and it’s not because we’re an email marketing tool. It’s because email is the most effective way to promote webinars.

Sending an announcement to your email list is the easiest way to spread the word. You reach your audience directly and can let them sign up on the spot.

With MailerLite’s drag & drop editor, you can create a professional webinar invitation newsletter. Pick from ready-made templates or start building from scratch with the newsletter editor. Then use the one-click RSVP feature—it automatically adds subscribers to an email group when they click a button in the email.

This makes it super easy for subscribers to RSVP without having to fill out any additional forms, and the group can then be used to send reminder emails to or to import subscribers into your webinar software.

It’s a win-win for both your subscribers and your RSVP workflow!

Email automation takes care of your webinar reminder messages and follow-up emails while you’re focusing on any of the other 10 webinar promotion strategies. 

In an automation workflow, you can create all the webinar campaigns upfront, set up a workflow and activate it to send each email exactly at the right time.

An example of a webinar automation workflow:

• Trigger: New signup is added to webinar group

• Email 1: Confirmation email directly after signing up

• Email 2: Reminder email a week, some days or a day before the webinar

• Email 3: A one-hour reminder or “we’re starting now” email

• Email 4: Thank you for attending email and optionally, next steps

• Email 5: Webinar content replay (can also be added in email 4 if the recording is already available)

Below is an example of a post-signup webinar automation created in MailerLite.

👉Tip: MailerLite automations can be triggered by various events. Learn more about triggers to decide which one works best for your workflow.

Does your company send a lot of emails? Have your support staff, sales team and marketing team (or every team member) add a line to their email signature with a CTA to sign up for the next webinar.

Using MailerLite? Watch this video tutorial to learn how to add and edit email signatures.

Or keep it simple and add a P.S line at the end of your newsletter. A P.S. line stands out in the email body, giving it a visual advantage.

A teaser video can inform, excite and convince viewers to sign up for the newsletter. By recording a video, people can meet their host(s) and quickly learn about all the details in advance. Upload your 1-2 minute creation to YouTube, add the registration link in the video description and you’re ready to go.

See an example of a teaser video by PWC below.

Pop-up forms can vastly increase attendee signups and awareness. But you need to know how to use the correctly. Read this article to learn how to do pop-ups right.

There are a variety of pop-ups to use. Some of our favorites include:

• Hello bars (at the top or bottom of each page)

• Exit-intent pop-ups (appear when a user is about to exit the page)

• Scroll-triggered pop-ups (when a user scrolls to a certain % of the page)

• Time-based pop-ups (after a specific time interval, e.g. after 15 seconds)

• Welcome mat pop-ups (take up the entire screen)

In MailerLite, you can create promotional pop-ups for your website. These are special pop-ups that you can schedule in advance and set to run for a certain amount of time. After the pop-up is activated, it’ll automatically stop showing on the set date and time.

👉Tip: Pop-ups with images convert better than pop-ups without images by a whopping 83.57%.

Watch this video to learn exactly how to set up a webinar promotion pop-up.

Blog posts are a great tactic to attract people to your site who are searching for something specific that you offer. When someone arrives on your blog after having searched for that specific thing, they are already primed to sign up for a webinar that covers the same topic.

Did you know you can build a blog using the MailerLite website builder?

You can dedicate an entire blog post to your upcoming webinar, add the signup form to your blog sidebar or insert CTAs in existing blog articles. The latter can be used for new blog posts and your most-read pieces of copy. Integrate a signup form directly in the blog or add a text link, banner or button that redirects readers to the registration page.

Additionally, you can promote your webinar by contacting other blogs and asking for a guest post (exchange), or by sending out a press release. Insert your topic keyword (e.g. “Female entrepreneur” + “write for us” or “guest post” to find websites that are open for guest bloggers. These methods can be more difficult and require more preparation.

Your social networks are great for webinar promotions. Adjust your copy to each platform and insert a clear CTA—e.g. “Grab your free seat”. On Facebook, you can create an event, and on Twitter, most marketers post several Tweets (sometimes with a designated hashtag). 

If you are promoting a business-focused webinar, leverage your professional network on LinkedIn where people can easily forward to their contacts.

If you’re not ready to post your webinar announcement on social media, you can use it to collect ideas or vote for upcoming webinars. On your Instagram stories, you can start a poll or survey and on Twitter, your copy could look like this:

Another way to get people excited is to host giveaways and announce the winners at the end of your webinar. This keeps people engaged, especially when the todos or clues are told throughout the webinar.

Similarly, when hosting a webinar series, you can announce challenges that people can complete until the next day.

This retweet strategy from BetProtocol is another creative strategy to increase webinar engagement. One day after, the webinar announcement gained over 300 retweets and comments.

👉Tip: When you combine email marketing with social media, you can reach both audiences in a powerful way.

Don’t forget about online communities such as Facebook, Slack and LinkedIn groups to promote your webinar, they’re a great free way to collect signups. Do always read the group guidelines or message the admin. Below you see an example from Smiley Retreat in a local Conscious Community.

If you’re looking to attract a new audience, you can also advertise a webinar with paid ads. If you are not familiar with buying ads, take a look at this handy guide on driving traffic with online ads.

Try Google AdWords or social media advertising. The most important thing is to get your targeting right so you can reach the people that would be most interested in your webinar. Start experimenting with a small budget and increase it when you see a strategy that works.

If your webinar includes several presenters, you can ask each one to promote the webinar on their own platform. Alternatively, you can reach out to people with a large audience, so-called influencers, and ask them to share your webinar with their followers (of course, this might require a great pitch, payment or something else that attracts influencers). 

Everyone loves a sweetener! Gathering signups for your webinar is easier when people have an extra incentive. For example, you could make a free PDF guide, which people will receive immediately when they sign up for the webinar. This is a great way to build an audience for your webinar, because:

• It gives people a taste of what’s to come in the webinar

• It adds value to what you’re offering

And who doesn’t want that? If you’re curious about other ways you can add lead magnets to your webinar strategy, take a look at this article on how to optimize signup forms.  

Before you jump in and start pushing your webinar, you need to decide which of the 11 strategies you’re going to use. This decision influences how much time in advance you need to start preparing the promotion.

This is what your schedule could look like:

• Send an email invitation eight days before

• Promote the webinar with a website pop-up and on social media all week long

• Send a reminder a day prior

• Send another reminder one-hour before

Other webinar series might require a longer promotional time span. One-time webinars are often first announced two weeks before, so the audience can plan ahead and the webinar date stays top of mind. You can experiment with this to see what works for you.

If you don’t have an existing webinar audience (or these people are not the target group), you’ll need to give yourself more promotional time to find and reach the new target audience.

Gathering an audience for your webinar is easier when you know what promotional methods to use. In this article, we talked about how to promote your webinar on your landing pages and website, as well as running ads and collecting signups on social media.

These 11 strategies are examples of the many tactics and outlets you can use to collect new signups. After the webinar is finished, don't forget to follow up with a survey, replay link, a post-event thank you email or any other email content. 

The great thing about promoting your webinar and collecting new attendee email addresses is that you can build relationships with them afterward.

How many of these tactics have you tried? Tell us your industry and what worked best for you in the comments! 

Editor's note: This article was originally published in July 2020, and it has now been updated with fresh examples and ideas for promoting your webinar.