Webinars are a great way to bring awareness or do group demos of your product. But it’s easy to mess it up. A webinar that yields conversion (new signups and/or payments) requires great planning, some of which can be done using La Growth Machine.
Looking to build the strongest webinar strategy? Read-on
Table of contents :
Webinar Grouped Demos VS 1:1 Demo - Some stats
During the first two years of La Growth Machine commercialization, we’ve been operating on a closed onboarding process: even though you signed up, you’re added to a waiting list.
This waiting had one main goal: filter out people who signed up only out of curiosity, to do a demo only with people who were willing to pay.
To identify the highly motivated signups, the Superhuman inspired us closed access onboarding process, which is highly detailed here. The idea is to add a few additional steps post-sign-ups that will scare off unmotivated people, typically a Typeform. That Typeform also provided information on the account and should be prioritized on not.
After this, we’d do a personal product tour lasting 55 minutes. Only then would they get access to LGM.
It worked great: 31% of people who had gone through the personal product tour eventually became a client. It’s 3x the average conversion rate. Great, but it doesn’t scale much!
Quickly, because of the increase in signups and word of mouth, we were limited in our capacity to onboard. It became frustrating :
For us: we had only 2 sales, so we ended up turning down potential customers
For prospects: they had to wait too long or get refused
That’s when we gave grouped demos via Webinar a try. The idea :
Recurring date every Tuesday at 5 pm
Anybody can attend
Mutualize demo time and focus on quality time with people post-webinar
Increase the number of people onboarded per week.
After two months of experimentation, we can truly say that grouped webinars, when handled well, works great :
72% of people are attending until the end
21% of people are becoming customers
4x more people are onboarded per week
A lot more time dedicated to quality time and upselling with clients
Shared questions and use cases that bring up all the possibilities La Growth Machine has to offer.
If you have a product that is fine for a grouped demo, you should consider it.
There is no free lunch: this requires a perfect execution before, during, and after the webinar, to create a customer experience that looks great.
Let’s deep dive into what you should do and how you should do it.
Suggested tools for a successful recurring webinar
Livestorm to host
Livestorm is a perfect tool for hosting webinars. We had other tools on our test lists, but Livestorm won our hearts for many reasons :
It handles the signup pages and reminders
It has great engagement features such as question tabs, and polls.
It provides great post-webinar engagement data that integrates perfectly with La Growth Machine
It’s easy to set up, and in the end, quite inexpensive.
La Growth Machine
Obviously :) It will be a key part of your strategy to :
Continuously source new registrations for your recurring webinar
Engage with your leads post-webinar using Livestorm’s data
That’s it. Probably some Google Sheets too to sort stuff!
Pre-Webinar: Why should I set up a recurring date?
Let’s talk about pre-webinar strategies. First and foremost, the big question, is when should it happen? This is the main reason Webinar is a problem: they happen to live with a set date.
If they can’t attend, people don’t sign up. Some of them might be in our to get the replay then, but it’s doomed to fail.
Recurring webinars are a great workaround: defining a set day and time each week during which your grouped tour happens, so anybody can attend.
Especially for grouped demo webinars: in the end, the content is the same. If you have a great influx of registrations each week, you’ll be happy to host them.
Having a recurring date makes it easy to have it part of your customer experience! Many product-led companies have weekly group sessions, and they should be embedded in your communication to make sure people are aware and attend.
Pre-Webinar: Why should I aim for at least 40 registrations per session?
The goal of a grouped demo is to have people excited about the topic of the day/product you’re showcasing. For that, nothing is better than group enthusiasm :
Many people attending show the success of the product
Many people attending leads to a lot of questions during the webinar
A lot of questions allow you to bring up all the possibilities of your product
A lot of questions make the webinar alive
You’ve understood: that the key to a successful webinar is to have people interact during the webinar.
But to succeed in doing so, you must reach a critical mass of people attending: in our case, we’ve seen that whenever we have fewer than 15 attendees, the webinar fails :
Very low engagement
Barely any questions, so you feel a bit alone
Not group excitement
Your critical mass number may be different, you’ll need to test it out.
But wait, why should I need 40 registrations if the critical mass is 15? Because not everybody will show up!
The webinar average attendance rate is 40%. This means that out of the 40 people, only 16 will probably show up. In our case, our average attendance rate is 60%.
You need to account for this in your registration rate. Do account also that about 51% of people who visit your registration page will eventually sign up, so in the end, for a successful webinar, you need a good reach!
Let’s discuss strategies to build awareness around your recurring webinar.
Pre-Webinar: Recurring strategies to make sure you have enough sign-ups for each session
Make sure your recurring group product tour is part of your onboarding communication
Since the goal is to onboard customers, it should be part of the customer journey.
At La Growth Machine, the invitation is visible two times :
Immediately after signing up, using the Livestorm plugin
In our Welcome email
Obviously, you don’t have to be in closed boarding to do the same. Here are some other examples :
If you have a decent amount of signups each week, this should drive a bulk of registrations
Doing multichannel outbound dedicated to inviting cold leads to the webinar
Another great way is to outreach to your ICP to invite them to the webinar.
Using Sales Navigator, it’s fairly easy to identify them.
Import your search results or list on La Growth Machine, and run a sequence to invite them.
We’d suggest a LinkedIn Then Email sequence, with 2 follow-ups (no need to push too much) to invite them to the webinar
Aim for a 3-8% registration rate on average - higher if you’re highly precise in your target and/or have a great product! This means that you’ll have to reach out to 500 people on average per week to make sure you reach your 40 registrations goal!
Identify similar events on LinkedIn and invite people who registered
Did you know that by using La Growth Machine, you could outreach to people who attended an event on LinkedIn?
Do search for similar events, they are a great source of hot leads. Read our guideline on how to import participants of LinkedIn Events into La Growth Machine
Post regularly on LinkedIn promoting the webinar
You’ve understood it, awareness of your webinar is key to driving sign-ups. It’s fairly easy to reach 3.000-5.000 views per post promoting your webinar.
If your webinar is a grouped tour, then you can use customer testimonials as content leading to your webinar!
During the webinar: Why should you be two people hosting the webinar?
The main goal of a webinar is to drive excitement about your product or topic of the day. Especially for grouped demos.
The best way to drive excitement is to have people participate in the webinar via questions.
The problem with most webinars is that you wait until the end to take questions :
People tend to forget their questions on the go
You might have people leaving the webinar in between, either because it’s not engaging enough, or too long. You’ll miss their questions
To drive a lot of questions, you have to show that you will reply to their questions
This is why we recommend to have two people hosting your grouped tour :
1 host: his role is to do the grouped demo/presentation of the day
1 moderator: his role is to engage with participants by replying on the go to their questions
Now here’s the tricky part: you have to push your participants to ask questions for this to work, regularly :
At the beginning of the webinar, the host must introduce the moderator and his role.
Here is how we introduce them (Agathe is the moderator)
“While I’ll give you a tour, please ask any questions that you might have using the question tab on Livestorm. Agathe is here with us today to act as moderator and reply live to your questions.
There are no wrong questions, just stuff I wasn’t clear about. Don’t be afraid to ask, again, that’s why we’re two. Your questions/doubts matter, so please do bother Agathe, otherwise she'll be bored.
If some questions are very important, Agathe will probably interrupt me to make sure I answer them live instead of her via text.
The goal of this group session is to make sure you can best use our product. So there should be no doubt at the end!”
After each main part, every 3-5 minutes, take a quick break and ask your moderator if there is any question we should take live before moving on to the next part of your webinar.
Even if there isn’t any, it’s very important to pause and ask. This will show you truly care for questions, and emphasize people should ask!
If there aren’t any, crack a joke “Really, normally people tend to have some confusion here. Either people are too shy, or we have experts today! Don’t be shy, ask. Agathe is bored!”
Interaction is key
Obviously, in the end, opens the floor to other questions
The difficult part is to have your first 3-5 questions. Once people see your moderator does provide a lot of answers live, and that you both care, you’ll see people asking a lot more questions.
Hack: you can have a fake attendee asking questions to initiate that process :-)
Another critical role that the host has is to choose a few questions that the host will reply live. If done very well :
It can help you drive to another topic smoothly
It can help you show more value about your product as she selected the right question
It can help you correct a mistake that you’ve made
When you have a good duo, it feels very natural and is a great way to make the webinar smooth and engaging. Instead of the usual dreadful 1 hour alone time...
During the webinar: Why should you use polls during the webinar?
Another way to drive a bit of engagement is to use polls. Polls are another great feature from Live, where you can ask questions with pre-filled answers.
They are extremely useful for :
Having people interact with you on specific topics during the presentation
To adapt what you’ll show based on your audience’s reply
As a backup during the Q&A, if your audience doesn’t have any questions
If planned carefully, they can provide valuable information for your post-webinar prioritization
You guessed it, they are part of your script and should be planned ahead of time.
Let’s take our process as an example :
We introduce ourselves and the goal of the day: showing participants how to set up a multichannel sequence using LGM
We start by showing how to set up identities :
Here, multiple polls can arise :
Are you going to do automation for a team of people or yourself alone?
- Yes
- No
=> Depending on the response, I’ll dive deep into team management later on. Also, it’s a great qualifier for post-webinar prioritization (more below)
Are you going to use Twitter from your perspective?
- Yes
- No
=> Most people won’t, but sometimes we have 50% that will. So later on I’ll choose to show more about Twitter.
How many leads will you activate on average per identity?
- 50
- 100
- 200
- More
=> This can drive different ways of implementing LGM, so I’ll adapt also along the way. It’s also a great qualifier for post-webinar prioritization.
I’m not going to list every poll that we have, but you get the idea! And, should the audience not be asking many questions, they’re a great backup instead of finishing up early.
“I see we have a lot of people that want to use Twitter. Let’s side-track so I’ll show you how!”
During the webinar: why you must have a script!
Like any good demo, everything is scripted. But it should also feel very natural.
Great salesmen can make people believe they aren’t in a demo, but a casual conversation. But it’s always a script well executed.
It’s the same for a Webinar. If you want your duo to work, you must have your poll questions planned. To have questions planned, you must have a script!
The script will also help you plan the quick breaks after each main part of your presentation, while also allowing your moderator to choose the right questions for you to answer live.
Post-Webinar: Using Livestorm’s data to automatically reinvite people who didn’t attend
Ok, the webinar went great. People were engaged, a lot of questions were answered, polls were sent! You’re only halfway through!
Most people will stop there. It’s a mistake! People are probably excited, and you must engage with them.
What’s great about Livestorm is that they provide you with an export of your event’s data. What you must use :
Who were they?
Did they attend or not?
What was their answer to polls?
Let’s start with re-engaging with people that didn’t show up. If you’ve followed our recommendations, your webinar is recurring weekly, or at least has several dates planned.
Using LGM, import the people that didn’t attend and have a very quick sequence, using both LinkedIn and email.
LinkedIn is the key component here: Livestorm allows you to send a notification to people who didn’t attend. But here's why it sucks: It’s a marketing email: it’s impersonal and people don’t care about it.
Using LinkedIn, and a quick follow-up via email, is a great personal touch. Why great?
Because it drives 41% to register for the next session!
Here’s our sequence on La Growth Machine :
Keep it simple and natural, it works great :
The enrichment allows us to find the LinkedIn profile
Our Message on LinkedIn (it’s the same whether we’re connected or not)
Our follow-up via email
The ‘Visit Profile’ 3 days later is a soft reminder in case they don’t reply. Your head will appear again in their LinkedIn notification. You’ll see, it drives replies :)
Easy, yet so powerful! 41% of people register again!
Post-Webinar: Identify priority accounts and automatically engage with them
After re-engaging absent people, you now must take care of the people who attended. There are two categories of people :
Mass-Market people: the segment of people it’s not worth spending time on 1:1. They’re going to use your service as self-served
Priority accounts: high-value target, with which you want to exchange! Let’s invite them to a 45-minute follow-up call!
You guessed it, we’ll use La Growth Machine for that!
Segmenting both accounts
You have multiple ways of segmenting the leads :
If you’ve set up your registration to provide the full name and company info, it’s fairly quick to check them one by one - We love automation, but some work is best done by hand. Especially when it only takes 15min a week :)
Livestorm automatically enriches your CSV to provide social data you can use
Polls’ answers can provide great insights on potential value too!
Last resort, if you have many signups, you have launched an enrichment sequence from La Growth Machine to have us identify the accounts!
Then, proceed to segment according to your ICP. The classic :
Level of seniority
Company Size
Potential Contract Value
You know the drill.
Engagement strategy for mass-market people
It’s probably not worth your time to engage in 1:1, but always nice to interact with them. The goal :
Be nice to them
Make sure they sign up for your product after the webinar
Add them to your LinkedIn network: it can help you increase the reach of your LinkedIn posts. We have an 84% connection rate after the webinar!
Have them drive referrals: if they’ve enjoyed the webinar, they should become ambassadors!
Here’s our sequence:
The enrichment allows us to find the LinkedIn profile
Our Message on LinkedIn (it’s the same whether we’re connected or not)
Immediately follow up with a simple email :
The trick? 3 days later, a quick message on LinkedIn that feels extremely natural and drives a lot of engagement!
If you want to go even further, you can plan a follow-up in 9 days asking how the trial went! Great way to close deals too
They’re mass-market, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t push them the right way :)
Engagement strategy for high-priority accounts
High-priority accounts are the golden goose. Those that you want them to convert. The sequence above won’t be enough, you have to make them feel special.
Two strategies :
Your icebreaker should be personalized. It can be the custom reason why you should work together.
In our case, we have one per ICP. Here are examples below
If it’s an agency: “A lot of agencies also use LGM for their B2B agency work. The use-case is great, and the time saved(and man hours!!) even more”
If it’s a B2B startup in the early Series A stage: “Your sales team is fairly young, but it’s precisely the moment to make the right choice in tools and outbound strategy”
And so forth… Or even better, you can do them manually!
Have a multiple identity approach. This is a more advanced strategy, but one that it flattering for the lead :
Have a senior person from your team, or the host of the webinar (usually a founder then), send a brief message mentioning you’ve noticed their account and that a salesperson will reach out to personally take care of them!
And then, a salesperson invites them for a call.
Sounds like a lot of work? Well, you can automate it all using La Growth Machine :)
Here’s our sequence :
Enrichment to get the LinkedIn profile
Our Message on LinkedIn (it’s the same whether we’re connected or not)
No email. Let’s keep it simple and natural.
Automatically add it to our sales’ lead (Agathe) using “Add to Audience”, so it may automatically be engaged in the following sequence
Here’s how Agathe sequence looks then
The first email is fairly standard. The {{customAttribute1}} is the personalized icebreaker!
It’s immediately followed by a message on LinkedIn, to make it very natural :
If they accept us within a day, here’s our follow-up
If not reply after a few days, an email follow-up :
Then another 7 days later. It’s a last resort to close the loop
Just to make sure, we’re also doubling down with a message on LinkedIn
About ⅔ of people book a 1:1 meeting. Great success!
It’s up to you now!
We’ve shared with you the basics. You can do more :
Use Zapier to automate the connection between Livestorm and LGM
Target people who register for a webinar via LinkedIn
Match it with your CRM data