Inviting, reminding and following up with an email sequence around an event can be a great way to help build anticipation and ensure participation for your event and get the conversation going before you go live. A few ideas on how to do that are below:
How Emails for Webinar Can Help
Email is one of the most effective channels for marketing a webinar. A well-thought email series will have an exponential impact on the attendance of your upcoming events.
According to statistics, emails generate half of the webinar registrations. Emails help to pique people’s interest and give them an easy way to register. Webinar emails will be either the main way, or at least help to greatly increase registrations that will translate into improved attendance rates.
4 Webinar Emails for Association Marketers
Here are four very easy to put together emails that you can send to both current and potential members of your association.
1. The Teaser
This is an email that many associations neglect to send. The teaser email is a great way to stir up some excitement about your upcoming webinar amongst the members on your email list. Giving them a sneak peek into what the webinar will be about can generate more interest than just sending an invite.
For added politeness, give the invitees an option to opt-out of the rest of your communications about this webinar. You can position this opt-out as an option to receive the recap afterwards. Folks may be too busy for a webinar but you can still provide them with value!
2. The Invite
The invite email is the most important webinar email in the series. This email must keep it simple, informative and point members in the right direction. However, you can still highlight the value this webinar is going to offer without sounding too pushy or losing interest.
Use this email to educate the recipients about why they should use their limited available time listening to your talk. Start with a hook and make the content of this email appealing and interesting (no one is going to sign up for a boring webinar).
Include the time (along with time zones), date, title, topic, speakers, cost (if any) and a registration link. If you have a lot of information to share, it may work best for you to build a landing page with all the information about the webinar along with the registration form. This will help you to keep your email concise and clear while still providing all of the information.
Make sure that the link you include, whether that goes to a landing page with more information or just a simpler registration form, has a strong CTA (Call To Action). Use urgency or scarcity language in your CTAs to encourage members to register. For example:
- Register Now!
- RSVP Today
- Save your seat now!
- Register for your free spot
- Save my seat
- Register for the webinar
Hot Tip: Use a countdown timer GIF in your invite email to get people excited and feel the urgency to sign up.
3. The Reminder
Sending a reminder email is a pro-active and courteous approach to reminding members to sign up for your upcoming webinar. If your original invite was the week before your webinar, sent the reminder a few days before.
Don’t feel bad about sending multiple emails, you are providing value and you don’t want them to miss out. Remember to exclude folks from the reminder email that have already RSVP’d, they don’t need a reminder.
Bonus: If you’ve already gotten a lot of RSVPs, and you know your audience well, try sending an email just to those that have already registered and ask them to invite a friend!
4. The Follow-Up Email
A follow-up email can be more than just a thank you.
To your attendees, this email should be an expression of appreciation for those that took the time to join your webinar but it should also include a summary of what was covered (preferably a recording of the webinar) and, if you’re up for it, an ask for feedback. Feedback is important for showing your members that you care about their experience with your association and is a great way to improve on the value offers you provide.
To those who did not attend your webinar, you can include almost that whole list. You’ll need to swap your “thank you” for a “sorry you couldn’t attend!” You could still ask for feedback, though. This is a prime opportunity to learn why they couldn’t attend. You might not get a lot of engagement here, but even a few hints will help you to improve attendance and engagement at future webinars.
An Email Goes a Long Way
As an association marketer, you already know the importance of digital marketing in the competitive world we live in today. However, webinar emails are the most cost-effective marketing tools for associations to boost consumer engagement and generate growth. You can now use the above-mentioned email series and make the most of this high return channel.
