You just wrapped your webinar, and it was a hit! So what’s next? Your work's not done—but thankfully neither is your opportunity to reach more people. You have a valuable resource in hand you can use for ongoing marketing and audience building, which is your webinar recording. This chapter will show you how to put it to good use as part of a webinar follow-up strategy.
Here’s what to expect:
- Why Should You Follow Up After Your Webinar?
- How to Host Your Webinar Replay
- The Thing You Must Do Before Sharing Your Prerecorded Webinar
- Building Your Webinar Email Follow-Up Sequence
- Expert Level Webinar Follow-Up: Three Tactics
- Making Your Webinar Evergreen
Why Should You Follow Up After Your Webinar?
Here are the key benefits of following up after your webinar:
- Educating your audience through your webinar
- Increasing sales of your promoted offer
- Growing your email list
At SPI, we use webinars for educating, as well as to promote our products, primarily our courses. In fact, the bulk of our sales happen after the webinar is over—which should give you a sense of just how important it is to follow up after your webinar.
The heart of your webinar follow-up strategy is your email follow-up sequence. This is a series of emails and messages that you send after the webinar’s over. With a little time and care in setting up your webinar follow-up sequence, you can put that replay to its best use. You can use the webinar replay as a bonus training resource that people get access to for joining your email list. And of course, you can use it to guide people to take action on the offer you promoted in your webinar.
Before you start sending emails, though, you’ll need to make your webinar recording available, so let’s briefly go over the mechanics of doing that.
How to Host Your Webinar Replay
As far as the mechanics of hosting and sharing your webinar replay, there's a number of different ways to do it. At SPI, we use Demio [affiliate link] to hold our webinars and create and host webinar replays. There are other tools that let you host your webinar and webinar replay, including GoToWebinar, WebinarJam, and several others, but Demio is our platform of choice.
What if you don’t use a dedicated webinar platform? You could post the webinar via an unlisted YouTube video or another video platform like Wistia. You won’t get the analytics a tool like Demio gives you, but it’s a straightforward way to make your webinar replay available.
You can also embed it on a landing page on your website, like we did here:
Regardless of how you post the webinar, you should treat it like a special event that people can only access through your email marketing sequence. You put a lot of work into creating your webinar, and it’s a valuable resource for anyone who joins, even if it is prerecorded!
Ready to dive into building your email follow-up sequence now? Not so fast! I have one important warning for you before we get to that stage of the process.
The Thing You Must Do Before Sharing Your Prerecorded Webinar
Before you go down the road of webinar follow-up, a big warning. You see, there are software solutions out there that let you upload a pre-recorded webinar and make it look like it's live. That’s right: you can have people register for your webinar, and when they log in they’ll see other (fake) attendees, fake chat, you name it. Just like the real thing, right?
I’m not a fan at all. I’m all about authenticity, and not pretending that your recorded webinar is happening live.
That’s why there’s one crucial thing you need to do before sending anyone to your on-demand webinar: let them know that it’s not live. You want to make sure there’s no confusion about what people are getting. Whatever the format of your original webinar—but especially if it was very interactive—you have to let people know upfront that it’s not live, or they’re going to be in for a rude awakening (and it’s your reputation and bottom line that will suffer).
Okay! With all of that out of the way, let’s dig into the details of what your webinar email follow-up sequence should look like.
Building Your Webinar Email Follow-Up Sequence
With that out of the way, let’s talk about your email follow-up sequence. What should this sequence look like? In its basic form, it’s a five- to seven-day sequence with one email per day, except for the last day, which will have more emails.
Your mileage may vary, but we’ve found that five to seven days is the sweet spot. Anything longer works typically only if it’s a really major launch, a once-a-year type of thing. But if it’s something you launch just a few times a year, then five to seven days should be fine.
When should this sequence begin? In general, it should start the same day of the webinar, shortly after it ends. We’ve also found that closing the sale after a weekend, on a Monday or Tuesday, gives people the weekend to think about the offer and can lead to higher conversions.
Pro tip: If you’re using a tool like Demio, you can automatically generate a link to a new page with a replay video, or embed the replay on an existing page on your site with more information about your product/offer.
Here’s an example of how you could build a five-day email sequence. This sample sequence is taken from our Email Marketing Magic course.
Day 1, Email 1:
The first email announces the official launch period for your product and mentions that the cart is now open (or that the special promotion is now available) to purchase it. It also lets people know when the launch period ends, and highlights whatever is going away at that time, whether it's access to the product, the discount, and/or any special bonus.
Day 2, Email 2:
This email builds on the first one by providing evidence that the product or opportunity you're sharing is actually going to work for the subscriber. You do this by sharing a quick win they can achieve themselves, a story of someone just like them who is now succeeding as a result of what you've taught (a testimonial, but with context), or a combination.
Day 3, Email 3:
This email is probably the most important email in the series. If a person hasn't purchased yet, this email addresses all of their potential objections. If you can tackle each of these objections head on and flip them on their head, you're going to convert very well.
Day 4, Email 4:
This email tells your reader why they have to act now—not just because the promotion is ending or the bonus is going away, but because if they don't take action now, they're still going to be dealing with the same struggles they had before. Use your own style to amplify the consequences of not taking action in this email.
Day 5, Emails 5, 6, and 7:
The last day is the most important day of the sequence because that's when we usually see 50 to 60 percent of sales—which is why we send up to three emails:
- Early morning: “Last day to get access!”
- Around Noon: “I recorded this video just for you” (this one is optional—but highly effective!)
- Early evening: “Final chance! _______ closes at ______”
These emails are mostly short and to the point, except for the second one. The first email in the morning, email 5, is a quick, final reminder that this is the last day to take advantage of your offer.
Email 6 goes out around midday. The subject line of this email says “I recorded this just for you.” It’s a short email that says something like, “Hey, I know you've been thinking about taking advantage of our offer. Click here to see a quick video message.”
It links to an unlisted YouTube video. That way it's free to host and easy to access if you have the link, but can’t just be found by a random person searching on YouTube. So what goes into this video? It should just be one to two minutes, recorded on your phone and not highly edited or produced. Just a simple, heartfelt one-on-one message from you to the prospect. Make sure to include a link to the offer in the email and the video description itself.
This email typically has a very high open rate.
Email 7 goes out with a few hours remaining, with a last-chance reminder about your offer and any bonuses that might be expiring. This last email typically is our best performing email.
I know it sounds crazy to send three emails in a single day—and trust me, I felt the same way at first. But it can work pretty well, so don't be afraid to give it a shot.
While most people who get these emails won’t actually click on the links, each email provides an additional touchpoint with them, and the more touchpoints you build up, the more likely a person will eventually click and take advantage of your offer.
And that’s how you create an email follow-up sequence for your webinar! This sequence on its own can be a powerful way to get people interested in purchasing your offer. But there’s more you can do to enhance how well it performs.
Expert Level Webinar Follow-Up: Three Tactics
So you’ve got your email sequence set up. There are a few more things you can do to take things to the next level.
Expert Tactic #1: Segment Your Audience
When you’re thinking about following up with people after a webinar, there are three different buckets to be aware of:
- people who showed up
- people who registered but didn't show up
- people who didn't even know about the webinar in the first place
You’re going to guide these folks through a funnel that involves viewing the webinar recording, then giving them the opportunity to take advantage of the offer you shared during the webinar. Are you going to drop everyone in those three groups at the same point in the funnel? You could, but it might be smarter to customize things a little. Here’s how to think about it.
Group 1: People who showed up
These people are the warmest when it comes to potentially taking advantage of your offer.
Group 2: People who registered but didn't show up
This group is the next warmest. Not everybody who registers for your webinar is going to attend. So the first thing to focus on in your followup sequence is to encourage these people to view the webinar recording.
Group 3: People who didn't register for the webinar
This final group is the coldest. They may or may not have known about the webinar, weren’t able to register for some reason, or simply chose not to register. You want to talk to them as though the webinar is new information.
So you have these three buckets of people—should you be sending them the exact same emails? Ideally, no. Instead, sending unique messages to each group of people will probably be more successful at getting them to take action.
- For group 1, since they’re already warm, you can go right to talking about your offer, with less emphasis on the webinar replay.
- Group 2 is a little colder, so your first email should have a bit more emphasis on the replay and less about the offer.
- For group 3, the people who didn't even register, you want to lead off with a strong pitch on what they missed out on so they’re incentivized to watch the replay. Mention of the offer can come later.
You could set up three different funnels, or just drop people in each group into different points along a single funnel.
Expert Tactic #2: Put Automations to Work
You can take advantage of automations in your email service provider to customize the path each person takes through your sequence based on their actions.
The simplest automation is one that stops sending emails to someone once they purchase your offer. Obviously someone who buys doesn’t need to get any more sales emails from you!
Another automation you can implement using ConvertKit or another email service provider is to keep track of who clicks on the sales page link in any of your emails but doesn’t purchase. Since these folks are pretty warm, you can jump them right to the video email (Day 5, Email 2).
Expert Tactic #3: Host a Q&A
It might also be a good idea, depending on factors like the size of your launch and your availability, to host a Q&A session about your webinar and offer. There will likely be a lot of people who have questions—and a lot of them will have the same questions. Answering those questions in a live session could mean the difference between people buying and not.
A live Q&A can also be a good way to create more urgency around your offer and any expiring bonuses or discounts. You can incorporate an announcement about the Q&A into your email sequence.
Making Your Webinar Evergreen
There’s one more strategy to talk about in this chapter, and that’s using your webinar replay to create what’s called an evergreen webinar—taking a one-time (or infrequent) event and turning it into something you can promote throughout the year and that people can access whenever they like.
The beauty of making your webinar evergreen is that you don't have to worry about putting a whole bunch of time and effort into repeating a live event. You’ll still need to put time into preparing your recorded webinar, as we covered earlier in this chapter, then creating an automated marketing campaign that can run largely on its own.
So what’s the reason you’d want to make your webinar evergreen? Possibly the greatest benefit of an evergreen webinar is more consistent sales throughout the year. If you only host your webinar twice a year, the stakes are pretty high. If you don’t convert people to your offer very successfully at either of those events, then you could be in trouble.
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On the other hand, an evergreen webinar may have a lower overall conversion rate because it’s not live and it’s more readily available. But this is balanced out by the fact that because you’re keeping the sales funnel open, you can get a steady drip of sales throughout the year, which may provide more reliable revenue.
In addition, making your webinar evergreen can provide not only steadier sales, but allow you to collect data and perform analytics in an ongoing fashion. This lets you see what’s working and what’s not, and make adjustments as needed.
How to Make Your Webinar Evergreen
So we’ve covered the main benefit of turning your webinar into an evergreen event. Let’s talk about the nuts and bolts now.
The mechanism behind an evergreen webinar strategy is pretty straightforward:
- Create a lead magnet related to the topic of your webinar that incentivizes someone to subscribe to your email list.
- Guide them along an email sequence that educates, builds trust and credibility, guides them to check out your webinar replay, and promotes the offer you share in conjunction with the webinar.
(By the way, you’ve probably figured this out already, but making your webinar evergreen helps you reach a much wider audience, including the people in group 3 from earlier—the ones who didn’t register for the original webinar, and may not have been aware of it.)
What about timing? Should each person get immediate access to the webinar as soon as they register and download your lead magnet? The short answer is you’ll have to use your best judgment. In some cases it might make sense to give people access to the webinar right away, and at other times it might be better to develop a relationship first, prove yourself, and establish trust before giving them access to the webinar content.
As an example, we offer an on-demand webinar to help promote our Power-Up Podcasting course. The webinar helps people go deeper into what they learned in the lead magnet they download when they join our email list, called the Podcast Cheat Sheet. The Cheat Sheet gives them a comprehensive technical checklist with everything they need to start their podcast. It also mentions the on-demand webinar, which builds on the concepts in the cheat sheet.
When someone downloads the cheat sheet, which works as a teaser or supplement to the webinar, it’s a signal that they may be ready to learn more about this topic. In this case, it makes sense to give people the option to join the webinar sooner than someone else who joins our email list through a different route.
Bonus Evergreen Webinar Expert Tactic: Add Custom Countdowns with Deadline Funnel
If you want to put another notch in your webinar marketing belt, especially when it comes to your evergreen webinar strategy, you can use a tool my team and I love called Deadline Funnel.
Deadline Funnel is an amazing tool that allows you to create a launch-like sequence for any individual who performs an action that starts a countdown process. The beauty of this approach is that Deadline Funnel can customize the timing of any promotions, discounts, or bonuses related to your offer. This means you can scale your webinar promotion by giving each person their own “mini-launch!”
For instance, say Person A subscribes to your email list today and receives a lead magnet. This action also starts a countdown for an offer to purchase one of your courses for a special discount in a limited time window. Another email follows shortly after telling them they have forty-eight hours until the promotion goes away.
Person B subscribes the following day, and they get the same sequence, but their countdown starts on that day.
Deadline Funnel does this using cookies stored on the person’s device. You can even insert personalized countdown timers into your emails and your web pages, and the timers will synchronize across these various locations.
If a person clicks a link after the promotion ends, they’ll get a message saying that the promotion has expired; the price will revert to the regular price or they’ll lose access, depending on how you set up the offer.
Check out this session of the SPI Podcast where Amy Porterfield dishes on building evergreen funnels:
Build Relationships First
Whether you’re inviting people to a live webinar or guiding them to a prerecorded one, you’re asking them for a lot—usually at least an hour of their time and attention. That’s why it’s so crucial to think about the bigger picture and focus on first developing a relationship, demonstrating your expertise and authority, and providing some quick wins. Once those foundations are in place, people are more likely to go from your content and emails to a longer-form event like a webinar where you can establish a deeper relationship and hopefully spur them to take further action with you.
In the final chapter, we’re going to cover all the potential things you might do wrong when it comes to your webinars—so you can avoid any webinar pitfalls!
