Visual Benchmarks On B2B Webinars: How Do You Measure Success?
Have you ever wondered if hosting a webinar is worth your time? Can a webinar help you meet your marketing or sales goals?
B2B marketers consider webinars as a powerful tool to convert prospects into leads or customers. But, how effective are webinars? Will it suit your business?
I worked with a client on hosting webinars. During this project, I researched benchmarks and spoke to industry experts like Sonya Waitman, Principal Consultant at Chilco Strategies.
In this post, you’ll find:
Benchmarks on webinars and visuals of the benchmarks.
Findings on using email marketing to promote your webinar.
Case studies and examples of events as marketing.
I spent 2 hours and 32 minutes writing this post.
Another time, I conducted user research on 160 webinar attendees to get their feedback. I wrote my findings here: What I Learned From Talking To 100s Webinar Attendees.
The Webinar-To-Purchase Conversion Funnel
In this post, I cover my webinar funnel research. The funnel shows that 0.015% of your audience will convert into paying customers. I created this funnel by compiling the statistics from platforms like Zippia, Campaign Monitor, and expert blogs. I talked to industry experts. I took the findings and structured and visualized them to make it easier for you to skim this.
Use Email To Maximize Webinar Registrations
Marketing email is the most popular and successful way to get people to register for webinars. 57% of registrations come from email.
Usually, the email will redirect a user to the webinar page. About 2.5% of email recipients follow the call to action in the email. 51% of users who land on the webinar page will register for it.
Sources: Zippia, Campaign Monitor, and Luisazhou’s blog
But, not everyone does well with email marketing. An example from my research:
A $2.5B software company acquired a SaaS company. They emailed their huge email list about their first webinar. Out of 3,500,000 users, 4,000 signed up. That's a 0.1% sign-up conversion rate. They continued emailing the same user base. They got fewer than 0.1% of users signing up for later webinars.
You can drive attendees to your webinar in two ways:
Promote your event to prospects to convert them to registrants.
Remind registrants to attend.
Timeline Of 1 Month To Promote Your Webinar
When to promote your Webinar:
Start one month before the webinar.
60% of sign-ups happen in the last week.
25% sign up on the day of the webinar.
I gathered data on the registration of people to an in-person event I spoke at as an example. See: Analyzing meetup signups. I used distill.io to track the number of registrations per day. The registrations were not rear-loaded. I drove registrations by contacting people and social media platform posts. This shows poor registration in an event when: a) the host or I did not contact the right audience a month in advance and b) did not have a compelling webinar registration page.
Sources: Wolters Kluwer insights, Dublin Tech Talks analysis, and Luisazhou’s blog.
40% Webinar Attendance Rates After Reminders
Getting the registrants to attend your webinar requires a lot of registrant reminders. Here’s the schedule to send reminders:
Send reminders 2 weeks in advance,
Reminder 1 week in advance,
Reminder the day before, and
Reminder on the day of the webinar.
40-44% of those who sign up (RSVP) will attend your webinar. I re-used the visual from tips on cold outreach to people.
Sources: Hubspot blog and Zippia.
Live Vs Replay: 40% Will Watch A Webinar Replay
33-47% of views happen after the live event.
Source: Wolters Kluwer insights and Zippia.
40% Conversion Rate From Attendees To Leads
20-40% of B2C webinar attendees will become (MQL) qualified leads. That’s 73% for B2B webinars.
15% of your webinar attendees will make purchases sometime later.
If 15% of attendees become customers and 30% (or 73%) of attendees become leads, then the conversion from leads to sales for this cohort of prospects is 38%.
Source: Zippia
Things for future posts:
Should you host a webinar for your product?
How to improve your conversion rates from audience to attendees?
I’m curious about your experience:
What metrics have you seen in your webinars?
What have you seen help make a webinar successful?