You have gone all-in when it comes to conducting a webinar. You have put a considerable amount of time and effort into researching the topic, making a proper structure, promoting the webinar, and teaming up with the right people.
However, what happens when all of this goes in vain? Like, you are unable to reach a wider audience with your webinar. You would be disheartened. These things happen with many webinar hosts, as they sometimes don’t invest enough time in searching for the optimal time to host a webinar.
In this blog, we will explain in detail the best time and day to host a webinar. Moreover, we also provide you with essential tools to determine the right time to host a webinar.
Before we look into that, let us briefly understand the factors that affect the webinar timings.
Without further ado, here we go.
Factors that Affect the Webinar Time
Here are some of the most crucial factors you should consider to determine the best time to host a webinar.
Your Audience & Demographics
You need first to determine the target audience. Is your audience B2B or B2C? Secondly, you need to understand the demographic of your audience( age, location, profession, marital status, education, income, etc.).
In addition, the audience you would like to attract to attend your webinar will depend on the products and services you would like to promote. If you promote products such as baby food or accessories, your focus or target audience should be mothers with young children. If you promote products and services such as the latest technology or financial advising,
your target audience should be business owners and entrepreneurs.
These things have a massive impact on the webinar timings.
Time Zones and Jobs
Time zone differences also impact webinar attendance. For instance, if you schedule a webinar at a time that is only suitable for one country and not suitable for another, it affects attendance.
Another crucial reason is that there is a specific time when people are doing jobs; they won’t be able to participate in webinars even if they want to.
Holidays & Events
Holidays and events have a significant impact on the webinar timings. If you schedule a webinar on holidays or events, fewer people will attend it. Besides this, there is a high possibility that guest speakers won’t be available.
For instance, from 25 December to 1 January, we observe the Christmas holidays across the US, UK, Canada, and other parts of the world. Therefore, it would not be logical to host a webinar during these days. Moreover, it would be highly challenging to attract an audience.
What are the Best Days to Host a Webinar?
There is no one-stop answer to the question. It all depends on the type of webinar and the purpose behind it. Based on the research, we have come up with several conclusions:
Schedule Webinar on Mid-Week
According to research by Abdalslam, 24% of webinar registrations are done on a Tuesday. Based on the same study, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday have the highest amount of attendance. About 28% of webinars are held on Thursdays.
As per ON24’s survey, Wednesday and Thursday have the highest amount of voters, with about 64%. In contrast, Tuesday has 24% of voters. Microsoft holds the majority of the webinars on Wednesdays. Check out Microsoft’s event page to know more about the same.
Search Engine Journal, an online platform that shares news, interviews, and how-to guides from marketing experts worldwide, hosts webinars on Wednesdays & Thursdays.
We can conclude that midweek is the best time to do a webinar because the working professional mindset is very high. However, it is not suitable for all types of audiences. It would be best to try out different days for the webinar until you discover the right day for your audience.
Avoid Hosting Webinars on Mondays, Fridays & Weekends
Mondays are when professionals come to work after they have relaxed on the weekend. Hence, they have a pile of work that they need to finish. Therefore, you shouldn’t host webinars on Monday.
Other than this, Fridays are when banking & professional people are exhausted from the work they have completed over the entire week and are looking forward to enjoying the weekend. Moreover, students also want to get out of their hectic study schedule and enjoy Saturday and Sunday. Therefore, you should avoid hosting webinars on Mondays, Fridays, and Weekends.
What is the Best Time to Host a Webinar?
Timing is the most important thing when you host a webinar, and it is challenging to get the right timing compared to an ideal day. It will help if you carry out different types of experiments to get the right set of timings for your webinars. Here are several types of experiments that you can consider.
Ensure Your Webinar is Accessible in Different Time Zones
If you have an audience in different countries, you should make sure that your webinar is accessible in different time zones to reach a wider audience.
The best time to hold a webinar is between 10 AM to 12 PM and 1 PM to 3 PM PST (Pacific Standard Time). So, the best time to host any webinar is before & after lunch. These timings help you reach out to audiences residing in America and Europe.
According to a report by ON24, 39% of webinars happen between 10 AM to 12 PM, and the best time for webinars is 11 AM.
Offer On-demand Webinars
If your audience is spread across different time zones and can’t attend live webinars, the best strategy is to offer on-demand webinars. For the same, you need to record the webinar and share it via a link with the audience. By this, the maximum number of people could view it.
Along with that, you can also leverage the recorded webinars as a lead magnet. You can create a landing page and provide users access to the webinar by entering their email. With this, you can capture users’ email effectively and use it to send other marketing services.
You can leverage any of the popular automated webinar software, or you can use a webinar plugin in case your website is built on WordPress. It helps you schedule your webinars effectively and track them anytime.
Below we have given you several tools & techniques that will help you determine the best time for a webinar.
Tools and Techniques to Determine the Best Time for Webinars
Online Survey Tools to Poll Potential Attendees
Utilize several tools to conduct a survey in which you can ask the users about their availability to attend a webinar. Some webinar tools have built-in poll and survey conducting options.
Analysis of Past Webinar Attendance Data
If you have conducted several webinars, you can gather all the essential insights, such as the trends and patterns when webinars perform well throughout the year. With the help of detailed analysis, you can also improve audience engagement and retention.
Consider Social Media and Email Marketing Metrics
Social media and email marketing metrics help you determine the behavior and preferences of the audience. Here, social media analytics help you to determine when the audience is most engaged on the platform. For instance, if you find that your audience is active on Twitter from 2 PM to 4 PM on weekends, you can schedule the webinar accordingly.
Email marketing is useful to identify when the subscribers like to open & engage with the emails. It also helps you to get metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to determine the best time to send your webinar invitation emails.
Conclusion
We hope you have understood the best time & day to host a webinar. However, you should not stick to a specific time & day for hosting webinars. This is because the strategy that works for other people might not work for your webinar.
You should experiment with different times to determine when the maximum audience will attend the webinar. Besides this, you should conduct webinars with different strategies to determine the engagement of the audience. With the personalized strategy, you can provide a better experience to the audience and make your webinar successful.
The best way to achieve this goal is to utilize tools like WebinarPress. It comes with a range of tools that make your process of conducting a webinar smooth & effective. It also comes with support in case of any issues or concerns.
FAQs
What are the best days to host different types of webinars?
It totally depends on the audience and the topic. Here are some standard guidelines that you can consider.
- Educational Webinars: These typically involve offering information, and the best time to host webinars is on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
- Marketing Webinars: These webinars are focused on promoting products or services, and the best time to conduct these webinars is on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
- Training Webinars: In these webinars, the host gives training along with necessary instructions. These should be held on weekdays after work hours so that participants can get the maximum benefit from them.
- Panel Discussion Webinars: These webinars involve a discussion with panelists & experts. These should be held on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
- Q & A Webinars: These types of webinars are typically focused on answering questions from the audience. The best days to host Q&A webinars are usually weekday evenings, after work hours
Should I host my webinar during the week or weekend?
You should host your webinar during the week on Wednesday and Thursday as it is expected to get the maximum amount of audience.
What is the ideal time to host a webinar?
The ideal time to host a webinar is about 10 AM to 12 PM PST, which is 1 PM to 3 PM EST. By hosting a webinar at this time, you can target audiences in different time zones
How long should be the duration of the webinar?
Most of the webinars have a duration of 60 minutes. You should keep at least a 1-hour duration of your webinar. Out of which, 5-10 minutes are for the introduction and the rest 40 minutes are for a webinar presentation, and the last 15 minutes are for the Q & A session and Polls.
