You have invested plenty of time and effort in making a modern and reliable product or service that can transform the lives of people. You have even built a website on WordPress, the leading CMS worldwide, and started conducting webinars. Despite doing all these things, you struggle in getting the attention of the audience and generating leads.
The reason behind not getting traffic and leads is that you are forgetting one of the essential things: The webinar funnel. It is the most important thing for businesses and entrepreneurs for establishing a brand, generating leads, educating users, increasing engagement, and lastly, converting visitors into paying customers.
In this blog, we will discuss the basics of a Webinar sales funnel, how you can create a successful webinar funnel, and what things to consider while analyzing the performance of a webinar funnel.
Without waiting much, let’s get started.
What is a Webinar Funnel?
A webinar funnel is particularly a sales and marketing funnel where the webinar acts as a lead magnet to attract visitors, convert them into leads, and, lastly, leads into buyers. It includes creating awareness, attracting traffic, getting enough registrations, and delivering webinars. To get familiar with this, you should first know about the components of a webinar sales funnel.Â
So, let’s get started.
Understand the Components of the Webinar Funnel
The webinar funnel is basically divided into three parts: top, middle, and bottom funnel. Let’s look at the same in detail.
Top of the Funnel (TOFU)
- Generating Awareness: First, you must make people aware of the upcoming webinar. You can create awareness in two ways: Inbound and outbound marketing. Inbound marketing involves SEO, social media, blogs, landing pages, etc. Outbound marketing comprises print ads, display ads, PPC, etc.
- Attracting Potential Participants: After creating awareness about the webinar, the next task is attracting potential participants in the webinar. To achieve the same, you should make engaging messages and promotions to gain the audience’s attention and urge them to check things in detail. All the leads you have obtained will fall under the top of the funnel (TOFU).
Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)
- Nurturing Leads: After everyone has registered for the webinar, they fall under the interest stage. Initially, it would help if you encouraged them to follow your page on different social media handles. Further, it would be best if you kept them engaged through email sequences, blog posts, and any other valuable content.Â
Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU)
- Converting Registrations into Attendees: After all the people register for the webinar, your next goal is to ensure they participate in the live webinar. Start sending email and SMS reminders to create a buzz about your webinar, and ensure maximum participation.
- Post-webinar Engagement and Follow-up: When the webinar is over, you should focus on engaging with the attendees and taking follow-ups with them. For follow-up, you should send a thank you email, resolve any of the doubts/ issues of users, and send webinar recordings. Your goal should be to present your product or service as a solution.
- Providing Great Offers & Discounts: You should focus on offering products or services with great offers and discounts to urge users to purchase right away. If some users don’t opt for products or services even after doing all these things, you should not lose hope and always promote upcoming webinars or valuable resources with them.
Why is Webinar Funnel Crucial in Online Marketing?
Here are some of the reasons the webinar sales funnel is crucial for online marketing.
    1. Reach a Wider Audience and Increase Engagement
Talking about the in-person events, you can reach only a limited audience. However, in online webinars, the scenario is completely different. You have an opportunity to reach an audience from around the planet.
By taking advantage of the webinar funnel, people worldwide will register for the webinar, and attend it live from the start to the end of the webinar.Â
   2. Generate More Leads and SalesÂ
Webinars are highly suitable for generating leads and sales. Using a webinar funnel, you can encourage more people to register for the webinar. All of these registrants become the valuable prospects of the products and services. Hence, it is expected that you get a higher number of sales.
   3. Chance to Connect with Prospects Live
Whenever you conduct webinars, you have the opportunity to connect with the prospects live and interact with them through chat, and Q&As. It even increases your trust and credibility among the audience as they will be watching live. In addition, webinar lets you establish yourself as an expert in a specific field.
   4. Measurable ROI
The excellent thing about the webinar funnel is that it lets you look at the overall return on investment you have obtained by investing the money until now. It gives you a chance to keep track of the registration rates, attendance rates, conversion rates, etc.
   5. Get Valuable Data and Insights
Webinar funnel even allows you to obtain valuable customer data and insights. This consists of the attendees’ behavior, overall experience, and interactions during the webinar. Based on the insights, you can modify all the strategies in the following webinars.
8 Steps to Create a Successful Webinar Funnel in WordPress
Here is the streamlined process of creating a successful webinar funnel.
  1. Choose a Webinar Topic and Target Audience
The most basic thing in the webinar funnel is to choose the webinar topic and the target audience. Here, your aim is to go for a webinar topic that aligns well with your product or service. Along with that, you should make sure that the webinar topic is relevant, exciting, and teaches that they are unaware of.
After finalizing the webinar topic, it would help if you determine the target audience. For the same, you need to find answers to some of the questions mentioned below:
- Who is the ideal customer?
- What are their interests and paint points?
- What are their demographics?
- What can they expect from your webinar?
The best way to identify the target audience is by creating a user persona. It comprises demographics, psychographics, goals and objectives, challenges and pain points, and more. By creating user personas, you can identify your target audience efficiently.
  2. Choose a Webinar Format
After deciding the target audience and the topic of the webinar. The next thing you should focus on is deciding the webinar format. Various types of webinar formats enable you to connect, inspire, and engage with the audience. These are as follows:
- AMA Webinar
- Panel Discussion
- Online Event or Conference
- Product DemosÂ
- MasterClass
- Interview
- Case Study Webinar
You should choose a webinar format that aligns well with your potential audience and helps you to grow your conversions and sales.
  3. Creating compelling Webinar Content
To craft highly engaging webinar content, you should focus on providing relevant content, high-quality images, and effective examples.Â
Here, you should invest time in making a proper outline for the webinar. It comprises an attractive title, a unique introduction, engaging body content, and a solid conclusion with a call to action.
To make effective webinar content, you should invest time in creating a webinar script. A script consists of a detailed introduction, all the header sections along with points, supporting details, attractive visuals, examples, and a conclusion. A script ensures that the presenter remains on track, shares a reliable message behind the webinar, and keeps the audience hooked.Â
  4. Selecting the Right Webinar Platform
The next thing you should consider is choosing the best webinar platform that helps you deliver the information to the audience without any hindrance. WebinarPress is the best webinar plugin for WordPress, enabling you to present everything efficiently.
Here is the list of things you should check when choosing the right webinar platform:
- The total number of attendees it allows to invite.Â
- The webinar platform enables integration with email, CRM, and other marketing tools.
- Provide engagement features like Q&A, polls, chat, etc.
- The platform possesses analytics and reporting capabilities.
- Make sure that the platform allows streaming high-quality video and audio.
- Equipped with reliable security and privacy features.
- It offers reliable customer support and documentation.
- The platform should work with your desired webinar format.
Now, you might have chosen a webinar platform based on the above criteria. Before you finalize the webinar platform, you should test it thoroughly.
  5. Promoting the Webinar Registration Page
After finalizing the webinar format and the platform, it would help if you started promoting it through different mediums. Here are several excellent ways of promoting your webinar.
Landing Page: Â As you have built a website on WordPress, you will create a webinar landing page using the same CMS, highlighting all the benefits of attending your webinar. It should possess an engaging copy, a registration form, and a clear call-to-action button. Also, drive traffic from your website to the webinar registration page with the help of banners and engaging pop-ups.
Social Media Promotion: There are various social media platforms. Out of which, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are the most well-known. Moreover, Instagram has more than 2.35 million active users monthly. On the other hand, Facebook has over 3.03 million active monthly users. Hence, by promoting your webinar on these social media platforms, you can have a chance to reach a wider audience.Â
Start by sharing social media posts related to your webinar and the registration page link. Anyone clicking on the link will be instantly directed to a landing page. To create more buzz about your webinar, make an event page on social media and use a dedicated hashtag.
By creating a buzz for your webinar through social media, you will get more traffic on that page and even more registrations.
Paid Advertising: You can do paid promotion of your webinar through social media ads on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And, don’t forget to include a link to the registration page. Â
Apart from social media, you can do webinar ads on Google and LinkedIn. There are various ways to promote your webinar on Google; however, the most well-known are display and native ads. Besides this, you can even consider promoting your webinar through retargeting ads.
Email Marketing: It is considered a direct form of marketing, and lets you bring traffic to the webinar registration page.
This strategy is highly robust if you have a particular number of email subscribers in your list. You have two options: Send an email newsletter to all the subscribers in your list.
Alternatively, you can bifurcate the email subscribers depending on their interests using a CRM tool and then send an email. You are more likely to get higher traffic on your webinar registration page as all these people have shown interest in your brand before.
The best way to handle email marketing is to leverage a tool like MailChimp to send reminders right from confirmation to ongoing reminders and after the event is over.
  6. Collecting Registration and Lead Information
After drawing your audience to the registration page, the next step will be to urge them to register for the webinar and capture their details.
Here, you should ensure to design the registration form in a way that asks users minimum details to register for the webinar. It could be name and email. Apart from this, you can even ask additional questions to segment the audience and direct marketing efforts.
To ensure that the maximum number of users register for the webinar, provide them with freebies or offers.
  7. Delivering a Memorable Webinar Presentation
After getting enough attendees for the webinar, you should focus on delivering your most valuable and memorable webinar presentation. How?
Here, it would help if you practiced your webinar until you become confident enough to deliver it smoothly. Don’t just deliver your webinar in plain format. Try to integrate real-world examples and anecdotes. You can even make it highly interactive by adding different types of polls, Q&As, and more.
Additionally, you should integrate a call to action button in the webinar to urge users to take action, such as purchasing your product or service.
  8. Following Up with the Attendees
After completing the webinar event, you should not stop the conversion with the customers. You should always remain up on the game in nurturing your leads and ensure you convert them into buyers.
After anyone has attended the webinar, the next thing you should focus on is sending a thank you email to them. You can even send a link to your products or services along with coupon codes or discounts.
The best thing to hear from the attendees is setting up an evergreen webinar funnel. Taking about this strategy, you need to send a set of automated emails to the users post-webinar. It starts with a thank you email along with a pre-recorded link to the webinar. Then, you send emails about offers and discounts on different products or services until they become your buyers. It is the most effective strategy to generate leads regularly.Â
Measuring the Performance of Webinar Funnel
After executing the webinar funnel, you need to check its performance to know whether it has performed as per your expectations or not. For the same, you should consider some of the key webinar KPIs and metrics, such as attendance rate, engagement rate, registration rate, and conversion rate.Â
By analyzing these metrics, you can make effective decisions about the funnel. For instance, if the registrations are not up to the mark, you need to modify the promotion approach. In case, you have got high number of attendees, but engagement is not enough, you need to modify the content.Â
Besides this, you should also calculate the ROI considering all the expenses you have made on the webinar funnel. Based on the analysis, you can transform your webinar funnel, provide top-notch user experience, get higher conversions, and take your business to a new level.Â
Conclusion
Ultimately, we might have become familiar with the process of executing a webinar funnel for your business.Â
By leveraging WordPress, the world’s leading CMS, and following what we have shared, you can build a webinar funnel that enables you to reach your potential audience, enhance engagement, and generate enough revenue for your business. It would help if you only focused on delivering exceptional value to your potential customers; everything will follow.
To help you get high webinar attendance and engagement, consider choosing WebinarPress. It is one of the best WordPress webinar plugins that works on various devices. It lets you handle multiple tasks like adding registration forms, hosting live webinars, making sales funnels, setting email notifications, etc.