A Step-by-Step Guide to Organizing Webinars

Aquibur Rahman is the CEO and co-founder of Mailmodo. He's helped various early-stage startups grow through content and email marketing.

Over the past 2 years, Mailmodo has hosted 62 webinars across 3 seasons and we’ve reached a stage where we’re consistently getting hundreds of leads each event. 

In this article I am going to answer the questions fellow entrepreneurs and marketers often ask after watching us organize our webinars:

1. Why host webinars?

Webinars are an effective channel to reach new audiences, position yourself as an expert, and generate high-quality leads. 

Take Shopify for example, their single, most successful webinar, "How to Make Your First $1,000 with Shopify," generated 15,000+ leads in one year, with an average conversion rate of 10%.

2. How to decide the topic for a webinar?

The best webinars deliver value to the target audience. Here’s how we do that: 1. Address customer pain-points -  If the same question crops up in customer calls, we hold a webinar on that topic. 

E.g: People often ask about email automations/flows, so we held an event on frameworks for segmentation and automation triggers

2. Research keywords to learn popular/trending topics - Tools like BuzzSumo or Ahrefs help find new topics, or decide which angle to pick based on the search volume. 3. Answer questions from communities -  Even if people don’t ask you questions directly, lurking in communities, and seeing discussions gives you insight on what they’re struggling with. 

4. Align with the GTM launch of a feature - If we’re launching a new product feature, we often have a webinar on the same problem that the feature solves

E.g: When we launched our improved Shopify integration feature, we held a summit on the eCommerce challenges, hacks and solutions. 

5. Stay on the same theme as your lead magnet -  We roughly launch a lead magnet each month, so often we choose a topic aligned with the lead magnet.

E.g: We held a masterclass on email copywriting when we launched our 21-day email performance challenge

3. How to get guests for your webinar?. 

Some webinar formats don’t need a guest. Say, if you’re the sole presenter or it’s an interactive Q&A with your audience. But if you want a guest speaker or a panel, getting the right person becomes crucial. In which case, the question often arises, “How much does it cost to get speakers?”

In Mailmodo’s experience - none. And we’ve had some eminent guests like Neil Patel, Liz Willits, Chase Dimond etc. Since our format is free for the audience, we’ve always worked with speakers who don’t charge. 

The reason creators or experts agree then, is that they’ve reached a stage where they want to give back to the community, and are willing to share their knowledge. 

If you’re figuring out who to approach in the first place, look for people who:

• Are an expert on the topic you want an event about
• Have appeared for events before so they’re open to chat
• Have a sizable audience (socials/newsletter) to reach more people. 

Building a relationship or having a personal connection sure helps, but don’t underestimate the impact of cold outreach either.

4. How to drive registrations & attendance

Getting registrations, or leads, is the objective of a webinar. It's also the most challenging one. 

Starting off, even 30 registrations was a challenge. Our highest since has been 800+ registrations - all without ads. 

These are the channels for webinar promotions: 

1. Communities - Slack and Whatsapp communities are most responsive. Linkedin or Facebook communities, less so in our experience. 

2. Social Media - These include the profiles of the founder, brand, employees plus accounts of the speaker and their company. 

3. Emails - From your end, you can include a webinar banner in newsletters, product update emails, and emails to people who signed up for previous events. 

What’s important here is you reduce the friction for users to register for your event. The standard CTA button redirecting people to a landing page causes more drop-offs. Meanwhile, an interactive form that users can complete inside the email can lead to 3x higher registrations. 

1. Co-marketing partners - These include brands/creators who you’ve collaborated with before and would promote your events. 

2. Organic- Sometimes creators/influencers of the industry can pick up your events and share it with their audience. 

E.g: Really Good Emails has featured our events in their newsletters more than once. 

In terms of results, the first three channels bring in most of the registrations.

Alternatively: Gate the video recording even after the event. So if someone discovers your event later, you can still capture their email address and get leads.

How to get registrants to attend?

30-40% is the registrant-to-attendee benchmark. Not all registrants will attend your webinar, either because of the timing, or because it’s easier to watch the recording later in 2x speed. 

But here’s how you ensure the ones who can join don’t miss out:

1. Ask them to add the event to calendar:

People often don't attend an event if it’s not on their calendar, simply because they forget. Adding an event to their calendar ensures it stays on top of their mind. 

But asking them to do so with multiple redirects or ics file downloads will again lead to low responses. So we started using a one-click Add-to-Calendar widget in our post-registration or invitation emails. The conversion rate from that was 11%. 

2. Send reminder emails

There’s no fixed number and timing of the emails. Two or three emails are usually sufficient, but be careful not to annoy people with too many emails. We usually send emails 1 day and 1 hour before the event. 

Alternatively:

In order to improve attendance, some events don’t share recordings after the event. For example, The Guru Email Marketing Conference does not share recordings with their US or Canada audience.  

Parting Thoughts

It can seem daunting, if you’re just beginning to host webinars. But they’re a great lead-gen channel for businesses and that too, at low cost. You don’t need to get everything right in your first try, but use this guide and do start.