The main role of a webinar landing page is to turn visitors into registrants. If that isn’t happening, and you’re seeing plenty of traffic from all your webinar marketing, but no sign ups, you likely need to optimize your landing page.
Your webinar landing page is your opportunity to capture attention and generate excitement for your event. It serves one purpose: to persuade visitors to leave their information and save their seat at your webinar.
When you optimize your webinar landing page for conversions, you turn more pageviews into registrations and utilize all your new registrants to further spread your event across their networks. It sounds too good to be true, but landing page optimization is a key step to creating a successful webinar strategy.
Here’s how you can optimize your landing page before and after registration, and even beyond your event end date.
Before registration: Optimize for registration conversion
Webinars can be a powerful way to connect with your target audience directly, establish rapport, and keep your business top-of-mind when they’re ready to convert.
Before people decide to register for your event, they need to know what’s in it for them.
What you share on your webinar landing page could make the difference between landing another registrant or sending someone away feeling like they’ve wasted their time.
That means everything from content to functionality must showcase the value of your event and encourage a visitor to sign up.
Some quick tips on building your webpage for registration are:
- Share your agenda
- Add prizes and incentives
- Showcase your speakers
- Make it easy to sign up
- Measure your conversion rate
Tip: If you have to work with a web designer and developer to build this landing page, make it easy for them by providing all the copy and sections you’d like in a Google Doc, first.
Share your agenda
Your agenda reflects not only the topic of the webinar, but all of the information you plan to share during it. Sharing your agenda on your landing page helps your visitors understand why they should join and what they can expect to learn.
This section can be as long or as short as you need to do your topic justice. For longer, multi-day events, there might be an entire webpage dedicated to the agenda. For one-off webinars, you may have a quick description accompanied by a bullet list of reasons to attend.
Visitors will use this information to decide whether or not they want to exchange their time and information to learn more.
Take a look at how Twilio provides a quick teaser introducing the webinar, then highlights key takeaways. Visitors can see why they should sign up at a glance.
Twilio does a great job of laying out schedule and agenda expectations, showing the exact time breakdown of their event. Visitors can see there will be time for Q&A, and the entire event should last approximately an hour.
Add prizes and incentives
Everyone loves free stuff, and you can use this to your advantage. Offering prizes and incentives for your webinar attendees can be a compelling way to boost webinar sign-ups for anyone still on the fence about registering for your event.
Registration doesn’t guarantee 100% attendance, but providing an incentive for people to show up live can improve both your registration and attendance figures.
First, think about what your audience might like, and tailor your giveaways to their needs and interests. It could be a few annual subscription to your SaaS, eCommerce fulfillment credit, or even company swag.
Then, give those prizes a prominent place on your landing page. Ideally, your landing page visitors should see the prize details above the fold (i.e., without needing to scroll down the page). This will grab their attention and encourage them to find out more about the webinar. Ultimately, it should help encourage them to enter their information and sign up.
Take a look at how Shogun offers exclusive swag for live attendees. Although the details are at the bottom of the page, you see the “Event Swag” menu item featured right at the top of the landing page.
Make your prize details visually appealing. I recommend adding a photo or graphic to represent the prize, such as Shogun did above. If relevant, you can include a sticker denoting the prize value.
Keep your copy short and sweet, and use emotive language to emphasize the value of your incentives. Your visitors should understand what the prize is in the first few words.
Tip: No one likes to see pages of disclaimer text under your prize offerings. If you have prizes with too many strings attached, they become pain points instead.
Showcase your speakers
Your webinar speakers help establish credibility and drive interest in your event. Whether you plan to host the webinar with in-house experts or team up with guests, showcase your speakers on your registration page.
Incorporate photos and short bios so landing page visitors can easily see who will be speaking at the event. The bio section for each speaker may include a brief overview of their expertise, background, and the value they bring to the webinar.
Sharing this speaker information can make your webinar more appealing to your target audience by showcasing expertise and highlighting your authority. Present speaker information in a visual format that’s easy to skim and pick out their key strengths and value.
Take a look at how prominently Commerce+ showcases who is speaking at their event. Visitors immediately see the speaker, their company, and their role.
If you’re worried about long bios taking up too much space and distracting from the main CTA, you can use a lightbox that pops out with more speaker details upon clicking their photo, or an accordion function that drops down additional information on click.
Make it easy to sign up
The average person’s attention span has reached an all-time low. People tend to lose concentration after just eight seconds. This means you need to engage immediately and make it easy to sign up.
If your landing page is too complex or detailed, your visitors will quickly lose interest before they convert, so your webinar registration form must be clear and concise.
Make your form user friendly and accessible on both mobile and desktop, and keep your entry fields to a minimum. Only ask people for the information you absolutely need, usually their name and email address, and sometimes their company.
The easier and faster you make it for people to fill out the registration form, the more likely they’ll be to sign up for your webinar. This is a simple user experience activity that can make a big difference to your registration rate.
Take a look at how easy it is to sign up for Discoverr in just a few seconds.
Measure your conversion rate
You won’t know how well you’re doing unless you have a way to measure success. The main metric you want to look at here is your pageview to registration ratio.
How many people who make it to your landing page end up registering? If not, why not?
Here are some of the things to consider:
- The marketing copy doesn’t match your landing page copy, so visitors feel tricked into clicking.
- Your ad promises don’t match the top benefits highlighted on your landing page, so they leave without finding what they came for.
- The promotional designs don’t match the landing page, so people arrive and assume they are somewhere else. For busy multi-taskers, that’s a quick way to get your tab closed.
- Your landing page is confusing or hard to navigate, so they leave out of frustration.
- The registration flow is complicated, and it isn’t worth their time to jump through hoops just to sign up.
- Your CTAs are hard to find, or at the bottom of the page, so they get bored and leave without finding them.
There’s a number of reasons for page visitors to drop off, and it’s your job to figure out whether they’re doing so at an unacceptable rate, and how to stop it.
Tip: Use FullStory to replay session visits and find out where people are getting lost or dropping off.
After registration: Optimize for more leads and attendees
After people sign up for your event, you can utilize strategic CTAs to generate more leads and maintain attention to encourage live attendance.
You can do this in a few different ways:
- Prompt a social share
- Provide a follow-up CTA
- Kick off communications
Prompt a social share
You can leverage your registrants to access their network. Once someone signs up, encourage them to share the event on social media and announce they’re going to attend. Since your registrant is likely in your target audience, the chances are some of their network is as well.
After someone registers, use your “thank you” page to prompt people to announce they’ve signed up on social media. This helps you tap into their audience, provides social proof for your event, and helps increase your reach.
Take a look at this post-registration confirmation message from Make It Big. In addition to thanking their registrants for signing up and asking them to add the event to their calendars, they also make it easy to share the event on various social media channels.
The key is to balance all of the actions you want your registrants to take next. You need to balance your desire for even more registrants with getting your existing registrants to join live and contribute to the quality of the event with smart questions and engagement. Which brings me to my next point…
Provide a follow-up call to action
The main purpose of your webinar registration page is to get registrations. Once you get them, your next goal is to get attendees. Post-registration is the perfect chance to keep the conversation going.
After sign up is complete, provide a follow-up CTA, like a reminder to add the invite to their calendar. Alternatively, you could use your webinar “thank you” page to encourage people to upgrade to a webinar series, or to purchase a guide that will benefit them during the webinar.
Here’s the footer of Make It Big, which appears after the registration widget. In addition to providing additional value, the wording of this CTA is highly relevant to the event audience and encourages registrants to book a demo next (while waiting for the event to begin).
At this point, you’ve already converted your visitors and have the opportunity to serve up additional resources to keep the conversation going through to the event. It’s an excellent chance to reach audiences with multiple different forms of content. They have just registered, and perhaps they want an eBook next, or to sign up for your newsletter and get updates on any future events.
Tip: Don’t put any additional asks above your registration CTA, as you may split their focus. You want to go in order of priority.
Kick off communications
Immediately after someone registers, they should be added to an automated email series to keep them engaged from the get-go. These emails will play a pivotal role in ensuring your webinar registrants turn into attendees.
The first email you should send is a confirmation email. It should include an invite to the event and a brief summary of what attendees can expect during the event. Be sure to say thank you for signing up, and let them know how excited you are for them to join you at the upcoming webinar.
Next, send a series of reminder emails in the lead-up to your event. These reminders could include a mix of functional emails that simply reiterate the webinar date, time, and details, and more persuasive, content-led emails that use storytelling and emotion to maintain audience interest. The content-led communications could be a sneak-peek Q&A with webinar speakers or an analogy to showcase how your webinar will help attendees with a particular problem.
The functional reminder emails will remind registrants what they signed up for, whereas the content-led ones will remind registrants why they signed up. Keeping in touch with people who register for your webinar will keep your brand at the forefront of their minds. The result? They’ll be more likely to remember your upcoming webinar and actually attend.
Check out this clever email from Linn Academy with a countdown timer (via MotionMail) to the event. It serves as a reminder of when the event is going live, why you should attend, lets you know they have another email on the way, and gives you an opportunity to review the speakers.
Your emails are key to turning registrants into attendees, so don’t let all your landing page optimization go to waste!
Post-event: Optimize your webinar landing page for continuous value
Your webinar landing page can do more than simply generate sign-ups for your event. Once the event is over, you can turn your webinar landing page into a continuous lead-generation machine. This extends the life cycle of your landing page and increases its value for your webinar attendees.
Here are some ways you can extend the lifetime value of your webinar landing page and turn it into a lead generation machine:
- Add ungated recordings of your webinar
- Gather feedback on your event to improve for next time
- Allow visitors to access the content on demand
Let’s take a look at each of these in more detail.
Add ungated recordings of your webinar
After the webinar ends, some of your webinar attendees will likely want to re-watch recordings or share them with friends, family, and coworkers.
Adding the recording of your webinar to your landing page is a great way to prolong the value of your landing page once the event is over. You can also direct registrants who didn’t attend to the landing page to catch up with the recordings.
This is an excellent tactic when your webinar furthers your own brand goals, and it’s in your best interest to get more viewers. For example, if it enhances your thought leadership, shares more about your brand, or showcases a strategic partnership. This tactic can also increase registrations for future webinars, as you can prove via your recordings that your events are packed full of useful information.
Take a look at how Shopify Unite made all of their sessions available to play directly from their landing page.
Gather feedback on your event to improve for next time
You can and should use your webinar landing page as a means of gathering feedback for your webinar. After the event is over, add a feedback form to your landing page. Then, anyone who visits the page again can fill out your survey.
To increase response rates, consider offering people an incentive for completing the form. The more feedback you receive, the more you’ll understand how to improve your future webinars.
Check out the pop-up that appears at the bottom right corner of the Shopify Unite landing page.
Tip: You can also ask your attendees asking for feedback in an automated post-webinar email drip.
Allow visitors to access the content on-demand
Emails are your lifeline when engaging and nurturing your webinar registrants. If you’re able to convince people to sign up for your email newsletter, you can nurture them directly and turn them into invested customers.
After your webinar, flip your live webinar into an on-demand event using the recording, and allow people to watch the video upon registration. You then capture their information and acquire a direct line to your audience.
You can even compile all of your past webinars into one page, and add a newsletter registration form at the top that promises updates on all future events, and access to past event recordings.
Take a look at the Teikametrics webinar library below.
Wrapping up — Optimize your landing page for registrants, attendees, and continuous leads
Your webinar landing page is a powerful tool to have in your webinar marketing arsenal. This page can drive leads and registrations for your webinar by showcasing the most important information for your target audience.
It can also be used after someone registers to get them excited about the event and encourage them to share it with their networks. This furthers your reach and helps drive more sign ups.
Finally, it can be used post-event as a resource hub to increase audience engagement after the event is over. This gives your webinar landing page new purpose and keeps it optimized for the stage of the customer journey your webinar attendees are in.
Whenever you plan your next webinar, remember that your webinar landing page can be a powerful tool for your overall webinar success.