Webinar Replay….Yes or No?

Should you ever offer a webinar replay?

Imagine you’ve just put on a successful webinar. The webinar itself went well. Hundreds of people registered. Over 40% of registrants showed up live. 5% of attendees signed up for your webinar offer.

Time to kick back and count your takings, right?

Wrong! What do you do with the 60% who didn’t show up?

First, a Caveat…

The majority of your webinar sales will come from live attendees who show up the first time around. So if your webinar attendee rate is 40% (which is good), it’s wrong to assume you lost 60% of your sales.

Some people won’t have attended because they weren’t really that interested. They were never realistically going to attend, and they definitely weren’t ready to consider your paid offer.

The group to concern yourself with is the people who were interested but got waylaid in some way. Maybe the webinar timing was inconvenient. Maybe something important cropped up. Maybe they just forgot, and are kicking themselves about it.

What should you do for those people?

One option is to offer a limited-time replay, available for no more than 48 hours. If you go down this road it’s essential to offer the replay through your webinar provider, NOT as a video embedded on a web page.

Replicate With A Webinar Replay

You want to replicate the live webinar experience as far as possible. You don’t want people pausing the video or otherwise getting distracted.

A second option is to run an encore webinar. This is where you run the same webinar again, as a one-off, normally 24 hours later. The benefit of this approach is it adds scarcity to the webinar. They missed it the first time, so you’re offering one last chance at redemption!

In general, an encore is more effective for a large audience. If you had said more than 400 people registered for the original webinar, an encore will probably outperform a replay. But at lower registration numbers it generally becomes more profitable to offer the limited-time replay.

Why? The encore webinar conversion rate is likely to be higher, but the webinar replay will attract more views.

There are hybrid options available too. Many webinar providers make it easy to convert a live webinar into an automated webinar. The automated webinar then replaces the replay or encore.

Potentially I would still only promote the automated webinar to the original registrants for two or three days, and certainly not more than a week. But after that, you can try promoting the automated webinar to a new audience.

Ultimately the right webinar replay strategy for my business may not be the right one for yours. You may need to do some testing to find what works best.

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