Webinars are effective strategies for generating leads. However, marketing doesn’t end in lead generation. You want your leads to progress down the sales funnel and eventually become customers, which can sometimes be very difficult.

To improve your chances, you need a webinar funnel. That is a series of automated content sent at specific times to your prospects depending on their journey.

While webinars were traditionally considered more educational than marketing, their power to capture an audience’s attention and maintain their interest over long periods has now made them very important for conversion. 

73% of marketers agree that webinars are the best way to generate high-quality leads.

So if you want to not only generate leads but also convert them, read on to discover how to create a webinar funnel that converts in 2024.

What is a Webinar Funnel?

A webinar funnel is a strategy employed in digital marketing to generate leads, convert them into prospects, and ultimately transform them into paying customers through webinars. 

Essentially, it’s a roadmap or plan designed to attract an audience, capture their attention, provide value through educational or informative content, and then drive them toward purchasing your products or services.

A huge advantage of a webinar funnel is that it can be automated, such that you generate large number of leads and more revenue with less effort.

Stages of a Webinar Funnel 

A webinar funnel, like other types of marketing funnels, involves various stages to ensure leads progress effectively.  These stages include:

• Awareness: The top of the funnel where potential leads first learn about your webinar through social media posts, email campaigns, paid advertising, etc.

• Interest: Once aware, the aim is to arouse interest in your offering through compelling and attractive webinar descriptions, benefits, or what the audience stands to gain by attending. A trick that works here is to partner with renowned experts and creators in your niche, as this can drive interest in prospects. 

• Sign-up: After creating interest, leads sign up for the webinar. At this point, you will have obtained their contact details to communicate further.

• Attendance: Despite sign-ups, not everyone will attend. To boost attendance, send reminder emails, or texts, or use retargeting strategies.

• Post-webinar engagement: Here, the participants receive follow-up emails or resources related to the webinar topic to enhance their learning or motivate them to take action.

• Sale: The final stage of the funnel. Having provided value, it’s time to introduce your product or service, present how it solves their problems or satisfies their needs, and encourage purchase. 

One important thing to note is that webinar funnels are not strictly linear. Some potential leads might join in at different stages, and some might opt out before reaching the end of the funnel. 

That said, the objective remains the same – guiding potential customers through their decision-making process and nudging them gently toward conversion.

Benefits of Creating a Webinar Funnel 

When done correctly, webinar funnels are the most effective lead-generation tool for sales and marketing departments. A well-designed webinar funnel can assist you:

• Create direct connections with prospects.
• Appeal to a wider audience.
• Promote your brand as an industry leader.

How to Create a Webinar Funnel that Converts

The value your webinar provides to the audience and your final goals are critical in developing a webinar funnel that attracts, engages, and converts. To accomplish this, you will need to:   

1. Define Your Target Audience

So, who are your ideal customers? What do they look for? What motivates them? Understand how your webinar will address the needs of your target audience, whether they are entrepreneurs, marketers, or small businesses. 

For example, suppose you work on the sales team for a project management SaaS service. You may hold webinars aimed at small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), such as “HR Onboarding Hacks for New Platforms: Turning Everyone into Early Adopters.” 

Depending on your target audience, you may choose solely informative webinars or “seminars” that showcase testimonials from other businesses employing your service. 

To better understand your internet visitors’ interests and demographics, use web tools such as Google Analytics. Additionally, use social media analytics tools to determine who is most likely to participate in your webinar. Don’t forget to conduct customer surveys or a quick LinkedIn poll to receive immediate input from prospective buyers.  

LEARN: How to Identify Your Target Audience as a Digital Creator

2. Determine Your Goal

Why do you want to host a webinar? To make money, educate your audience, or be seen as a thought leader? Or because there’s an end goal in mind? 

Identifying the “why” from the beginning guides your effort in preparing for the webinar, down to how you advertise it to your audience. 

For Fortune Nnamdi, in the early days of his career as a Marketing and Sales expert, he organized webinars to generate leads. In his words, “If you are not generating new leads every day, you are losing out on a whole lot of money. I generate leads every single day. Two years ago I hosted a free webinar on WhatsApp and I generated 1504 leads in less than three days, without spending ten Naira on ads, purely organic.”

To define your webinar goals, ask questions like; 

• What is your target audience, and what proportion of that do you want to reach with your marketing strategy?

• How many customers will you need to acquire to meet your revenue target?

• What is the cost per acquisition, and how can you optimize your webinar funnel to lower that cost while increasing ROI?

For example, if you’re having a webinar to launch a new product, your success criteria would look like this:

• Registration rate: A target of 500 registrations.

• Attendance rate: At least 50%, or 250 attendees.

• Attendee engagement rate: at least 50 questions or comments.

• Conversion rate: If at least 10% of participants become paying customers, that equates to 25 new consumers.

• Revenue goal: Based on the average value of a new customer, the webinar will generate $50,000 in revenue.

A webinar is an effective marketing strategy that when maximized can help you achieve your business goals. 

3. Choose a Webinar Format

Once you’ve identified your target audience, you can decide on the format of your webinar. Consider the success factors you’ve just given, such as lead generation, customer education, or product sales.

Some frequent webinar formats are:

• Lead generation webinars

Lead gen webinars are designed to attract potential new customers by giving instructional content on topics relevant to your target market. Depending on the content, your webinars may introduce multiple funnel stages (i.e., ToFu, MoFu, or BoFu) and may incorporate pitching or selling aspects.

• Thought leadership webinars

These webinars are often ToFu webinars, which help establish your company as an industry expert. Your primary goal is to provide important market insights, trends, and best practices. Panel discussions, interviews, fireside talks, and even solo presentations by industry experts are excellent formats for delivering this kind of webinar.

• Product demonstration webinars

These webinars, often known as “deminars,” are typically MoFu because they are designed for prospects who have previously expressed interest in your service and are considering it as a viable solution for their needs. Here, you highlight a product or service’s benefits to help your audience make a decision.

• Customer onboarding webinars

These webinars are often classified as post-purchase or bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu). These webinars are designed to teach new customers how to use the product or service they’ve just acquired. To help prospective clients learn about your product, host Q&A sessions, step-by-step demonstrations, or highlight case studies.

• Customer Success Webinars

These are also BoFu webinars, as they promote consumer loyalty and advocacy. A customer success webinar seeks to help your existing customers get the most out of your product or service by delivering demos, success stories, product updates, and feature releases.

4. Develop a Webinar Landing Page 

Your webinar landing page serves as your event’s initial impression. Content on your landing page can either convince your prospects to register for your webinar or not. 

Here are a few things to include in it;

• A catchy headline that describes what attendees will learn throughout the webinar.
• A brief overview of the event, as well as a list of subjects to be discussed.
• Date, time, webinar duration, and time zone.
• Registration form.

To create a registration form from scratch, you can use data collection tools such as Typeform. Alternatively, you can use Livestorm’s registration pages to collect other information you need.

At the end of the day, you want content that clearly states what attendees stand to gain in your webinar. 

5. Promote Your Webinar Registration Page 

It is time to start advertising! The more people who register for your webinar, the better your chances of attaining your goals. 

Here are the best webinar recommendations for a great promotion:

• Share with your audience on social media

Whether you have a huge or small following, you can use social media to engage your current followers and encourage them to share with their networks. Create attention-grabbing content by combining different media types and content elements such as polls, quizzes, informative content, etc.. You may even build a separate event page or event hashtag to generate excitement for your webinar.

• Direct website visitors to your webinar landing page.

Create a banner or pop-up on your website to guide people to your landing page and promote your webinar. Use timers and countdowns to generate a sense of urgency and increase registrations.

• Leverage email marketing.

Use customer relationship management (CRM) platforms like Salesforce or Hubspot to segment your email list depending on their interests and degrees of interaction. This allows you to deliver targeted communications to individuals who are interested in the issue. You can use Livestorm to create automatic email sequences ranging from confirmation to webinar reminders and even post-event follow-ups.

• Use paid ads to retarget your audience.

Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn Ads are good ways to retarget people who visited your webinar page but did not register. To increase the relevance of your adverts, you can create lookalike or bespoke audiences based on their behaviour and demographics.

Read: 7 Creative Strategies to Promote Your Webinar on Social Media in 2024

6. Deliver a Memorable Webinar 

A memorable webinar engages the audience, gives useful information, and leaves your audience feeling transformed. This is the most effective technique to encourage registrants to share their webinar experience with others and create good word-of-mouth recommendations for you. 

Here’s how to deliver an unforgettable webinar:

• Create an outline, practice your presentation, and test the webinar platform you intend to utilize ahead of time.

• Use interactive features such as surveys, Q&A sessions, and chats to keep your audience interested throughout.

• Use visuals such as slides and photographs to demonstrate your points. 

• Keep your presentation clear and focused to avoid overwhelming your audience with too much material.

• Following the webinar, thank attendees by sending a thank you email and providing the webinar replay as a resource. 

• Request feedback from attendees to discover what went well and what may be improved next time.

LEARN MORE: 7 Secrets to Hosting a Successful Webinar

7. Include a Call to Action (CTA)

Including a CTA in your webinar might help you gently drive listeners to the next stage of the funnel. However, you must carefully time your CTAs. Typically, put your CTA near the end of your webinar, after you’ve delivered value and established trust.

Your CTA can direct your viewers to

• Join your mailing list.
• Subscribe to your premium content!
• Take a survey.
• Register for a free trial.
• Book a demonstration.

If you use Livestorm, you can send clickable CTAs directly to guests in your meeting room, allowing them to take action right away. You can also edit the CTA text, button, and URL to fit your specific requirements.

8. Send out Follow-up Emails and Develop an Evergreen Webinar Funnel

The end of your webinar doesn’t mean the end of your marketing efforts. Continue to nurture your leads (attendees of the webinar) to turn them into clients. 

Thank them for their participation and summarize the webinar’s major takeaways. You can provide supplementary content, discounts on similar products and services, or even free trials.

You may also construct an evergreen webinar funnel, which is a series of automated webinars that run on a set schedule, allowing you to generate leads and sales without having to actively host live webinars. This can be accomplished by pre-recording a webinar and scheduling it to play at specified times or on demand, based on the lead’s activity.

This demonstrates that you care about their experience and are eager to share with them the necessary content, even if they were unable to attend the live event.

9. Always Measure Your Results

At the end of every webinar, track your numbers to know which efforts gave you the most results. Did you have the most sign-ups from social media? Or did your email subscribers register the most? 

What part of the webinar resonated most with your audience? What couldn’t they stop talking about? 

Did you have poor registrations? What could you have done better? 

Analyzing all the important metrics helps you to know what to do better to achieve your desired goals.

Conclusion 

Webinar funnels are an excellent way to connect with potential customers, showcase your expertise, and foster relationships that can lead to conversions. Ensuring a seamless process from registration to follow-ups is important for an effective funnel.

Use these steps to build your funnel and keep optimizing based on customer behavior.

If you need a stress-free way to sell your webinar tickets or webinar recordings, use Selar. With Selar, you can sell all kinds of digital products and services to anyone, anywhere.