Webinar Best Practices - Part 3 - Following-up

Contacting participants after the webinar is important and it should be done within 24 hours. Create follow-up emails within this time period and, if possible, personalize them (for example, one way to personalize is to include an answer to a question a participant had). You should also follow up with those who registered but did not attend. Provide what you promised: for instance, slides, a link to the event recording and any other relevant material. You can further leverage the event by providing a link to the webinar recording on your web site, embed it in your blog, and incorporate it in your social media efforts. Invite attendees to follow you on social media.

You should critique the webinar for lessons learned and identify improvement areas for future webinars. Review any attendee feedback for ways to improve. Do a post-webinar evaluation with presenters to ID what worked and what didn't.

Having a high quality recording of the webinar completes the process. Brainshark states that 49% of attendees review this content and 34% of attendees forward the content to others. This will extend the life of your webinar.

Review the number of registrants and attendance rates. The AMA states that an attendance rate of 30 to 40% of those registered is good. Track the number of registrants and attendance rates and do a comparison with previous webinars. If the purpose of the webinar was to generate leads, track how may qualified leads came from the presentation. If it was a training session, follow-up to see how the training was used. Evaluate any social media activity regarding the webinar. Look at the responses to polling and see what you can learn from your audience in terms of interest and content. If you didn't get a lot of participation during the event, look at the post-webinar survey to see if you can understand why.

Webinars are an important way to communicate with your targeted audience. A successful webinar takes careful planning, developing content of value and timely follow-up.

If you have any questions about setting up a webinar or would like a free trial of our conferencing solutions, please contact us.

View other articles from the Webinar Best Practices 3 part series:

• Webinar Best Practices - Part 1 - Planning Your Event
• Webinar Best Practices - Part 2 - Conducting the Event
• Webinar Best Practices - Part 3 - Following-up