How to Earn Customer Loyalty with Webinars

Why Choose Webinars to Win Loyal Customers

There are several ways to win customer loyalty, but why webinars?

Let’s get into what makes webinars the perfect tool.

Establish Trust

Webinar is the best form of content to establish trust with your audience. It is one of the best sources for thought leadership content.

This is where you learn new strategies, tips, and tricks from the horse’s mouth. The speaker’s facial expression, demonstration, gaps, and tone add shoulder pads to the speaker’s credibility.

These intangible feelings that can be difficult to communicate with written content are easy to express with audio and video.

However, a webinar is also the fastest way to make a bad name for your business, especially if you turn your webinar into boring salesy pitches. It is a two-edged sword.

Get More Leads

According to Business Wire, 89% of marketers believe webinars outperform every other lead generation channel.

By hosting webinars, you can win loyal customers and get the chance to funnel more leads into your sales pipeline, which you can follow up after the webinar session.

Build an Email List

An email list is an important asset to every business with an online presence. 

The common way to build a list is to create a lead magnet (mostly a downloadable one) to give the audience in exchange for their email address.

But even at that, people hardly share their email addresses for security reasons and to avoid being sold to – because no one wants to feel sold to. 

Interestingly, hosting webinars gives you a very credible reason to collect emails from your registrants.

So, this is an easy way to build an email list for your business (consider this as an added advantage). You can promote other offers to your email list in the future.

Future Sales

Webinars are a top-of-the-funnel marketing tool best for educating your audience. They are known to have a direct influence on revenue.

Business Wire reports that 72% of businesses confirm a direct influence of webinars on their pipeline and revenue.

Webinar may not convert attendees instantly, but it lays the foundation for future purchases.

With consistent follow-ups after the webinar, you can get attendees to sign up for a demo account, book a free consultation, and also purchase your product.

The best part is that you have the email list of your attendees, which means you can always sell them more products in the future.

This is the beauty of content marketing.

How To Earn Loyalty From Your Customers Using Webinars

Now, let’s get into the ways to earn loyalty using webinars.

Establish Expertise Beforehand

When people sign up for your webinars, they do so, hoping that you have what they need to improve their lives and businesses.

Therefore, one of the first things your webinar must do is to establish expertise, assuring attendees that they are in the right place.

The earlier you do this, the better because some participants will likely exit the webinar room pre-maturely if it gets boring.

So to avoid this, 

• Tell a story
• Keep your introduction short and sweet. 

Start a Monthly Webinar Series For Valued Customers

A monthly webinar series helps you keep in touch with valued customers to avoid losing their trust. It takes consistency to build trust with a random stranger on the internet. 

You should appear on their screen every chance you get if you desire consumer loyalty. Because the internet is so noisy that a Twitter scroll is all it takes for customers to forget about your brand.

But a monthly webinar series will put you in front of your customers consistently, which is what creates loyalty.

Empire Flippers is a company that uses the occasional monthly webinar series to build a loyal audience.

Most of their webinars are targeted at website flippers, as that is their target audience.

Empire Flippers find influencers to share their expertise with their audience. 

This is a good strategy as sometimes you might not be the expert on a topic. in that case, inviting an expert to co-host the webinar makes perfect sense.

The expert gets more exposure, so does your company, and you gain credibility.

By doing this, you will hardly run out of topics or experts to talk about a topic.

Repurpose Your Webinar Content for More Awareness

If you decide to start a monthly webinar series for your brand, you should also repurpose your content.

Committing to a monthly series takes a lot of effort, so maximize this to create multiple content assets for your business.

You can turn your webinar into:

• Video content for youtube
• Shorts for Instagram reels, youtube shorts, and TikTok
• Turn it into written content for your blog
• Create bite-size tweets from key points from your webinar
• Infographics for Instagram carousels, Facebook, etc.

You can generate 10+ content from one webinar session for different platforms and increase brand exposure and reach.

Enable Peer-To-Peer Networking

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networking means allowing your attendees to engage with one another, share information, and maybe go on to become friends.

What P2P networking does is that it helps you build a community. Interestingly, every brand with loyal customers has one thing in common, a cult following (community).

In other words, earning customer loyalty goes beyond just YOU. It is more about the community you are building.

Here are a few ideas to achieve this:

• During your webinar, encourage attendees to network with others in the webinar room. 
• Give short breaks for participants to engage with other members via chats.
• Invite a few attendees to speak on the virtual stage (sharing their webcam).
• Create groups on relevant platforms where networking can continue to grow stranger. For ex, LinkedIn or Slack are better options for B2B audiences and Facebook for B2C audiences.

Do note that not all webinar software allow attendees to chat with one another. So, ensure you are using a webinar platform that supports it.

Offer Individual Follow Ups

Consistently engage with your audience before, during, and after the webinar. You can do this via email and other channels.

When you follow up, personalize your message to individuals based on their stage in the webinar funnel. You can group your contacts into segments on your email automation software. 

Interestingly, nearly all automation software can do that, and some webinar platforms even come with inbuilt automation, simplifying the process.

Some ideas to group your registrants include:

• People who attended the live webinar, 
• Those that bought the product during and after the webinar, 
• Attendees that left the webinar room.
• Registrants who didn’t attend the webinar, 
• And people who are yet to engage with your emails.

Once your segments are set up, follow up each customer segment with a personalized message that relates to their stage in the webinar funnel.

Here are examples of ways to leverage these segments to follow up on your contacts during the pre-and post-webinar stages.

Before the webinar 

• Send your registrants a reminder of the webinar session. 
• Engage them with valuable content
• Persuade them to share the webinar with friends

During the webinar

• Send a reminder to registrants yet to join the session.
• Encourage people to interact with the webinar hosts and participants.

After the webinar

• Send a thank you message to attendees (plus freebies)
• Send a recorded session link to registrants who didn’t show up and those who left halfway
• Promote offer to attendees 
• Upsell paying customers with high ticket offers

It is not enough to host a webinar; follow up on your attendees to stay relevant to them.

Every time you follow up, you give attendees more reasons to become loyal to you.

Bonus Tip: Only Provide Valuable and Quality Content

The underlying meaning of everything said so far is to create valuable content. Anything can be valuable as far as it is what your target audience is looking for. 

Fun fact, comedy can be valuable content if it is what your listeners want.

In other words, creating valuable content doesn’t mean you have to share something ground-breaking. It simply means satisfying your audience with what they want from you.

Now to the quality part of it.

Several things can go wrong with your content quality as far as video and audio are concerned.

If you have the expertise and the resource your audience craves, but your sound quality itches the ear, you will sound like a novice.

Pro Tip: Invest in a quality microphone and camera to produce top-notch content that adds to your credibility.

How To Prepare For a Successful Webinar

Here are some steps to prepare for a successful webinar session.

Know Your Attendees

Before your webinar session, take time to know your attendees, who they are, and what they need help with.

Your attendees have something they hope to learn from you. Use the registration form to learn more about your attendees by asking an open-ended question.

A simple question is what they would love you to cover during the webinar session and one or two problems they are facing regarding the topic.

Engage With Your Audience Pre-Webinar

Similar to the first point, you can plan out several activities for the pre-webinar and start engaging your audience long before the date of the webinar.

Some ideas to engage your audience pre-webinar:

• Automate a reminder
• Send them polls and quizzes

Choose the Appropriate Webinar Platform

The webinar platform you host your webinar on will contribute to your attendees’ experience.

There are several webinar platforms on the internet to choose from – some are built for live webinars and evergreen webinars, and some offer all solutions.

Here are things to watch out for when deciding on your webinar platform and plan:

• The webinar platform should be within your budget.
• How many attendees can you have in a room? 
• What are the engagement features offered?
• What type of webinars can it host? (Evergreen, live webinar, hybrid)
• Browser-based or app-based? (I prefer browser-based as registrants don’t have to install an app to attend your webinar).

Take your time to identify what features you want in your webinar (it could be a gamification feature like quizzes, polls, etc). 

Once you have an idea of what your webinar looks like, choose a platform that fits the most.

Pick The Right Webinar Format

There are three popular webinar formats that you can select from:

• Live webinar
• Pre-recorded webinars 
• Hybrid webinar

Each of these webinar formats has its pros and cons. The evergreen webinar is scalable and easier to create but doesn’t offer good engagement as opposed to a live webinar.

A live webinar gives a vibrant experience to attendees and speakers. It also makes promoting offers easy and persuades attendees to buy in. But it comes with stress. Lastly, the hybrid is a combination of the two.

Before you host a webinar, decide which webinar format is suitable.

Offer a Clear Call to Action (CTA)

What action do you want attendees to take during and after your webinar session?

Is it to sign up for a free trial? Book a consultation? Download free resources? Join your Facebook community?

Before launching your webinar, ensure you have in mind a clear CTA of expected actions you want your attendees to take before, during, and after the webinar.

This will help you create the needed marketing assets for the CTA, like the banners, video sales letter (VSL), etc. 

It will also help you pre-configure your CTAs on your webinar platform and display it at any point in the webinar.

For CTAs you want to pitch live on the webinar, ensure you rehearse them – especially if it is your first time; make it as brief, convincing, and humane as possible.

Or, you can pre-record your call to action and plug it into the webinar like an advert. This saves you the stress of memorizing your sales pitch.

Pro Tip: You can make use of meeting templates to plan your webinar agenda.

Executive Summary

Webinars are a handy tool to establish authority and credibility, which is the bedrock of customer loyalty.

Beyond the webinar, ensure you consistently engage, educate, and provide quality support to your community. That is how you gain people’s loyalty.

Written in cooperation with mydigitalkube.com