Printing Industry Webinars
Idealliance is a global non-profit association that serves the print and packaging industry. As Director of Media, Marketing, and Communications, I created a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, including this one for capitalizing on leads from webinar attendees.
When I started at Idealliance, the company had a regular cadence of free informative live webinars every month. The sign-ups and live attendance were regularly over 200 people, and often 400 or more, which were great numbers for such a niche audience. Unfortunately there was no system in place for regular targeted follow-up or a plan to sell to this highly engaged audience.
I quickly realized that our company had a golden opportunity to market to an audience that was primed and ready to buy. The numbers indicated that this audience was eager for more content, and it was a missed opportunity that we weren’t reaching out to them with next steps after the webinars were over.
I created a process to capture their information upon signup, then sent a series of reminder emails to encourage them to attend the upcoming webinar in order to increase our already high attendance rate. After the webinar was over, I sent them a recording, along with relevant upcoming educational opportunities available for purchase.
The active audience members who opened those emails then were added to a geographical email list for live, in-person trainings happening in their area, and those leads were also given to our sales team for personalized phone call follow-ups to see if they had colleagues who would be interested in discounted group training as well. We also used this engaged list to tout our membership; and since the webinars were so popular, we offered occasional “members-only” webinars as an additional incentive to join.
The emails sent after the webinars had an average open rate of over 25% and our sales team was able to get a lot more qualified leads from the list of attendees.