How to Boost Webinar Conversion Rates At Every Stage of the Funnel

Every webinar has a goal. It could be about getting more leads, growing your audience, or even boosting sales. There’s no use in running a webinar if it doesn’t drive people to your goal. That's where webinar conversion rates come in. They measure how many people actually took the action you wanted. 

When we’re talking about webinar conversion rates, there are multiple places in the webinar funnel where someone can convert. Each stage of the webinar funnel has its own set of conversion points — from initial registration to post-webinar follow-up. At each stage, leads are either drawn closer to your offer or drop off. That’s why it’s important to optimize conversion rates throughout the funnel.  This article will walk you through the different conversion points at each of these stages and share tips on how to improve your webinar conversion rates. 

What is a Webinar Conversion Rate? 

A webinar conversion rate measures how well your webinar gets people to take the next desired action, like signing up for a product or booking a demo. It's a key way to measure if your webinar achieved its goal. Throughout the webinar funnel there are a lot of opportunities for people to convert to the next step.

When you host a webinar, you first need to get people to visit your webinar registration page, then get them to convert on that page. After that, you need to convert registrations into actual attendees, get some of those attendees to take action during the webinar, and finally convert viewers after the webinar. 

How to Measure Webinar Conversion Rates

Measuring webinar conversion rates is straightforward. It's about seeing how many people move to the next step in your webinar funnel. It can be calculated with this formula:

Webinar Conversion Rate = (People who took the desired action / Total people at that stage of the funnel) × 100

For example, to find out your webinar registration page's conversion rate, divide the number of registrations by the total number of unique views your registration page got, then multiply by 100.

Webinar Registration Page Conversion Rate = (Registrations / Unique Views of Registration Page) x 100

Here’s another example. If the goal of your webinar is booking sales demos, then you could measure your webinar conversion rate with the following formula: 

Webinar conversion rate = (Demos booked / total webinar attendees) x 100

The inputs in the formula might change slightly depending on the stage of the webinar funnel you're measuring, but the concept stays the same. You're tracking how effectively each part of your webinar moves people to act.

How to Boost Webinar Conversion Rates

Boosting your webinar's conversion rate is all about making each part of your webinar funnel work better. In the rest of the article we’ll dive into how to make more people click, sign up, attend, and take action during and after your webinar. We’ll share tips to improve those webinar conversion rates at every step.

Kickstarting Webinar Conversion Rates: Boosting Engagement and Traffic

To get started with improving webinar conversion rates, focus on the initial step: getting more people to “convert” to viewing your webinar registration page. For example, let’s say you’re promoting a webinar to your email subscribers.  The metric you’re trying to improve here is the percentage of email recipients who clicked and viewed your webinar registration page. 

While this might be more accurately referred to as a click-through rate (CTR) measurement, we wanted to cover tips for improving it here because it impacts the rest of your webinar funnel. It all starts with that. No matter what marketing channel you’re using to promote your webinar, you're trying to convert an audience who knows nothing about your webinar into viewing your registration page. Here’s how you can do that: 

Create Engaging Social Content to Convert

You can convert more people to your webinar registration page by getting more creative on social media.  Think teasers that spark curiosity or infographics that break down webinar details in a visually appealing way. Mix up the types of content you post. It can be anything from fun quizzes to short video clips. 

Contrast makes it easy to create short-form clips that are perfect for social media. You can upload past videos or webinars to Contrast and the tool will help you create clips.

Finally, remember that adding a touch of fun makes any event more appealing. For a deeper dive into effective social media strategies, explore our complete guide to promoting webinars on social media.

Improve Your Email Strategy

Email is the best way to promote any webinar. It typically drives 57% of registrations. Over 50% of webinar signups happen the week of the event, but if you start promoting at least four weeks before, you can get a 12% increase in registrations. 

Here’s a really simple three-part webinar email strategy you can use: 

1. Start with an initial announcement to spark initial interest.
2. Follow up with a second email that features a video that teases what attendees will get from attending.
3. Continue with email reminders leading up to the event day.  Emphasize the looming deadline to register and what they'll miss out on if they don’t attend.

Contrast customers can use our platform to customize and send email invites and reminders or their own email marketing platform. We’ve made it easy to adjust the timing of your emails and personalize them for maximum impact. 

Check out this guide to webinar invitation emails if you want to dive deeper: How to Build the Perfect Webinar Invitation Email (Plus 20 Great Examples and Templates)

Create Webinar Titles that Convert

Create titles that are compelling and highlight benefits to grab attention. We reviewed 5000 webinars hosted on Contrast to see what worked. The ones with the highest webinar conversion rates all did this:

1. Include the keyword of your webinar
2. Speak to your audience
3. Be clear about the outcome of the webinar
4. Good writing
5. Tone of voice

For more details, check out the full article: How to create a catchy webinar title: 5 Tips

Use Diverse Promotional Strategies

Going beyond the usual email and social media campaigns can make your webinar stand out. Have you tried hosting interactive Q&A sessions on social platforms or leveraging online communities? You could also partner with influencers or industry experts to get the webinar in front of their audiences. 

We’ve detailed all of these ideas and more in this guide: 25 unique webinar promotion tactics you haven't tried yet. 

Registration Page Tactics for Better Webinar Conversion Rates

Improving your webinar's registration conversion rate focuses on turning page viewers into registrants. This webinar conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of webinar registrations by the unique views of the registration page, then multiplying by 100. 

Webinar Registration Page Conversion Rate = (Registrations / Unique Views of Registration Page) x 100

Here are some ways you can increase the webinar conversion rate on your registration page. 

Design Principles for High-Converting Webinar Registration Pages

Focus on a clean, attractive design that's easy to navigate. The page layout should be intuitive and focus on guiding users to the registration form.

It’s easy to build a good-looking webinar registration page that converts using Contrast. 

• Easily add a cover image and your webinar details
• Add and customize speaker profiles, including photos, bios, and social links.
• Personalize your page with your brand’s colors and logos.
• No coding needed- our registration page builder lets you create pages in just a few minutes
  

Concise Copy Increases Conversion Rates

Clear is better than clever. Your registration page should have compelling copy that clearly states what attendees will gain from the webinar. Don’t focus on yourself. Highlight the benefits and outcomes that they’ll get. 

User-Friendly Registration Forms

Make sure the sign-up process is straightforward. Long forms kill this webinar conversion rate, so use forms that are easy to fill out. Think about it this way. In most cases, it’s better to get more leads from your webinar but have a little bit less data than to have a low webinar conversion rate. 

Showcase Testimonials and Social Proof

Use testimonials and other forms of social proof to build trust and credibility. Humans are social creatures. We want to know what other people think about something before trusting it ourselves. 

One easy way to do this is by pulling quotes from the chat of your last webinar. The example below is from a webinar we hosted. We could use some of the messages in the chat as testimonials on future registration pages to help increase this webinar conversion rate. 

Converting Webinar Registrations to Attendees 

The next webinar conversion rate that we’ll focus on is the registration to attendee conversion rate. It’s also sometimes referred to as attendance rate. This metric shows how well you're converting sign-ups into live participants. It can be measured with the following formula: 

Webinar registration to attendee conversion rate  = (number of live attendees / total number of registrations) x 100

Some people who sign up for your webinar will never attend it live or watch it on-demand, but there are things you can do to improve the webinar conversion rate of registrations to attendees. 

Convert Registrations with Timely Reminders

Take advantage of email reminders and continue to emphasize the unique value that they’ll get from your webinar. Sending a reminder the day before and another 10 minutes before the webinar can significantly increase attendance. The goal is to make sure that they don’t forget about you after signing up for your webinar. 

Preview Exclusive or Interactive Content

Highlighting something special that's only available for live attendees can create a sense of exclusivity and urgency. That could be a live Q&A with the speaker, a download that's just for attendees, or a special live-only offer. 

Contrast simplifies the process of hosting engaging Q&As during your webinars. You can easily set up and manage live Q&As and display them on screen with our dynamic layouts to keep your webinars visually interesting.

You could also use interactive content post-registration like polls or quizzes to get people more engaged. For example, after someone registers, you could automatically email them and ask if they have a particular question about the webinar topic that they’d like to see discussed in the webinar. 

Engaging Attendees to Improve Webinar Conversion Rates

The next stage of the webinar funnel that we’ll focus on is the live webinar itself. The goal here is to measure and improve the webinar conversion rate. We’re trying to increase the number of live attendees that take your next desired action. This action or goal could be anything from downloading additional content, visiting a website, booking a demo, to signing up for your product. The conversion rate at this stage is crucial because it directly impacts your webinar's ROI.

To understand how well your webinar converts attendees into taking action, you can use the following formula:

In-Webinar Conversion Rate = (Number of attendees taking the desired action / Total number of live attendees) x 100

This formula helps you pinpoint the effectiveness of your webinar’s content and the engagement strategies you used in it. Here are some ways you can boost this webinar conversion rate. 

Interactive Elements 

One key to improving in-webinar conversion rates is to keep your viewers engaged from start to finish. High engagement levels increase the likelihood of attendees taking the desired action. We built Contrast for the sole purpose of making webinars more engaging. Polls, Q&A sessions, live chats, dynamic layouts, and widgets all help to capture audience attention. Remember, an engaged audience is more likely to respond positively to your calls-to-action (CTAs).

Effective In-Webinar Calls-to-Action

Strategically placed CTAs are crucial for guiding attendees toward the desired action without disrupting the webinar's flow. Your CTAs should be clear, compelling, and relevant to the content being presented. Timing is also key; introduce CTAs at moments when engagement peaks, such as after delivering valuable insights or answering a common question.

Fore more details, check out our guide to webinar CTAs. 

The Foundation of Success: High-Quality Content

The core of any successful webinar is the content. Focusing on creating high-quality content is probably the number one thing you can do to improve your webinar conversion rate. It must be engaging, informative, and relevant to your audience's interests and needs. Tailor your webinar’s content to address their specific problems and you’ll see an improvement in your webinar conversion rates. 

Short on topics? Check out these 11 webinar ideas. 

Maximizing Webinar Conversion Rates: Post-Webinar Tactics 

After your webinar wraps up, the journey to convert attendees into leads or customers is far from over. This is where post-webinar tactics come into play. This stage focuses on strategies to continue engagement and guide attendees toward your desired action. 

The post-webinar conversion rate can be calculated by looking at the number of registrants or attendees who take a specific action after the webinar ends. At this stage, that action you’re measuring is likely your primary goal of the webinar - leads, demo bookings, signups, sales, etc.  This conversion rate measures the effectiveness of your post-webinar strategies.

Post-Webinar Conversion Rate = (Number of Post-Webinar Actions Taken / Total Webinar Registrations or Attendees) × 100

For example, let’s imagine that the primary goal of your webinar was to get people to try a self-guided demo of your product. If 100 people attended your webinar and your primary 20 of them tried the demo after, your post-webinar conversion rate would be 20%.

Here are some ways you can boost this webinar conversion rate:

Follow-Up Communications That Convert

Effective follow-up communications are key after any webinar. Tailor your messages to reflect the attendee's engagement level during the webinar and provide them with valuable resources or next steps. For example, you’ll want to send a different email to those who attended vs those who registered but didn’t. 

Nurture Campaigns

Nurturing leads after the webinar involves sending targeted content and personalized messages to guide them through their buyer's journey. This could mean segmented email sequences, social media engagement, or direct outreach from your sales team with personalized offers.

Repurposing Your Webinar Content

Repurposing webinar content into different formats like blog posts, infographics, and short video clips extends the life of your content. It can also be used in your nurture campaigns to help drive more conversions after the webinar. 

With Contrast, you can easily turn your live webinar into an on-demand webinar available for replay, complete with customizable chapters. 

Our Repurpose Ai tool also makes it easy to transform your webinar content into different formats. Need to create a custom email nurture campaign for people who registered but didn’t attend your webinar? Just ask Repurpose Ai. It can create it for you based on the content that was shared in the webinar. 

Gathering Post-Webinar Feedback

Collecting feedback through post-webinar surveys is essential for understanding what worked, what didn’t, and how you can improve future webinars. This feedback informs your content strategy and helps refine your webinar topics and presentation style. It’s an often overlooked way to increase your webinar conversion rates. You might find some reasons why people didn’t convert in the feedback and can adjust your strategy moving forward. 

Measuring and Analyzing Webinar Performance

Understanding how well your webinars convert attendees is key to proving the ROI of webinars to your leadership team. This starts with measuring webinar conversion rates using your webinar platform's analytics tools.

Your webinar platform should offer detailed analytics that track every part of the webinar funnel. These analytics help you see not just how many people registered or attended, but how deeply they engaged with your content. 

With Contrast’s webinar analytics, you get a clear view of your various webinar conversion rates. A lot of webinar platforms only offer detailed analytics in their paid plans, but we offer ours for free. We want every marketer to know what works and what doesn't. 

You’ll also want to integrate your webinar platform with your CRM so that you can track things like meetings booked from webinars or sales closed. In addition to helping you calculate the ROI of your webinar, when you install the Contrast + HubSpot integration you can use webinar data to create custom lists, workflows, sequences, reports, and more in HubSpot. 

Beyond the webinar conversion rates we’ve already discussed, it's also important to track some other webinar KPIs to measure performance. Some essential metrics include:

• Source of Webinar Registrations: How people found out about your webinar.
• Watch Time: How much of your webinar people watched
• Attendee Engagement: How much attendees actively participated in the webinar

Tracking these metrics over time will give you a solid foundation for improving your webinars. It will help make them more engaging, which will result in more conversions. 

Webinar Conversion Rate Takeaways

We've walked through how to lift your webinar conversion rates at every step. Starting strong with engaging content that draws people in. Making registration easy and attractive. Keep promoting to convert registrations into attendees. Host interactive sessions to boost your in-webinar conversion rate. And following up strategically to drive post-webinar conversions. 

Here's the gist: make every part of your webinar funnel clear, engaging, and easy for people to move through. From first click to final action. Each step matters to improve your webinar conversion rates. 

And here's a tip: Contrast can help a lot. Our platform makes webinars easier to run and more engaging. Plus, it's free to use.

Try these strategies. Try Contrast. We’re certain your webinars will do better.