We’ve just released an exciting conversion-focused update that will get you more registrants for your webinars.
This is more than a feature update post. I’ll be sharing what we learned (from over 250,000 webinars) about what makes a high converting registration page. I’ll also show you how to build your own customized pages in minutes.
Why is your registration page so important?
The whole point of running a webinar is to build trust with your audience. We offer a valuable workshop and/or demo, we engage with potential customers, we answer questions.
At the end of the day, people only buy from those they trust.
But that trust building process doesn’t start on the webinar. It starts at registration.
In a matter of seconds, people ask themselves two questions the moment they land on your registration page:
- Is this worth my time?
- Can I trust this person with my email address?
If the answers are yes, they sign up!
You now get the opportunity to build upon that trust with your webinar. Even if they don’t attend the webinar, you can follow up via email with a webinar replay, or another piece of content they would find useful.
If the answer to either of those questions is no, you’ve lost them (maybe forever). You have no way to follow up because they didn’t give you their email address (and you might even be out of pocket if you ran a paid marketing campaign).
See how critical this is?
The industry average for a webinar registration page conversion is 30%. We at WebinarNinja found that to be shockingly low.
If 100 people visit a webinar registration page they saw in an email, on social, or in an ad, only 30 of them sign up?!? What happened to the other 70?
We’ve been obsessing over how to improve registration conversions for the past year. We learned what a webinar registration page MUST HAVE to convert at a high rate. We also nailed down what YOU MUST NOT HAVE to avoid visitors leaving your page without signing up.
In this post, I’ll be sharing what we’ve learned and how we’ve used our research, data, and experience to allow WebinarNinja users to create custom registration pages that convert at an average of 59%.
4 Registration Page Must Haves
Again, you have seconds to convince your visitors to register for your webinar. It’s critical you give them the information and experience to make that quick decision. Here is what you must have on every webinar registration page.
The 4 registration page must haves follow the AIDA principle. AIDA is a marketing acronym that stands for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. I will break down how to implement each of these in your registration pages.
A classic scene from the Pulitzer Prize-winning play adaptation, Glengarry Glen Ross.
1. Attention: Grabbing someone’s attention is the first step in converting a visitor into a registrant.
You really can’t get anyone to do anything if you don’t have their attention. With everything that can distract us in this day and age- notifications, messages, alerts- we need to command our visitors attention so they can take the action we need them to take.
An interesting hero image can grab your visitors attention immediately. This allows them to zero-in on your registration page and block out all other distractions. As they say, an image is worth a thousand words.
Advertising and marketing legend David Ogilvy used images to grab people’s attention as his signature move in his advertisements.
Who’s that distinguished man on the red carpet? What’s up with that guy with the eye patch? What’s his story?
Humor is one of the fastest, most effective ways to be noticed when you have a second or two to work with. With the WebinarNinja’s all new page builder, you can upload images or choose one of our many pre-selected gallery images to go along with your catchy headline.
2. Interest: Now that you have their attention, it’s time to pique their interest.
Let’s take a look at an example. The combination of a dog raising its paw + the headline of “GOT QUESTIONS ABOUT HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DOG?”, makes a visitor smile, and curiosity sets in.
Creating a headline is just as easy. We created our page editor to allow for inline editing, which means you can edit and see what your page would look like without previewing. You can even style your headlines so they stand out.
You can also change the color of your hero image overlays to make the headline really pop.
3. Desire: Attention and interest are one thing, but actually wanting something is another thing all together.
A second headline that cuts through the noise and triggers desire can do wonders. One of the best ways to trigger desire is to ask a question. Our brains are hardwired to seek out answers when a question is asked. So ask questions to elicit answers that confirm desires.
In our example registration page, we ask the question: “Wish You Could Civilize Your Dog?”
If your dog is driving you mad, then you can’t help but answer with an emphatic “YES!”
This creates the desire to get answers on how to get your dog to behave.
4. Action: Make it dead easy to take action.
The action we want visitors to take is to register for the webinar, obvi.
A clean, clear registration button allows visitors to clearly understand how to take that action. All the visitor needs to do is click a button to complete a simple registration form.
Why the 2- step process?
We split tested thousands of registration pages over the years and found that a 2-step registration process lowers overwhelm for visitors and increases conversions by up to 200%.
Worried you’ll write the wrong webinar title or host(s) name when editing? How about the wrong date and time? No problem.
We created a simple tag feature that allows you to insert webinar specific info with handy tags like Webinar Title, Host, Date, Webinar Type and more.
Notice how all 4 elements of AIDA are all above the fold of the page- meaning on a computer, a visitor doesn’t need to scroll to experience all the elements. Any additional information I may want to add to the page should be added beyond the fold.
What About Attendance Conversions?
So you got people to register for your webinar. What about making sure they show up?
The industry attendance rate is 40%. That means on average, out of every 100 people that register for your webinar, 40 attend your live webinar.
Again, this statistic was unacceptably low to us. Why are people not showing up to a webinar they willingly registered for?
So we worked hard on improving the experience registrants have after they register. With the critical changes we made to our thank you pages, email notifications and fast access links, we were able to increase the attendance rate to 63%. Let me show you how.
Thank you pages
The thank you page (or confirmation page) is the page the registrant sees immediately after registering. This page plays an important role in ensuring your registrant shows up to your webinar.
The call to action we want our registrant to take, this time, is to prioritize your webinar in their busy schedule. As we all know, if it doesn’t get added to your calendar, it simply does not happen.
This is why we include an Add to Calendar feature on all thank you pages. With a click, your registrants get all the webinar info (date, time, link) added to their calendar.
When we start our week or day, we check our calendars to see what’s coming up. This feature makes sure you webinar is top of mind and not missed.
Just like your registration page, your thank you pages are totally customizable with WebinarNinja.
Email Notification Reminders
Email notification reminders are built into WebinarNinja. Timely email reminders get sent to your registrants to remind them that your webinar is coming up.
You can create and add your own email notifications but we created ones for you by default. These notifications remind registrants at the optimal time and frequency- in our experience- with over a quarter of a million webinars.
These emails ensure your webinar is top of mind well before and just before your webinar begins.
How To Create Your Own Custom High Converting Templates
With our latest feature release, you can now customize and save your own registration and thank you page templates with WebinarNinja.
You can even set your custom template as default so it’s used for all future webinars you create- saving you a ton of time. WebinarNinja will automatically convert the template to adjust to the webinar type- Live, Automated, Series or Hybrid.
Also in this feature release, we added an all new media library. Here, you can manage all your page templates and media. This is an easy way to see them all, edit, delete or duplicate your templates with a few clicks. We will be expanding the media library soon in an upcoming feature release.
The best way to experience how easy and effective our page template creator is, is to give us a spin for free. Yup! Get started for free with our Free 14-day trial. Run your first webinar on us! You can upgrade, downgrade or cancel right inside your account at anytime, no hoops to jump through.Plus, if you need any help along the way, we provide free training and helpful support. In fact, 95% of our users have rated our service as exceptional.
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