Webinar Secrets

How to prep, how to fill the seats and get people to show up, why cupcakes are involved, and what I've changed over the years...

Want to do webinars in your business?

Awesome!

I love them in mine.

I mean, what’s not to love? You get to help people for free, and you get to earn trust with your audience and enroll folks in your programs who are a great fit for you.

I’m gearing up for a couple of live free webinars next week, and I thought I’d share a little of my strategy and how I prepare. And some of the insanity behind-the-scenes! (Note: If you are a coach you are welcome to attend the free webinar - it’s going to be awesome, and it’s all about how to get a steady stream of coaching clients. Here’s a fun link to grab your seat).

Let’s start with the landing page, why a cupcake?

Here’s what I mean about the cupcake:

I’m in an ongoing fight with my team, wherein they want to put my face on all of the things, and I don’t want them to put my face on all of things, and so they tell me to pick a coherent image to tie in with the webinar theme…

…which I somehow always do when I am hungry. Hi! I’m a toddler.

And so we end up with food. That’s it. That’s the secret. That’s why there’s almost always a food image on our webinar registration pages, and often in our ads. I’m hungry and love sweets (and my theory is that you *also* love sweets and it makes the topic more fun and accessible to have a cupcake involved. Let me know in the comments if I am right!)

How do we fill the webinars?

For us, we market our webinars to our warm audience, which means people who have interacted with us in some way. Our primary way to fill webinars is by emailing the Coach Pony email list.

I’ll send 2-3 solo emails in the week leading up to the webinar (which means emails just focused on the webinar), and also put a tiny blurb into 1-2 our regular Sunday Couch School emails. Couch School is our free weekly business training for coaches, that you can do from your couch. So, here is a blurb from our last Couch School, to give you an idea of how I incorporate this into our newsletter:

We also do a small re-marketing campaign on Meta just to our warm audience, usually $1000 - $2000. We do not spend a lot of money on Meta ads at Coach Pony, and this is one of the few times we do a more focused spend - just to make sure folks on our email list see the chance to join the webinar and don’t miss it.

We focus on warm traffic because it converts far better on a webinar than cold.

How do we get people to show up?

This is something we are always experimenting with, as show up rates have dropped over time.

But in general, as soon as you sign up you get a welcome email, and in that email the first action, in bold, is to add the event to your preferred calendar. I do this because I want the class to show up in the place you are most likely to see. So we push you to do that first and foremost. We use AddEvent as the tool to make it a simple one-click for our clients.

We then ask you to respond to us and let us know what you are looking to learn. This is super helpful information for us so we can see what coaches are struggling with - it’s easy market research - and it also makes it more likely that the webinar reminder emails will land in your inbox.

Note: If you want to see these emails, sign up for the webinar and watch the process. It’s a great way to learn!

Then 24 hours before the webinar starts you get a reminder email with the Zoom link and some important reasons to attend live. I always try and highlight the takeaways or benefits that students get from the learning in these emails, as well as my own credibility on why I’m someone who has knowledge on this topic.

The day of the webinar you get another reminder about an hour before, and then we do one right as the webinar begins, which normally will hit your inbox about 10 minutes after the webinar has started.

So - we send at least 4 reminder emails with the information to help make sure you get there.

We used to also offer SMS reminders, but we found that didn’t move the needle on show up rates and was a tech pain for us to implement, so we stopped.

One thing we don’t do, but I’ll be experimenting with later this year, is to offer a show up gift to folks who attend live. A fun bonus PDF or training that we’ll only share in the chat on the webinar so only folks who are there can grab it. I haven’t done it in the past because our show up rates were good, and I’m also lazy. But I think it’ll be a fun experiment to see how it impacts folks being there live.

How do I prepare?

Over the years I’ve built out several different great webinars on important topics for coaches. We’ve got one on how to sell coaching, one on how to find clients without any social media, and this one on how to build a business with a steady stream of clients. I repeat these webinars every year.

These all took time to build - several weeks each for me to pull together the slides and information, and put it into the most helpful format possible. I tend to use slide decks that consist of close to 150 slides, so there’s a lot to think through to make it helpful AND engaging.

Now that I’ve built all of them, I tend to spend a day the week before the webinar editing and updating the relevant slide deck, and the Monday before the webinar practicing the delivery. Yes, I literally give the full presentation to myself at least twice before I inflict myself on real people.

Then I’ll skim through the slides one last time on the day of the first webinar, and after that muscle memory takes over.

I also make sure to have a really nice breakfast before the webinar, and I have water, tea and soda available as I give the talk. I get SUPER thirsty when I speak, and I’ve learned to make sure to have hydration available from many angles.

Finally, the day before the webinar I fire up Zoom and Ecamm Pro, and make sure all of the tech is working and my team can hear me and see me and there are no snafus.

(If you are curious, I use Ecamm to be able to pull comments up on the screen, have fun sound effects, and other things to make the webinar more engaging).

What I’ve changed over the years

Over the years I’ve tried to shorten my webinars.

Over teaching is my achilles heel.

With a webinar, you have people’s attention for about an hour.

And if you are making an offer, you do want to get to it before the hour is up - as people will have other commitments to get to.

Because I’m long winded and I LOVE to teach, I have a constant battle with myself not to over teach, and stuff my webinars with so much information that my students get overwhelmed, and I run out of time to sell my program at the end. So over the years I’ve worked hard to edit myself and my teaching down, so that students retain the knowledge I give them, and also have space to learn more about our program if that is of interest.

Note: I still have work to do in this area. If you attend the webinar, you’ll see the struggle :).

I’ve also changed my sales approach. We all know that I’ll be making an offer at the end of a free webinar, so I briefly mention that that up front, as a part of the agenda. I don’t do my sales pitch in the beginning of the webinar, but I do say that I’ll be modelling how to sell a coaching program, and I share what it is and where folks can find it if they are interested.

I think the community appreciates the heads up, and I like to be as transparent as possible.

Finally, I offer more webinars at different times. I used to just do one webinar per launch, but I know, I know! People are busy, and having multiple times increases sign up rates and gets more people engaged. So *most of the time* I’ll do two webinars during any launch.

We also *of course* offer replays of the webinar as well, but getting people live is always the goal.

What I haven’t changed over the years

I haven’t ever changed my strategy. My webinars are designed to do two things:

Thing 1: Help the community.

Thing 2: Show people why they also need more help, and should consider investing in my Build A REAL Business program.

No matter how much I want to help, I’m just one person with an hour of someone’s attention.

I am not magical.

As good as my classes are (and they are good - the feedback on our Coach Pony webinars is superb) I cannot make a major impact to someone’s business and make them a success in just ONE hour.

But I can give them what they need over time, and in a structured program I can give them support and feedback and information that will help them reach their coaching goals.

So I want folks who need a quick helpful tip or two to get that for free in the webinar. And I want the people who know that building a business takes training and time to get a chance to work with me more closely in BARB.

The webinar is designed to do that, and my strategy there has been the same since my very first free webinar.

And that’s it!

That’s what I’m focused on next week! If this is of interest to you in your business, I hope to see you there! And if you have a question, put it in the comments.

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