Why People Aren’t Signing Up for Your Virtual Event & How to Fix It

What do you do if you've set up a webinar, promoted it heavily, and only a few people register, or even fewer show up?

That’s what happened to Folasade.

In this article :

• Folasade will talk about the webinar that failed

• We’ll talk about why the webinar failed

• What could have been done better

• Why the fixation on using webinar registrants as a yardstick for a successful webinar is misguided

Here’s Folasade’s experience 

“I used to lead content marketing for an early-stage startup.

I remember the first time we decided to invest in webinars as a marketing tactic. We were so excited about it — we had all these marketing assets ready, we'd been preparing for weeks, and then… It was a complete flop.

We got only 7 people as registrants. I was disappointed. This was something that was supposed to be huge.

We'd spent so much time creating the marketing materials and pushing them out across social media, but it didn't have the impact that we'd expected.“

Here’s why we think the webinar failed (and by extension why most webinars fail)

1. The webinar was too general; they were aiming for too broad an audience.

Let's say you're hosting a webinar about the best ways to market your small business. Your target audience is very narrow: only people who own small businesses will benefit from this information. However, your webinar title reads "How to market your business more effectively."

While your targeting might seem broad, you are limiting the chance of your message connecting with a particular demographic.

There are different types of businesses, each requiring a different marketing strategy. So who is it that you want to teach how to market their business? 

In the example above, your message is reaching everyone but it isn’t resonating with anyone in particular.

So, they’ll all see your webinar flyers but very few of them will register because they can’t tell whether or not they will gain value from attending due to the lack of clear communication. 

2. They don’t trust you or your brand enough to attend.

In addition to investing in content and building your brand through more extensive outreach efforts, you can build trust with your audience by inviting experts who are well respected within your target audience.

Doing this will let them know that they are going to be learning from an expert on the subject which will give them confidence about signing up for your webinar.

This will also give you credibility as an expert and help build relationships with your audience.

3. They don't see any urgency or relevance in signing up right away.

This is tricky because one of the “famous” hallmarks of planning a successful webinar is that promoting a webinar weeks before it occurs and encouraging registrations will guarantee enough attendees. But what if that idealogy is broken?

This is a personal opinion, but I’ve found that announcing my webinars too early does more harm than good.

My hypothesis:

• People who register a long time before the webinar is held are more likely to forget about it and will probably not attend.

• If there are too many days between registering for a webinar and the actual event, people are more likely to lose interest in attending.

So, what can you do to improve your webinar registration to attendance ratio? 

Experiment with announcing your webinar in a way that makes it look exclusive.

Here’s an example. 

Let’s say you have a webinar where you want to teach small business owners how to use social media to grow their revenue to 6 figures within 8 months.

You can put a tweet or an Instagram post saying: 

We’ll be hosting a free webinar with @ (*insert name of speakers) this Saturday. We’ll be sharing full details on how they both used social media to build their shoes and thrift businesses into over #3 Million in monthly profits. Like this tweet and I’ll send you a DM on how to register for the webinar.

Try to amplify the tweet within your network and in no time, people will start sending DMs. 

When people send you direct messages (DMs) asking to register for your webinar, don't reply by sending them a link.

Rather, ask for their name and email address, send them a calendar invite with the link to the webinar in the invite, and tell them to accept the invite.

Set up reminders on the calendar invite so you don’t have to send out email reminders that end up in the promotions tab. 

PS: By not sending them a registration form, you maintain the integrity of your tweet that the webinar is exclusive, and they cannot simply share a link with a friend.

4. You measured the success of your webinar solely by the number of registrants and attendees.

A successful webinar that converts into leads is one that is well-planned, executed, and organized. But what makes a successful webinar is not just about what you wanted to achieve by organizing the webinar in the first place.

It's also about how you can repurpose your content so that it continues to deliver value to those who watched it live and those who may want to watch it at a later date.

Here’s Folasade’s advice on repurposing online events.

“If you invest your time and energy in planning an online event, and only a few people show up, don't give up.

You can still do a lot more with your recording and potentially reach many more people than would have attended the webinar.

For instance, I recently planned a Twitter Space session for a startup and we had a lot of people tune in. However, we didn't have more than 70 people at a particular time. 

In my head,  I thought more people would join because the startup had a good following on Twitter but that didn’t happen.

So what we did was, we converted the recording to LinkedIn posts, Twitter threads, and blog posts.

What  I’ll say is that repurposing is the best way to actually take advantage of stuff like that and make sure that you don’t totally lose out on it.

Record, transcribe, turn it into an article, turn it into a Twitter thread, share it on Instagram as a carousel… That’s basically it.”

Here's to the Marketers who work for early-stage startups

Bottom line

The bottom line is, follow best practices for enticing as many attendees as possible. We’ve provided a few of these above, but we want to emphasize here that when it comes to webinars, there are no “one size fits all” rules—be empathetic with what your business requires and think outside the box. 

Don’t be afraid to be different or try new things! While this publication has focused on why webinars fail, remember that planning the webinar itself is not where the job ends. The best thing you can do after your webinar is, 

1. Milk the hell out of your content by repurposing it to different channels. 

2. Make it easy for people to take the next step in whatever it is that they came looking for: keep them on your email list and continue marketing to them like they came by your booth at a tradeshow!

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