A Webinar Follow Up Strategy That Always Generates Leads

Hosting a successful webinar is only half the battle; the real magic happens after the event. A well-executed webinar follow-up strategy is the secret to transforming your audience's interest into actionable leads. Without a clear plan in place, all the hard work of organizing, promoting, and delivering the webinar could fall flat, leaving potential opportunities untapped.

Whether your goal is to nurture new prospects, convert engaged attendees, or re-engage those who couldn’t make it, a strategic follow-up approach ensures you’re maximizing every touchpoint. In this blog, we’ll walk you through a step-by-step webinar follow-up strategy designed to generate leads consistently. From crafting personalized messages to leveraging multi-channel outreach, we’ll cover everything you need to keep the momentum going long after the webinar concludes.

Ready to turn your webinars into a lead-generation powerhouse? Let’s dive in!

Pre-Webinar Preparation: Laying the Groundwork for Follow-Ups

A great follow-up webinar strategy actually starts long before your event goes live. Setting the stage with effective pre-webinar preparation helps to ensure your follow-ups will be targeted, personalized, and meaningful. Now, let's look at three key steps in laying the groundwork for successful follow-ups:

1. Capturing Data During Registration

Your registration form is a goldmine for insights that could shape your post-webinar engagement. Ask questions that can give you an idea of your audience's goals, pain points, and preferences. Examples of useful data include but are not limited to the following:

  • What challenges are they trying to solve?
  • Which topics are they most interested in?
  • How familiar are they with your product or service?

This will not only help you craft your follow-ups, but it will also inform your webinar content to meet audience-specific needs, making the session all the more engaging and relevant.

2. Segment Your Audience In Advance Of The Webinar

Not all registrants are created equal, and a one-size-fits-all approach simply won't resonate. By segmenting your audience in advance, you can create personalized follow-ups that speak directly to their unique interests and behaviors.

Consider segments such as:

  • First-time registrants versus returning attendees.
  • Prospects at various stages of the buyer's journey: awareness, consideration, and decision.
  • Industries or job roles for a more focused approach.

Pre-webinar segmentation ensures that when it's time to follow up, your messaging feels personalized and relevant increasing the likelihood of conversion.

3. Crafting a Compelling Value Proposition for the Webinar

The value proposition with which you sell the registration is not only a tool for securing attendees but also the very backbone of your follow-ups. You will want to reinforce this value in every touchpoint post-webinar to remind them why further engagement with your brand is of benefit.

Example:

  • If your webinar promises actionable insights, your follow-up can extend the value with some extra tips or resources.
  • If you presented a product, highlight the benefits with a custom demo offer.

By more clearly defining what the webinar is worth and delivering on your promise, you build trust and provide an easy transition into your follow-up strategy. In this way, set yourself up in the best way to create resonating follow-ups with your audience for better connections and lead generation.

Timing Is Everything: Crafting the Perfect Follow-Up Schedule

Timing plays a critical role in the success of your webinar follow-up strategy. The key is to strike while the iron is hot—engage with your audience while the webinar content is still fresh in their minds. At the same time, a thoughtful cadence ensures your messaging remains relevant and consistent over time. Here’s how to structure your follow-up schedule for maximum impact:

1. Immediate Follow-Up: Within 24 Hours of the Webinar

The first 24 hours after your webinar are crucial. Your audience is most likely to remember the event, so this is the best time to re-engage.

Key actions to include:

  • Send a thank-you email: Thank them for attending or showing interest.
  • Share the webinar recording: Make sure that those who couldn't attend can still view the content.
  • Key takeaways: Include a concise version of the key highlights and talking points from the webinar to remember how valuable it was.
  • Present further steps: A clear request may be to schedule a demonstration, download a related asset, or join another webinar.

2. Medium-term: 2–7 days since ending the webinar

Once the initial excitement has subdued, it's time to nurture your leads with meaningful follow-ups. This is a great time to dive deeper into your audience's needs and present tailored solutions.

Key actions to include:

  • Share additional resources: Email blog posts, whitepapers, or case studies that give further information on the subject of your webinar.
  • Segmented outreach: Using the data obtained during the registration process, as well as during the actual webinar, craft personalized email messages based on attendee actions.
  • Socialize on social media: Ask people to follow your brand, take part in discussions, or join associated groups online.

3. Long-Term Engagement: Nurture Campaigns and Periodic Check-Ins

Not all webinar leads will immediately close. For the rest who take longer, be sure to have a long-term approach to keep them within your sights.

Activities to include:

  • Automated nurture campaigns: Send targeted email sequences, filled with useful content relevant to your audience's interests and buying stage.
  • Periodic check-ins: You could touch base with product updates, industry trends, or simply upcoming events.
  • Exclusive offers: Give your incentive-each discount, perhaps, or VIP access to a future webinar to help you reactivate cold leads.

Through this process, integrate immediate, medium-term, and long-term follow-up for an all-inclusive webinar follow-up strategy to engage the audience, nourish the leads, and increase conversions with the passage of time.

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Multi-Channel Follow-Up Approach

A successful follow-up webinar strategy doesn't rely on one method of communication. You will be able to meet your audience where they are using multiple channels to create more opportunities for engagement and conversion. Here's how you integrate email, social media, and personal outreach into your follow-up efforts:

1. Leveraging Email as a Primary Follow-Up Tool

Email is the cornerstone of any follow-up strategy, offering a direct and efficient way to engage your audience.

Key practices include:

  • Personalized messages: Use data from the webinar to tailor emails to each attendee or registrant. For example, reference specific questions they asked or sessions they attended.
  • Clear and actionable content: links to the webinar recording, key takeaways, or even related resources. Every single email should have a distinct call to action, say, "Book a demo" or "Download this eBook."
  • Automated sequences: design an email drip campaign with lead nurturing over time. Add value at every step of the buyer's journey.

2. Leveraging Social Media to Connect and Engage

Social media is a great place to nurture relationships and keep your brand top of mind.

Best practices include:

  • Post-webinar engagement: Publish highlights, quotes, or even polls to teams on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram, and ask for comments.
  • Direct messaging: Send follow-up messages through LinkedIn or other professional networks to connect with attendees and thank them for joining; invite further conversation.
  • Community building: Encourage participants to enter a specific group or forum where they can share thoughts, ask questions, and maintain contact with your brand.

3. Personal Outreach to High-Potential Leads

Attendees who present the greatest level of engagement, or who match the criteria of an ideal customer, have proven to be the perfect prospects for personal outreach.

Following are some effective methods for follow-through:

  • Phone calls: Follow up directly to inquire about their experience, answer any questions, and present custom solutions.
  • LinkedIn messages: A personal message of appreciation for attending, with one further resource or next step relevant to their interests.
  • Custom proposals or offers: When there is great potential from the lead, create a tailored follow-up to exactly what their needs are-for example, a product demo or a personal consultation.

This multi-channel approach lets you engage leads in various meaningful ways, making sure your follow-up strategy for the webinar is holistic and efficient. Each channel reinforces the others, creating a cohesive experience that moves leads closer to conversion.

Use a Webinar Theater to Generate More Leads

After a webinar, you create e-mail campaigns, keep in touch with prospects, or repurpose the content into other content mediums, among other webinar follow-up best practices. And if you’re like most, you probably post the on-demand link somewhere on your website and watch views trickle in over time. But what if there was another strategy to generate leads from your webinar LONG after it is over?

The trick to getting more leads from your webinars is by surfacing the older webinar topics to both new and old prospects, in one place. A webinar theater is a virtual home for ALL your webinar content, both live and on-demand. With a theater, you can drive registrations for new individual webinars, while providing access to a library of existing resources from past webinars.

 
webinar theater is a virtual home for all your webinar content both live and on-demand
 

You don’t want to repeat yourself, but hey, that presentation from February may be just what’s needed in October to push a prospect to close. Consider adding a webinar theater for all the webinars you have hosted, and the ones you will host in the future, in one place.

After a Webinar: Strategy to Qualify Prospects

With a theater, you can let your marketing program cross-pollinate while your prospects self-select the content they need in the theater you set up. This way, you can continue qualifying prospects for webinars done in the past. 

Features available in a webinar theater that can help you qualify prospects at any time:

    • 1:1 room chats
    • Small groups and public chats
    • Social sharing capabilities
    • Surveys, polls, and tests
    • Detailed reporting to create a valuable picture of each prospect over time. 

Adding the above features to your current vault of valuable content takes your lead generation through webinars to a whole other level.

How Webinar Theaters Help Improve Conversions

Posting your webinars online is a great first step in repurposing your content and getting more value. However, the above-mentioned features from a webinar theater give some added bonuses to your valuable content for lead generation.

Increase ROI

You have limited time and resources, so making the most of every piece of content is critical.  If you can drive more views for your on-demand content, you can engage more customers and prospects, squeezing more ROI from each webinar campaign and stretching your budget just a bit further.

Qualify Prospects With Real-Time Data

With real-time analytics and reporting, your sales team has 24/7 access to data from virtual attendees. In the theater, you can see where attendees are clicking and what information they are interested in – all to help you qualify prospects and nurture leads more easily after the webinar has already been live.

Gain Authority in Your Industry

Using webinars as part of a content marketing strategy is increasingly popular because they allow you to demonstrate thought leadership and interact with audiences to create engagement, which you can measure through unique tracking capabilities.

Follow-Up On This Webinar Strategy

If you have webinar content that can act as a lead-generating tool long after the live date, then try setting up a webinar theater for your content today. See how your webinars will look when you use the 6Connex virtual event platform with video conferencing in a live demo.


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