How we got our first 100 Webinar sign ups

In this post I wanted to share some more insights about how we got our first 100 webinar sign ups and how we use Jetpack CRM to help manage our communications for those who have signed up.

Why Webinars?

We have been developing Jetpack CRM since 2015. It’s consistently improving as we add new features and refine performance, fix bugs and build out the software. However, there’s only so much that can be said in blog posts. There’s a saying

A picture speaks a thousand words

That’s true, but if that’s true then the following is also true too

A video speaks a thousand pictures (and has sound!)

So, videos are in theory much better than screenshots. You can use videos to explain your product, you can use them to talk about features but there’s one thing missing from Just Putting Videos Up Onto YouTube. Interactivity is missing!

Webinars let your viewers ask you questions live and you answer them live!

That’s where Webinars come in, with Webinars you can talk about your product, but also you can answer questions live, viewers (or participants) can watch, follow along and ask you questions, you can then answer them live. It’s the perfect combination. But what use is a webinar if no one shows up?

Getting your first 100 sign ups

There’s plenty of things that you can look to do to boost your webinar attendance and I’ll cover them in this post. We use Livestorm for our webinars, combined with Jetpack CRM to help us to maximise the effectiveness of them (more on that later), here’s what we do to get our webinars packed with people every time we run them. Here’s how we go about doing it

Choose a time that suits..

We are UK based, but we have a lot of interest from people in the USA, that’s why we try and run our Webinars at a mutual time (2pm UK time) this is first thing in the morning in the USA (but hopefully not too early) for people to attend.

Vary the time, from time to time

Wow, that’s a lot of times to say time 😊but if we find that 2PM is too early, we’ll do a later one every month or two to cater for people who cannot make our 2PM time.

Choose Tuesdays, because it’s NOT Monday

We’ve found that running the webinars on a Tuesday is the most popular time, if you choose a Monday then too many people are just getting back to work after a weekend, maybe hitting a weekend worth of inbox they need to manage. Tuesdays are generally calmer and a better time to host the webinars.

Include the webinar in onboarding material

In our emails that go out to people who have completed the welcome wizard, we mention the webinar and how to sign up for it.

Include options to sign up on the website

We have also got places on the website where people can sign up to the event via certain widgets. We have it on our use cases page and on other various places on the blog.

Send paid traffic to the sign up page

We don’t (currently) send paid traffic to any of the webinar sign up pages, but that could be another lead generation source for you. As long as you set up Jetpack CRM and Livestorm together you’ll be able to see whether your paid traffic is resulting in more leads into your business.

Ask your existing contacts to sign up..

This is a big one and where you can easily use Jetpack CRM to help you, you can contact your list and let them know about the webinar, if this isn’t the first time you can even use the features of Jetpack (and livestorm) to make sure you don’t nag the same people twice. Find out our exact setup below.

Jetpack CRM and Livestorm

We did a ton of research when it came to choosing our webinar provider. We wanted browser based, nothing for the attendees to install and webinar recordings (which we then put up on our YouTube channel). So we chose Livestorm to help us here, and they’ve been great.

It wouldn’t be as great if we didn’t utilise Jetpack CRM to help us with our Webinar attendees management and this is what we do (and why we do it).

Install the Jetpack CRM Livestorm Connector

This is one of our newer extensions, and we use the Jetpack CRM Livestorm connector to make sure that our attendees from Livestorm are in the our CRM. First up you need to head over to the Livestorm webhooks part of your account, then choose Webhooks box.

Then make sure you enter the URL to your CRM with the ?jetpack_listener=livestorm as the parameter on the end of the URL. This tells Jetpack CRM that the information is coming from livestorm and it should interpret it.

For this to work, you need the connector extension installed. To take advantage of the full CRM features (like sending emails to certain contacts based on tags) the bundles are the best choice.

Start getting webinar sign ups

You can follow any of the tips in the first part of the post for this. You’ll be getting new leads for your webinar via the Livestorm registration page (ours is below) and these sign ups will be added to the CRM (tagged with livestorm as well as the webinar topic and date).

Here’s how ours looks for a recent webinar (check out the tags), but why is this important? [names and emails have been hidden for privacy reasons]

So, we are capturing leads into the CRM from the webinar, and as you can see from the screenshot, we are able to filter by tag and see exactly which webinar they are signed up to.

This is where the power of the CRM comes in, we are able to now see

How many sign ups we are getting for the webinars over time
How many Customers we are getting because of the webinar
The split between Leads and Customers from our webinars

Our main goal of running webinars is to help more Leads make the decision to become customers of either an extension or one of the bundles. If we were only getting customers sign up, then the webinars might be better suited (for those attendees) to be more of a “clinic” where we can help solve specific questions related to extensions.

Why tagging matters?

Through the Jetpack CRM livestorm extension each contact is tagged with their webinar date, and this becomes important when we want to do things with that information. We can now write a Mail Campaign which targets only Leads who DO NOT have the tag livestorm. This means we will communicate with only the people who have not signed up before (and get fresh sign ups).

This is important because we don’t want to keep trying to get people who have already signed up to the webinar, to sign up again.

Secondly, we use these tags for post webinar marketing and follow ups. If we discuss a certain feature or offer in the webinar, we can now easily select all the people who had signed up and let them know via email about what we discussed and reminding them about any offers that are running or any other webinars they may like to see.

Making the MOST of your Webinars

We love how seamless our setup now is when it comes to running our live events. If you run any sort of live event system yourself we recommend a similar setup. You’re making the most of your webinars when combined with Jetpack CRM and really helping to maximise their effectiveness.

All you need to do this is the following:-

An account over at Livestorm
Jetpack CRM (Core) installed
Jetpack CRM: Livestorm connector
Jetpack CRM: Mail Campaigns

That’s all there is to it. Happy webinar’ing with Jetpack CRM.