Webinar platform company ON24 has just released their special COVID-19 webinar benchmark report looking at data from the month of April 2020, during the height of COVID webinar mania.
I’ll be exploring its findings in this and future blog posts. Up first – attendee to registrant conversion rates:
ON24 looked at data from its client base and for April 2020 it saw attendee conversion rates rise significantly. Overall, 61% of registrants converted to attendees, up from 55% in 2019. For events with more than 100 attendees, the average conversion rate is now 53%, up 10 points from 2019’s 43%. These are significant increases, but as you can see there is a large differenced of 8 percentage points for webinars of under 100 attendees versus above 100 attendees.
In late March and April during the initial phase of the stay in place orders in much of the world, people flocked to webinars. As tens of millions of white collar employees now worked from home they sought more engagement, knowledge, and interaction – and had less impromptu and last minute meetings in the office. The result was that more people actually showed up to watch your webinars.
But it is going to be interesting to see if ON24 shares May or June numbers as my sense is people started to get “webinared out” and live attendance conversion rates probably declined a bit in those months.
If you are benchmarking your own webinar program and attendee conversion rate, make sure you account for what is probably a short-term increase in conversion rates and don’t get to exciting if your rates bumped 10 percentage points recently.
With in-person events likely not happening until late 2021, the battle for webinar attendees is going to heat up, and your target market is not going to show up just because they are working from home.
To ensure the highest attendee rates for your webinars, make sure you:
- Send reminder emails a day and few hours before the live webinar.
- Remind registrants to add the webinar to their calendar.
- Use social media to promote the webinar which can remind registrants to attend the live webinar.
- Remind registrants of the content and additional assets they will receive by attending such as white papers, special reports, and tip sheets.
Stay tuned for more webinar stats and best practices in future blog posts.