Webinars and online seminars allow audiences to participate and engage with presenters from anywhere in the world. But how do you keep engagement consistent? In this guide, the Hubilo team is discussing engaging webinar audience techniques and best practices to encourage participation and improve the likelihood of conversions.
Alt text: The word "audience" written on a whiteboard with a person drawing arrows to it to represent engaging webinar audience techniques
Audience engagement directly affects learning, retention, and brand awareness. It drives conversions and action as well as provides your business with valuable feedback from its target audience. Every webinar engagement strategy should address key factors such as awareness, visibility, relationship building, and lead generation. Using a data-driven approach helps improve webinars over time, delivering more relevant and impactful experiences.
Moreover, audience engagement increases the likelihood of attendees taking the next step in the customer journey. That's why it's important to provide value to your audience and measure the success of your webinar over time.
A webinar platform makes it easy to maximize engagement activities, track responses, promote better storytelling, and gather valuable insights about audience participation. Hubilo is a webinar platform that helps businesses and marketers maximize their leads and return on investment.
If you're searching for a webinar solution that integrates with customer relationship management (CRM) software, improves audience attendance, and increases engagement rates, Hubilo makes it easy. Users can map the attendee journey and optimize every touchpoint to generate interest, capture intent, and maximize impact. Our platform fundamentally changes the way marketers view webinars, driving the lead-generation process straight to the sales pipeline.
Alt text: Two marketers using a laptop for engaging webinar audience techniques during a webinar
An email sequence is one of the most engaging webinar audience techniques. It helps build anticipation or gauge subscribers' interests and behaviors. The goal of the email sequence is to drive attendance to the webinar and entice audiences to take further action following the webinar experience.
Businesses can send email reminders for webinar events, introduce topics for future webinars, and create a sense of urgency to register as part of the engagement strategy. It's important to craft a series of emails to highlight key benefits as well as key takeaways. But it's also important to space out your email reminders to avoid overwhelming your audience. This is the best way to maximize impact and build trust.
During the webinar experience, it's essential to promote meaningful interactions to keep the audience interested. Hubilo, for example, allows for features such as the following:
With interactive elements such as question-and-answer segments, live polls, and other featured actions, you can create value that's relevant to your audience and encourage them to take a desired action that aligns with your goals. Research shows that 92% of attendees want a Q&A segment at the end of a webinar. That's why it's important to incorporate these sessions into your webinar strategy and allow participants time to ask questions about the subject matter after the presentation.
Real-time polls also make participation easier for attendees who are intimidated by Q&A sessions. The multiple-choice nature of the polls helps hold the audience's attention and can fuel brainstorming for the Q&A segment. Enabling chat features allows attendees to share insights and knowledge, interact with one another, and engage in discussions to foster learning.
These are just some of the ways that businesses can turn potential customers into an engaged audience. By actively promoting meaningful interactions through these webinar tools, you can create a more effective and interactive webinar that captivates your target audience and fosters a sense of community.
Another great example of engaging webinar audience techniques is to host breakout rooms where attendees can split off from the main chat room of the virtual event into a chat room with smaller groups. Having smaller circles allows participants to collaborate and engage in conversations that are more relevant to their market segment. Businesses can also use this as an opportunity to deliver a more targeted online presentation and introduce concepts based on relevance.
Breakout rooms can also be used to handle the different needs of an audience and provide them with a place to connect with like-minded individuals who share similar opinions. Some participants feel more comfortable sharing their thoughts with a smaller audience size where they can better establish rapport. When hosting a breakout session, it's essential to assign a facilitator to each virtual room to guide discussions and ensure that conversations flow smoothly.
Alt text: Gmail inbox to represent how email sequences are one of the best engaging webinar audience techniques
After your webinar has concluded, it's important to follow up with attendees and non-attendees via email to drive further engagement. You can segment your email marketing list based on your attendees' participation answers and interests. This increases the likelihood of conversion and helps optimize future marketing campaigns.
It's also essential to track metrics such as email marketing open rates, click-through rates, survey participation, watch time, lead scores, and other analytics to assess the impact of your webinar strategy. Sending follow-up emails that are personalized to the attendee's market segment can help nurture your relationship with your audience and improve upon current strategies using relevant feedback.
Hubilo's mission is to build an industry-leading engagement platform that enables businesses to implement engaging webinar audience techniques, host exceptional events, and grow revenue. Our vision is to reimagine webinars as key growth engines for businesses, and we execute that by providing customizable and branded platforms, unparalleled customer experiences, deeper integrations, and more.
Our expert professionals are relentless in understanding marketers' needs. We're here to help everyone—from content professionals and event marketers to CMOs and marketing ops—host effective webinars. That's why we offer a webinar+ platform that increases webinar registrations, improves attendance by 3x, and improves engagement rates by 70%. More importantly, our platform has the technology to allow businesses and marketers to create a personalized experience for attendees to generate leads, maximize conversions, and drive successful outcomes.
To get started with these webinar audience techniques and learn more information about our webinar platform and its interactive tools, request a demo here.
Discover how Hubilo's Webinar+ can help you 2X your pipeline