How to Manage Successful Webinars, Part 3: A Post-Event Checklist

You’ve just wrapped up your online event and are relieved that everything in your webinar went smoothly. Now what?

Although a well-executed webinar gives reason to celebrate, now is not the time to sit back and relax. Post-event follow up with attendees – and good timing – is critical to keeping momentum and turning your B2B marketing investment into qualified sales leads.

Here is a post-event checklist which we have developed, based on having run dozens of our own webinars.

1. Activate follow-up email campaign.

   In part 1 of our webinar checklist, we covered the campaigns that you prepare beforehand, including the emails that will get sent to your event attendees and no-shows. It’s important to have these ready to send as soon as possible after the webinar. The email will typically include content related to the event, e.g. presentation slides, background information, access to a post-webinar discussion in your LinkedIn group, etc.

   Our experience has shown that a quick follow-up greatly improves your chances of engaging the audience. This is also true in competitive environments, such as a trade show where attendees will be followed up with by multiple vendors. Being the first vendor to follow up lead to a much higher email click-through rate.

   

2. Follow up with prize winner.

   Having a prize draw during your webinar is a great way to generate excitement about your event. Follow up quickly, and consider even including a hand-written note in the package thanking them for their interest.

3. Follow up with top tweeters.

   Twitter chats are a great way to enhance the webinar experience and amplify the content message. I’ve used a tool called Hashtracking to identify the top participants after the event. This gives you a great opportunity to reach out to these individuals directly and thank them.

4. Address live chat questions.

   During the webinar, you will hopefully have received questions from the audience. Some of these can be addressed during the webinar, but don’t leave it at that. Follow up with each relevant question individually after the event. It is an opportunity to build the relationship with your prospects.

5. Conduct post-webinar survey.

   Some webcast platforms allow you to build a feedback survey directly into the webinar experience. With others, you’ll have to build your own survey. Regardless, use the opportunity to learn about your audience and gain feedback which will improve your future events. Give room for general comments in the survey, and follow up with testimonial worthy comments.

6. Set up a redirect from your old registration page to the new archived event page.

   You’ve been promoting your event for the past several weeks, which means you’ll still have inbound links, and get traffic to the old registration page. Convert this interest into traffic to your archived webinar page by placing a redirect from the old page to the new one. The archived event page can contain the presentation slides, links to related resources, and the event recording as soon as it’s available.

7. Update your events listings.

   This sounds obvious but is often forgotten.

8. Process the webinar recording.

   We take our event recording, edit it if necessary, and post it to the Marketo channel YouTube. Once there, it can be embedded on our archived event page.

9. Build a scoring campaign for archived webinar view.

   Looking at a webinar can be an indication of future buying intent, especially if the webinar content is related directly to your product or service offering. Build a scoring campaign in your marketing automation platform to track and measure this engagement.

10. Update social media channels to indicate the recording is available.

    Before, and during the event, you’ve used LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. to promote the event. Once you have the recording, add a note linking to the archived webinar asset.

11. Launch a second email follow up campaign.

    Because it can take several hours to process the webinar recording, we opt to send a quick, initial follow up right after the webinar, linking to the webinar slides and Marketo’s LinkedIn Group. A second follow up can be sent, e.g. a day or two later, once the video recording is ready and embedded on your site.

12. Upload webinar to your podcast channel.

    Webinars are prime content for portable media. When processing a webinar recording, we also produce a podcast-friendly version and post it to Marketo’s podcast channel.

13. Evaluate webinar results and share with the team.

    Although some of the results only become evident after a few weeks/months, i.e. pipeline contribution, there are some things you can measure right away to determine how successful your webinar was. Here are some metrics to note:

    • Number of registrants
    • Number of attendees
    • Number of relevant questions
    • Number of new leads
    • Number of new prospects, i.e. leads in your target market
    • Drop-off rate during the event
    • Number of mentions and retweets on Twitter
    • Number of comments/likes/shares on Facebook and LinkedIn
    • Minutes (or hours) between end of webinar and your follow up email
    • Average ratings from the post-event feedback survey

    Finally, share the results with your team and thank them for helping to make it happen!

This post is part of a series on How to Manage Successful Webinars. Check out Part 1 and Part 2.