How to Create a Webinar Funnels to Increase Leads | 6 Steps

What is a webinar funnel?

Webinars are great ways to find and nurture leads. Like any sales funnel, a high-quality webinar can attract traffic and drive potential customers.

Sales funnels attract leads and engage them long enough to convert some of them into sales.

A basic sales funnel moves through the awareness, interest, desire, and action stages. While the specific funnel varies depending on your business, most follow this trajectory as a lead journeys from being unaware of your brand to becoming a buying customer.

Webinar funnels are one specific way to guide prospects through these stages. You can use webinars as a point of interest to capture the attention of prospective customers who haven’t yet heard of your brand or considered buying from you.

How do online webinar funnels work?

Webinar lead generation is a bit more complex than a basic sales funnel. It involves plenty of work ahead of the webinar, including multi-channel promotion and creating a high-quality landing page. You’ll need to market and promote the upcoming event and make it easy for interested leads to register.

Webinar registrants become leads, which you nurture during and after the webinar process. You don’t even have to wait for the webinar to start; as soon as they register, begin sending thank-you emails and additional resources that might interest them.

The live webinar should then engage and entertain leads further, with plenty of interactive elements like polls, a live chat, and Q&A time.

After the webinar, you’ll continue nurturing this new audience with additional touchpoints like surveys, links to the webinar recording, and thank-you messages. You’ll then add these leads to your CRM or email marketing platform for further contact. At the end of the webinar funnel, some of these attendees will become paying customers—if you've done your job right.

Why do you need a webinar funnel?

Webinars are one of the most popular and powerful ways to engage a B2B audience. In fact, 40% of B2B buyers consider webinars to be the most valuable content source for making a purchasing decision.

But a high-quality webinar funnel does more than help you land more leads. You can also use webinars to:

• Improve thought leadership and authority in your niche
• Increase overall brand awareness
• Engage with current and potential customers
• Generate a community around your brand
• Provide training on your product for a better customer experience
• Expand your email list and collect survey data

How to create a successful webinar funnel: 6 Steps

1. Come up with a webinar idea

First, you need an idea for a webinar. The topic you choose should highlight your brand’s expertise in your niche.

For example, you might host a webinar that helps your audience solve for industry pain points.

Or you may pick a topic that falls into one of these categories:

• A training session on how to get more out of your product
• An interview with a celebrity, author, or expert in your niche
• Education on industry trends and current events

When in doubt, you can also ask your sales team for webinar topic ideas. They understand your current customers’ interests and pain points better than almost anyone else.

2. Create a quality landing page

The landing page, or registration page, is crucial for maximizing signups. You’ll link to it in all your promotional activities, and if you’re lucky, registrants will share it with their friends to encourage them to sign up, too.

A good landing page makes it easy for visitors to register for your webinar. It should have simple yet informative copy describing the webinar’s topic, content outline, and any major selling points (like notable guests or valuable benefits on offer). It should also have visual elements like tasteful images, an attractive color scheme, and a prominent CTA.

3. Promote your webinar

Once your landing page is ready, start promoting like crazy. If you want any attendees (and leads, and conversions), you’ll need to drive plenty of traffic to the registration page.

Social media

Your brand probably has a social media presence (and if it doesn’t, it should). So why not leverage the wide audience available on social media to get the word out about your webinar?

Your announcement posts should be short and to the point, engaging, and include a powerful call-to-action (CTA). The CTA should always ask readers to click the link to your registration landing page.

For best results promoting your webinar on social media, remember these tips:

• Use images (or even better, video)
• Create a sense of urgency in your CTA
• Create posts from clips of your featured speaker or host
• Cross-promote to new audiences by partnering with other brands and influencers
• Pin webinar announcement posts to the top of your profile (or create a custom header image)

Email

Promoting your webinar to your current email list is also a good idea. Create a series of announcement, reminder, and follow-up emails to hype up the webinar and invite your subscribers to attend.

Try to avoid annoying your email list with too many emails; you don’t want to encourage unsubscribing. But a tactful series of concise, engaging messages can draw in more registrations from your current email list (who are already primed to become customers).

For the most effective webinar marketing emails, follow these best practices:

• Avoid words that trigger spam (especially in your subject line)
• Highlight the value your webinar will bring to the reader
• Use plenty of white space and an inviting color palette that matches your brand
• Make the CTA button or link clear
• Segment your list so that only relevant contacts receive the announcement emails

Advertise on your website

If your website already receives plenty of traffic, don’t forget to point visitors to your webinar landing page. You can use popups and sticky bars to invite your guests to register.

In your webinar announcement copy, don’t forget to highlight the benefits of the webinar and who it’s for.

4. Send reminders

It’s easy to make the mistake of assuming once someone has registered, they don’t need to hear from you again until the day of the event. But an essential part of the webinar funnel is staying in the lead’s mind from registration to attendance.

After all, “out of sight, out of mind” holds true for many of us. Be sure to send new registrants a thank-you email for registering—and then schedule reminder emails in the week and day leading up to the event.

5. Hold an amazing webinar

Of course, the most important step in a webinar funnel is the webinar itself.

Getting people to register is one battle, and so is getting them to actually attend. But for those who do show up, you need to put on an engaging and memorable performance so they are never bored and feel their time was well spent.

Remember, webinar lead generation isn’t just a numbers game. You don’t win any prizes just for convincing enough people to attend; the point is to attract and engage a new audience, establishing yourself as a likable expert they can trust and learn from.

Want to watch a great example of a celebrity interview webinar that’ll also educate you on creating your own webinars? Check out this video from ActiveCampaign:

Below, we’ll cover a few tips for hosting the best webinar possible.

Don’t be too sales-y

We get it; your ultimate goal in hosting this webinar is to make more sales. But if you focus too much on why the audience needs to buy from you, they’ll disengage. Your audience didn’t take an hour or two out of their day to hear an infomercial.

Instead, focus on providing useful, actionable information.

Spice up your content

Avoid the temptation to give a lecture or speech. Instead, include interesting case studies, examples, and even personal anecdotes. You should also use visual elements like slides and videos to keep watchers interested.

Let the audience participate

The best learning experiences are interactive. You can use audience engagement tools like polls, a live chat, and a Q&A portion to cater the webinar to your audience’s interests and questions. Don’t let them completely dictate the direction of the webinar presentation—but by allowing audience participation, you’ll provide a personalized and uniquely beneficial experience they couldn’t get anywhere else.

6. Keep the funnel flowing

As your audience attends the webinar, they’re hopefully moving through your webinar funnel's interest and desire stages. Now, it’s time to transition them to the final stage: action.

The end of your webinar should include a CTA to get your audience to take that next step. Maybe it’s to make a purchase from you, sign up for a course or membership, or contact you directly. You might even offer a special discount or promo code to encourage them not to wait.

Make the video available on demand

The beauty of using webinars as a lead generation tactic is that their usefulness extends past the date of the live event. Depending on how relevant your webinar content is, you could create an evergreen webinar funnel that continues to attract leads long afterward.

How? By making the video available for on-demand viewing. Share the link with your email subscribers (especially those who registered but never attended live), and post it on your website for others to find.

Follow up after the webinar

While you want people to take your desired action immediately after the webinar, don’t give up on those who don’t. Schedule a follow-up email or two for registrants (even those who didn’t attend live). Thank them for joining, recap the content and benefits of the presentation, and provide any additional resources they might find helpful (including a link to the webinar recording).

Don’t forget to mention the special offer or promo code available for a limited time to webinar recipients.

Best practices for a webinar funnel that converts

Choose the right webinar hosting software

There’s nothing that turns off a webinar audience more than technical issues or glitchy audio. Choosing high-quality webinar software not only gives your audience the best live experience but also provides a professional-level recording that will continue to convert in the future.

If you’re looking for high-quality hosting and recording software, look no further than Riverside. It’s a user-friendly, browser-based tool that records in up to 4K video resolution. Invite up to 7 webinar panelists and 1000 audience members, and use advanced features like live call-ins, live streaming to social media, and a teleprompter to create a professional and engaging experience.

Riverside records locally to each participant’s device, meaning the quality doesn’t depend on your internet quality (no more glitches whenever a speaker’s internet lags). And, our text-based editor and Magic Clips tools make it easy to repurpose your studio-quality recordings into polished long-form videos—or bite-sized snippets for social media.

Learn more about Riverside, or sign up to start creating professional-quality webinars today!

Leverage social proof

Sometimes, people need that extra nudge to convert. If you have testimonials, case studies, or examples of successful customers, display them prominently. You’d be surprised how much of an impact that small tweak can have on an indecisive prospect.

Don’t be afraid to think outside the box

Especially for B2B brands, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut of overly technical, jargon-filled presentations. But if you can find creative ways to be new, engaging, and entertaining, you’ll attract more leads (and convert more of them into loyal customers).

For example, you might find exciting influencers or experts to headline the webinar. Or maybe you’ll take a whimsical or unusual approach to a topic. Don’t be afraid to try something new (but still in line with your brand voice and values) that might delight your audience!

FAQs on Webinar Funnels

What is the top of the webinar funnel?

Like any sales funnel, the top of a webinar funnel is the awareness stage. This is where your audience is just starting to become aware that your brand exists and can help them solve a problem or learn a skill. Your goal with a webinar funnel is to move them from awareness to interest, desire, and finally action (i.e., buying from you).

How much does it cost to create a webinar funnel?

Webinars are effective but relatively affordable methods of lead generation. The costs involved vary depending on how much you invest in advertising, guest speaker fees, and recording tools. But thankfully, affordable tools like Riverside make it possible to record and distribute enterprise-quality webinars without the hefty price tag.