Posted on November 10, 2022

Your Complete Guide to Webinar Email Marketing

Webinars are one of the most cost-effective tools businesses use to drive engagement with their brands.

You can hold a webinar to generate qualified leads, inform potential customers about your offerings, and more—but only if you’re able to attract attendees. In other words, reaping the many benefits webinars provide starts with effective promotional strategies. These strategies include webinar email marketing.

In this guide, you’ll learn all about webinar email marketing to improve your webinar’s attendance rate.

Understanding Webinar Emails

According to a report, email marketing provides the best return on investment (ROI) out of all the digital marketing techniques. In particular, ROI stands at $47 for every dollar spent.

In other words, if you use webinar email marketing the right way, you can reap the benefits.

Different email deliverability tools are also helpful when sending out webinar emails, as they prevent your email from being marked as spam.” after “The people on your list who are most likely to be interested in your webinar.

So how do you use email marketing to promote your webinars?

Webinar email marketing involves creating an email series to raise awareness about your upcoming webinar and get your audience to sign up for the event. You can break a webinar email marketing campaign down into these three tasks:

• Creating email copy
• Sending emails
• Tracking your campaign’s effectiveness

Let’s examine each component to learn what they entail.

Creating Email Copy

Creating email copy involves writing the emails you’ll use to promote your webinar to your audience.

A typical promotional email consists of the following aspects:

Email Subject Line

The email subject line is arguably the most crucial component of a promotional email, as it determines whether the recipients will open your email.

Think about it: your audiences’ inboxes are most likely full of emails competing for their attention. How do you ensure yours isn’t lost among the fray? 

You pique their interest with a catchy subject line. 

Your email subject line should succinctly communicate your webinar’s topic. Moreover, because some of your audience members read emails on their phones, keep the character count below fifty, as shown below:

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It helps to personalize the subject line too. Including the recipient’s name in it will do that. After all, email recipients are 50% more likely to open an email that includes their name in the subject line. Check out more email subject line statistics below.

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Some other things you can do to make your email subject line an attention grabber include:

• Using language that sparks an emotional reaction
• Highlighting the benefit your audience will gain
• Avoiding misleading headlines that will trigger their spam filter

If you get them right, email subject lines will help get the word out about your webinar. 

The Body

If the email subject line is the lure, then the email body is the hook you’ll use to land attendees.

The body of your webinar email should provide the reader with details about the event. For example, list the points your speakers will cover in the webinar. If your webinar speakers will discuss the functions of a new app, include a QR code for app download in the email. Providing this information upfront will help your audience decide whether the webinar is (or isn’t) for them.

Also, highlight the webinar’s speakers. Leveraging a speaker’s audience is a winning event registration strategy that helps fill virtual seats.

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Finally, your email’s body should have a conspicuously-placed call-to-action button. Without one, your target audience may passively consume your email before moving on to another.

A couple of things about your email body:

• Ensure there aren’t any grammatical or spelling errors
• Try to maintain a consistent tone

Here’s a pro tip for maintaining a consistent tone: If you work with a team of writers, you can use an AI blog writer to maintain consistency across the board. Writer, for instance, has a Customizable Style Guide feature that lets you set custom rules its artificial intelligence will implement when the team writes with the software.

For example, two writers in your team – one English and the other American – may use different spellings for common words like “colour” (British variant) and “favor” (American variant). 

So if your webinar’s target audience is predominantly in the US, you can use Writer’s Customizable Style Guide feature to ensure all your writers use American spellings. Aside from webinar emails, you can use the feature to help your team write a press release, a blog post and other marketing collateral. 

Sending Emails

Once you’ve written your emails, the next step will be to send them out to get your webinar in front of your audience. It’s a good idea to segment your email list, since you want to attract the people on your list who are most likely to be interested in your webinar. 

Also, you’ll need to time the frequency of your emails. Research showed that 45% of email list subscribers flag emails as spam because they were emailed too frequently:

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In a subsequent section, we’ll discuss when and how frequently to send different types of webinar emails.

Tracking Campaign Effectiveness

Finally, ensure you track your webinar email marketing campaign’s effectiveness at every step. The data you collect will prove invaluable for future campaigns.

Track the number of registrants, attendees, and post-webinar attendees. Each metric will help you measure the effectiveness of your email campaign. Also, pay attention to their experience by analyzing user interaction with Fullstory alternatives.

4 Types of Webinar Emails

There are various webinar invitation emails you can send to boost your webinar email marketing efforts. Here are the four most common types: 

Invitation Email 

One of the first actions you’ll take to kick off your webinar email marketing efforts will be to send out an invitation email. Your invitation email will serve two purposes, telling your target audience about the upcoming webinar and generate hype. In the broader context, this underscores the pivotal role of email marketing, not just as a means of communication, but as a powerful tool for creating anticipation and excitement around events. Email marketing plays a strategic role in building awareness, nurturing engagement, and driving participation, making it an indispensable asset in the success of various marketing initiatives, including webinars.

To fulfill these purposes your invitation email should include the following information:

• What it’s about: the webinar’s topic
• When it’s happening: its date, time, and length
• Who’s speaking: the webinar’s key speaker(s)
• Why your audience should attend: i.e., the value they stand to gain
• How to register: a call-to-action

The email below from GetResponse includes all the information listed above.

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Introducing the webinar speakers briefly and highlighting their achievements is a good idea. This information may prove crucial for getting some attendees on board.

It’s best to send an invitation email two to three weeks before you hold the webinar. Any shorter, and your audience might find it challenging to block out time to attend. Also, note that an invitation email can be an incredibly powerful tool when paired with a landing page. So ensure you have one ready and include a link to it in your invitation email.

Confirmation Email 

When your audience members start registering for your webinar, you’ll need to send them a confirmation email.

Confirmation emails should:

• Confirm to the reader that they’re registered for your webinar
• Reiterate the webinar’s date and start time
• Include the link where attendees can join the webinar

The screenshot below is an example of confirmation emails done right. It confirms registration for the event, reiterates the event date, and includes a call-to-action to join the event:

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You can either craft a confirmation email from scratch or use the template built into your webinar software.

Reminder Email 

Unfortunately, getting your audience to sign up for your webinar is only half the battle. In fact, it’s likely that only half of the people who sign up for a webinar will end up attending. 

Therefore, you’ll need to send out reminder emails to avoid a low attendance rate. 

Reminder emails remind the people who signed up for your webinar that the event is a few days away. The one below is a great example. It reminds the registrant they’re registered for an upcoming webinar and displays the date and time:

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You may need to send several reminder emails up until your webinar goes live as follows:

• Reminder 1: a week before the webinar
• Reminder 2: a day before the webinar
• Reminder 3: a few hours before the webinar
• Reminder 4: the moment your webinar is live

Be careful not to send too many reminder emails, as you risk being too pushy. Also, consider sending more reminder emails only to audience members who didn’t open your previous emails.

Follow-Up Email Post-Webinar

Webinar email marketing doesn’t end with the event date’s passing. You’ll need to send your audience a follow-up email post-webinar.

However, before you send this email, categorize your audience into two groups: 

• Group A: webinar attendees
• Group B: non-attendees

Naturally, you’ll be sending two separate emails.

The follow-up email addressing webinar attendees should thank them for showing up. Since these people had a front-row seat to your value proposition and are the warmest customers in your sales funnel, offer them a time-sensitive discount to give them a final push. 

Also, it would help to include a link to the recorded seminar so they can share it with like-minded colleagues. It’s one way you can keep your audience engaged post webinar.

Meanwhile, when sending a follow-up email to non-attendees, highlight that you noticed they missed out on the event. As with the “Thank You” email sent to webinar attendees, graciously include a link to the recording.

In Closing

To ensure people attend your webinar, you need to promote it in the first place. Enter webinar email marketing.

In this article, you learned important webinar email marketing tips. Craft the right email subject line and body. Use a consistent tone, include a strong CTA, and track your email campaign. Send out different webinar emails, too–from the invitation, confirmation and reminder to the follow-up post-webinar ones.

Follow these tips. Your webinar email marketing campaign will surely be a success.

This article was written and co-developed with Plamen Popov, who is the content and communications specialist for Writer, an AI writing platform designed for teams.