Brendan Cournoyer, Content Marketing Manager, Brainshark, Inc.
For marketing organizations, live and on-demand webinars present a great opportunity to engage with customers and identify potential prospects. Of course, to do that, you first need to have people actually attend your webinar.
Brendan Cournoyer, Content Marketing Manager, Brainshark, Inc.
For marketing organizations, live and on-demand webinars present a great opportunity to engage with customers and identify potential prospects. Of course, to do that, you first need to have people actually attend your webinar.
Email marketing continues to be the preferred strategy for webinar promotion — and that’s because it works. But since today’s audiences are inundated with so many e-newsletters, press releases, first-contact requests and (yes) webinar registration notices, marketers today are looking for more creative ways to stand out from the pack.
One way to do this is to incorporate video into your content and email marketing strategy (remember, content marketing is about more than just inbound!). Studies show that simply including the word “video” in your email subject line can increase click-through rates by as much as 7% to 13%, which is certainly nothing to sneeze at!
Many sites have reported on the public’s appetite for more online video, especially with YouTube cranking out over 4 billion hits each day and mobile devices allowing folks to literally walk around with portable TV sets at all times. Still, identifying the type of video that will offer the most value to your business and your audience is the key.
For webinar promotion, this could be as simple as creating a short “webinar trailer” for your upcoming event. (Hey, it works for Hollywood right?). These trailers don’t have to be long (I’d say two minutes max, though the best ones are in the 45-second range). All they need to do is answer a few simple questions like when the event is taking place, who is speaking, and of course, what it’s about and who should attend. It’s also a nice touch to have the actual speaker(s) narrate the trailer themselves to give your video a more personal touch.
We’ve used this technique at Brainshark, and have found click-through rates to be as much as three times higher for emails with these types of trailers. Still, as powerful as video marketing content can be, it takes more than that to really drive webinar registration via email. With that in mind, here are a few additional quick tips that, when combined with video, can really help take your email marketing to the next level:
Don’t underestimate your subject line. You can argue that a strong subject line is the most important part of a successful email marketing strategy. It’s best to keep your subject lines brief and to the point – don’t waste space with marketing fluff that will make your audience’s eyes glaze over. Long subject lines also tend to get truncated in your recipients’ inboxes, meaning they’ll only see part of your message. Try highlighting the topic in a clever, succinct way, and you’ll usually see better results.
Keep your calls to action clear. You also don’t want to clutter up the body of the email in a way that makes it difficult for readers to know what they should do next. When promoting a webinar trailer, try having the link stand alone rather than buried within a giant paragraph. In fact, avoid giant paragraphs altogether. Remember, less is more when it comes to grabbing someone’s attention online!
Use text, not images. While pictures and visuals are great assets for blogs and webpages, they don’t really translate to email marketing. It might seem like a great idea to include a clickable thumbnail image to promote your webinar trailer, but more often than not, that image will have to be manually downloaded before your recipients can view it. In the meantime, your email is left with the old “error box with a red X in the middle.” Not super attractive.
Be descriptive in your calls to action. If your trailer is only 45 seconds long — say so! Including a simple CTA link that reads “View Jack’s 45-second trailer to learn more” not only lets the audience know exactly what’s on the other side of that link, but it also assures them that what they are about to see won’t take up much of their time.
Brendan Cournoyer is a content marketing manager with Brainshark, Inc., a leader in online and mobile presentations. For more from Brendan, follow him on Twitter at @brencournoyer.
