220 – You can’t sell ’em if they don’t show up: Tom talks Getting People to Show Up for Webinars Part 2

Episode 220 – Show Up Webinar Part 2
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody, it's Tom here with Episode Two Hundred and Twenty of Screw the Commute podcast. This is part two of a two part series on getting people to show up for your webinars. Last Monday was Episode 217, which was part one and you definitely should listen to that if you really want to make better use of your webinars and get more people to show up. All right. Hope you've grabbed a copy of my automation e-book. Just one of the tips in this e-book has saved me seven and a half million keystrokes. There's shortcuts for your cell phone. There's automation tools that are free or cheap that will just skyrocket your productivity. And I've been using some of these since 1997. All right. So they're really, really powerful. They allow you to hand away more people in a shorter amount of time. And just amazing things that'll do for you. You'll be able to respond lightning fast and not pull your hair out. So grab that at Screwthecommute.com/automatefree. We sell this book for twenty seven bucks, but it's yours free to thank you for listening to the podcast and I hope you get a chance to go over and leave a review and a rating that really helps us out over in iTunes. If you go to screwthecommute.com we'll show you how to do it. While you're there, you might as well grab a copy of our podcast app. It's now in the app store, as does all kinds of cool stuff. And we've got complete instructions on how to use it. In case you're a little apprehensive on how to use all the fancy features, you can grab a copy of that at screwthecommute.com/app. Our sponsor, of course, is the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia. It's a distance learning school which teaches legitimate techniques to make a great living, either working for someone else or starting your own online business or both. Why not? And we have big scholarships for military, law enforcement and first responders and their families. So check it out at IMTCVA.org that stands for Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia. And it's a distance learning school. So it doesn't matter where you live as long as you can get an Internet connection. We've got some great students and graduates that are already making money in some cases, really big money.

[00:03:01] Let's get to the main event. Let's talk about how to get more people to show up at your webinars. And if, like I said, if you missed part one, that's episode 217, make sure you go back and listen to that episode. And any time you want to go directly to an episode where I mention an episode number, go to screwthecommute.com slash and then just put the number in 217.

[00:03:23] All right. The first topic we're gonna talk about is email announcements. Now, email is still the main way people like me make a fortune and get people to sign up and show up for webinars. Yeah, we use social media to a certain extent and paid ads, but most of the top players know the goal of social media is to get people the heck off of there onto an email list. Now this all boils down to sales. I mean, there's so much clutter, spam and fraudulent offers out there now. You pretty much have to write a highly credible sales letter just to get people to take advantage of a freebie like your webinar. When it comes to getting people to show up, your emails must create extreme desire in the prospect for the information. I mean, right from the get go. That means you have to get very good at copywriting. And I'm not trying to obnoxiously shove my program down your throat, but you could profit immensely by checking out my inexpensive program copywriting901.com. I mean, I've identified this as the number one skill in my 43 years of business. So if you ignore this, it's at your own peril.

[00:04:38] All right. Well, your e-mail must start with a great subject line that's we're going to talk about now. I mean, mess this up and whatever you do afterwards doesn't really matter if they don't open your e-mail, they'll never even see all your compelling copy to get them to sign up. So first of all, keep subject lines at 50 characters or less, and that includes spaces. Next, make sure you keep the most important part of what you want to say to the left. That way, if people are a lot less than 50 characters to the subject line in their email reader. Your most important stuff still can be seen. I know I counted in my email reader I only allot thirty six characters to the subject line. So you better hit hard and fast to the left. So here's a bunch of subject lines from past webinars. Complimentary webinar, how to make a media kit. Tonight, in all caps, adult higher education with no debt. Today, 2:00 p.m. Eastern. Scholarship Opportunity Webinar. How to get a legitimate marketing scholarship. And I actually reduced legitimate to legit just to save a few characters. Today/tonight big bucks speaking at fundraisers. Tonight's webinar, a TV station in your pocket. New webinar, be a cell phone celebrity. Tonight's webinar. Be a cell phone celebrity. New webinar, a broadcast from your cell phone or broadcast from your cell phone to today's webinar increase website sales Tuesday. E Commerce Webinar at 2:00 and 9:00 p.m. Eastern. And I didn't even put the PM there. I think people would know that. And it saved me a few characters. Anyway, that's just a few of the thousands and thousands of subject lines I've written over the years.

[00:06:33] All right. So once they open it, now there's we're in the body of the email and there's two bodies of thought. OK. On whether you should write long or short emails. There really isn't any answer I can give you for sure. The pain in the neck answer will always be that you must test it in front of your audience to see what works best. Now, your options are A) short e-mail that gets people to click to your Web site to read your ad copy on a Web page or B) long copy that tells the entire story of what they'll learn in that body of that email. Now, here's what you're up against. A short e-mail must be skillfully created to get people to click and with a longer e-mail, the more chance you have of getting it filtered by a spam filter.

[00:07:26] So here's an example of a short e-mail. Here we go. I discovered the three most powerful secrets to getting a standing ovation. Every time you speak, click the link below to check it out. And then I put the link in there. Now, in that email, very short, I use the curiosity technique that you would learn in copywriting901.com to get the click. Now, I put an example of a longer email in the show notes for this is episode 220. So you want to go there if you want to see the example of one that has all the details in there and they can just click right from the email and sign up. But as I mentioned earlier, you have more chance that a longer email is going to get caught in the spam filter with some innocent thing that you wrote. But the problem is, is with a spam filter that sees a billion emails an hour, something innocent to you might look like spam to them and get your filtered. So the trend is shorter emails leading to a web page.

[00:08:30] OK, so what about that web page? Well, that would be called a landing page or registration page. See, when you email or post in Facebook to tell people about your webinar, it's critically important that you send them to a registration page that's compelling. This page should have your great title of your webinar at the top and all the great things about the webinar on the page. And I'll have a screen capture in the show notes for you to show you what one of these looks like, but they vary considerably. This will just be one example out of hundreds and hundreds I've done. But guess what? It still boils down to great copywriting. I'm going to suggest again you take my copywriting course at copywriting901.com. This is the most important business skill I've developed in 43 years in business. And the better you get at it, the more money pours in your front door. And you know what you can sell copywriting services to others are too lazy to learn it for themselves. This can be extremely lucrative just by itself. Anyway, your landing page should make the person want to get your information as soon as possible, which means they will try harder to show up to your webinar rather than wait for the replay.

[00:09:50] Now landing pages for free webinars. And of course, we're talking about. Just a reminder, a free webinar leading to something that you can sell on the webinar, but landing pages for free webinars follow a similar format to a press release. They answer the question who, what, where, when and why. So who would be me and my guests if I have one on the webinar. What? It's a complimentary webinar on the topic where it's online and can be watched on all portable devices when given the dates and times. And make sure you mentioned time zones. Why? Well, sales copy giving them the benefits of your topic and compelling them to register is the why they should be there. Of course. Copywriting901.com. All right. So you'll have to go to the show notes to see an example of a compelling landing registration page.

[00:10:50] Confirmation pages. Now, this is a little off topic, but I do want to give you extra value. So I doubt if you're going to complain when I give you this moneymaking tip. Anytime anyone signs up for anything on your site, they should get a confirmation page, letting them know their registration worked and giving them details of how to participate. Well, I've got a cool technique for you that I don't know. Sometimes it creates a tiny bit of confusion in your registrants, but financially it's totally worth it. So when they click their register button from a lot of my webinars, they are registered, but they're immediately dumped onto a sales page for another product. Now, for people that have their email open and get a desktop notifier that their confirmation email has arrived. The confusion is minimal. They may see an email show up. That's a confirmation that their registration went well, but they're sitting on a page unrelated to their registration. Again, hear me out on this. I mean, I say they're confused because you would normally dump someone on a regular confirmation page that gave them details of the event that they just registered for. And we also send the email that I just mentioned that has the same info. So I'm breaking the mold slightly by dumping them on a sales page totally unrelated to the webinar. Guess what happens? Some of the people read the sales page and buy the product I'm promoting on that page. I usually make 500 to a thousand dollars using this technique before the free webinar even starts. Now usually use low priced e-books as the product in the 17 to $27 range. Of course, if you studied my other Internet products, you know, I'm going to add an upsell product usually in the same price range. This gives me anywhere from seventeen to fifty four dollars per person who goes for the deal. Sometimes I'll use one of my higher priced e-books and give a half price deal for it. Like a ninety seven dollar retail e-book for forty eight fifty. And then I might still add an upsell of twenty seven or seventeen dollars. So I'm willing to put up with a little confusion for my registrants to make a thousand bucks extra before the webinar is even scheduled to start. And I'm selling the product that's not for sale on the webinar. It's a different, totally different thing. So it's not hurting sales on the webinar. All right. When you start making extra money before your webinars even start. I'm sure you won't mind me giving you this extra tip. All right, so I'm going to give you an example in the show notes of where I frequently send people after registration and there'll be a link there to, let's say, the ultimate guide to professional speaking, you'll see that sales page.

[00:13:59] Now let's talk about a show up video. Again, we want to do everything we can to get more people to actually show up for the webinar shooting, a short video reminding them of the importance of showing up helps tremendously. Now, if you're not doing a product page as a confirmation page, the confirmation page is a good place to put this video. Now, if you're doing a product as a confirmation page, you put a link to the video in your confirmation email. I try to keep the video generic so I can use it for many different webinars. If you had the time, it would be even better to shoot a custom video filled with benefits for live attendance for each webinar you have. But sometimes I just don't have the time for that. So in the show notes, it really is going to behoove you to go the show notes for this episode 220 because we have examples of all this stuff. So in the show notes, I've slammed together a a show up video so you can see a sample of what that looks like. Very short. And in the show notes, I'm giving you an entire script that you can adapt to shoot your. Get them to show up video.

[00:15:15] All right. Next topic is reminders. You're gonna want to make sure your webinar system can send email and or text reminders to the registrants. The webinar system usually gives you a standard reminder blurb, all ready to go. I mean, you can edit it with any special info you want the registrants to get. It's not a bad idea to put in extra tips about the topic and other good material that makes people want to read you reminders. Most people look at the reminder subject line and then ignore opening the email or just delete it. If they started seeing good stuff in the emails, they would be more likely to open it and spend more time getting committed to showing up, which is your main goal of this whole thing. Multiple email reminders can usually be set to be sent to the registrants at various times prior to the webinar. Now almost always mine are set at 4 hours, two hours and one hour prior to the webinar. You can also set them to remind people one or more days prior to the webinar. I don't use this ability very often because most of my webinars are initially promoted the day before or the day of so a reminder on the day before would be kind of dumb. All right. Now here's a super trick. Many webinar systems have the ability to send change announcements to all the registrants and presenters. This is handy if you have to cancel or change a start time or provide a last minute handout or something like that. This function. Here's the super check, this function can be used to get more people to show up. See, instead of making a mundane announcement to the registrants, you put in an e-mail message with the subject line starting now, like maybe all caps and then your title or topic. All caps with exclamation points. Speaking at fundraisers. Be an example of one. You don't have to put your entire subject line that you use to promote the webinar. After three or four previous reminders, they know what the email's about the important part is starting now. This creates the urgency that they better drop what they're doing and get on the webinar. I send this about 15 minutes before the time of the webinar. Now you're going to have to see. Here's a warning for you. You'll have to see if your webinar system is reliable in sending emails immediately. If it makes you look really bad for the email to arrive a long time after the webinar has already started. Sometimes the next day. The one term you can add to your reminders is on demand. This sends the message to the registrant that they can watch anytime they want. I've got mixed emotions about this because on one hand you want to accommodate the people so that they can watch the thing whenever they want to. But on the other hand, without urgency to watch right away, they may never get around to it.

[00:18:30] OK. Text reminders. Nowadays, people get a little more touchy about getting texted than they do about getting emails. So make sure they have requested text reminders so you don't get irate emails and phone calls and and texts about interrupting people. When I first started text marketing, I got a few pretty pissed off people calling me even though they had signed up for my text broadcast service. One of them said, Hey, I was trying to get on a plane and you texted me in the middle of it. And you know what? How would I know? So you're going to have people like that that sign up for stuff and then they get mad when you send them things. Now, if you're in the corporate market, you may be sending reminders one or more weeks in advance. This is extremely rare in entrepreneurial markets. You're probably being paid for the webinar and it may have been booked months in advance and the executives want to get maximum participation. So plenty of notice is important. This kinda cracks me up because I'm so non-corporate. I might wake up on a Sunday morning and think to myself, Hey, I'd like to make a couple of thousand bucks today. I think I'll do a webinar replay tonight while I'm watching TV. That's not quite how it works in the corporate arena.

[00:19:50] All right, your social media use all your appropriate social media outlets to promote your webinar. Timing wise, this gets tricky since most of your friends don't see your Facebook postings unless you boost the post or make a more sophisticated and targeted at. Boosting for those who don't know is it like a really easy, low level way for a non sophisticated advertiser to get their post in front of more people by pay. Now, posts promoting things can vary in how long they take to get approved. See, when you're when you're boosting or putting an ad, it sometimes is 10 minutes and sometimes it's 24 hours or more. So you're better be on the safe side and don't wait till the last minute to boost your post promoting your webinar. It won't get approved until it's too late. On the other hand, boosting too early reduces the urgency of those that see the post to jump on your webinar. So again, you have to try it in your market and see how things are working out for you.

[00:21:01] Let's look at contest. This is a pretty cool viral method to get Twitter and Facebook people to show up live to the webinar. It's kind of a double whammy because you get the people that are tweeting and posting to show up for sure and you get a percentage of their followers who decide to attend your webinar. So what you do is you have a tweet post contest. You get people to come up with a great tweet and or post about your webinar and distribute it to their followers and send you a copy. You'll give out prizes, e-books, videos, consultations and stuff like that to the winners. But the winners must be on the webinar to win. This is a really great tip, folks. Now make sure you review contest law with your attorney or just online before you accidentally get in trouble with a contest or at least review contest law on the Web. But if there's no money changing hands, chances are you'll have no trouble with contest law.

[00:22:09] All right, prizes. Once word gets around that you give out prizes on your live webinars. More and more people will start showing up. You might be getting a new iPad and announce that you'll be giving away your old one on your next webinar. Maybe you could get a hundred bucks selling it on Craigslist. But here, let's look at some math here. But maybe giving it away on your webinar could get 30 more people to show up. And if three of them buy your, let's say, ninety seven dollar product, you just got two hundred ninety one dollars for the iPad in addition to all the other sales you would have made without the iPad. So so this is a cool way to move out some of your old electronics or at any rate, the idea is to give a prize and get more people to show up. And if you did have something more substantial like an iPad, make sure you have lots of other less substantial prizes, ebooks, consultations, videos. So many people have a chance to win. And I'm not saying your consultations aren't substantial. I'm just saying that these things don't put cash outlay out to deliver and you'll get more people attending if there are lots of prizes and maybe one grand prize.

[00:23:31] All right. Now calling people now, at this stage in my career in life, I'm pretty much the last person on Earth who wants to make a bunch of phone calls. All right. However, I will admit that in the beginning, way back in 1994, I would call every single person that ordered for me online and thank them. Admittedly, in those days, there weren't very many people to call. After I got good training in 1996 and started making a lot of money, I kept up the practice of calling people as long as I could. I don't remember how long I lasted, but I can absolutely tell you that calls accelerated my business tremendously. Now, if we take this into the webinar world, I can say with great certainty that calling people will get you way more registrations and show ups. The question is, is where do you get the phone numbers? Well, you can start with your customer list and you most assuredly have their phone numbers. Now, for me, with forty thousand plus customers, I guess I'd have to plan a webinar three years in advance if I had to call all of them. But I really wouldn't spend time cold calling for something like this anyway. I would use a new technology before it gets banned called Ringless voicemail. I'd only do this for people that knew me well or were customers. This allows you to call someone with a recorded voicemail, but their phone never rings, so it doesn't interrupt whatever they're doing to get your recorded message. So for this calling stuff, I really wouldn't rent lists and buy lists from people with phone numbers. You're just going to. People hate robo calls and are hardly answering anymore anyway. So I think the ringless voicemail is a much better option. Just look it up on Google for different companies.

[00:25:23] Hey, before we get into follow up methods that get you more to show up, I want to tell you about my twenty four week intensive pro speaking mentor program where I take you from where you are to a much higher level pro speaker. And if you're just a beginner, you want to be a pro speaker. That's great. I don't have to clean up messes that you make. And there's several different levels, including a level that teaches my famous back of the room selling technique where I've made millions of dollars and without being obnoxious, I might add. Like many sales speakers are. So you can check this out and screwthecommute.com/prospeaking and to tell me you heard it on screw the commute, use coupon codes, SPEAK10 for 10 percent off whichever package you choose. And I want to really help turn you into a great and busy pro speaker.

[00:26:20] All right. Let's talk about follow up now. So you've done everything possible to get more show ups and it's paying off. Now what about those people who just couldn't make it? Well, we still want them to watch the replay and by, don't we? Yeah, of course we do. As soon as the replay is ready, I have a follow up email ready to go and it doesn't have to be fancy, but it should be sent as soon as possible after the event. You want to get get it to people while they're still hot for the topic. Now many times I stay up really late on the east coast, getting it ready and send it out maybe at midnight Eastern Time, which is only 9:00 p.m. Pacific. People on the west coast of the USA still have time to watch it before bed and purchase. And people in the UK have it when they wake up. In many cases, I put a blurb in the email about how great the webinar was and how crazy the people went when they attended, or I might even put testimonials in from people that were on live. Here's an example of one of those short emails. Your sponsorship replay is ready. People went ape over this webinar, you'll see tons of examples of people just like you getting enormous amounts of money from big companies to help finance their dreams. Click here to watch. Then I put the link in and you can send emails like this or similar ones over a couple days. After that, it's not worth the effort. Also, sometimes the best practices are not necessarily the best practices. It would not make sense to send the replay to people who actually attended the webinar, right? Well, maybe not. Hey, if they didn't buy, they might want to watch it again because they were distracted or missed some of it or the kids were acting up or the pizza guy was at the door. Who knows why they may might want to watch it again. So I send the replay out to all the registrants. Even the ones that bought get it in case they want to pass it along to a friend. And not once ever has anybody that purchased complained about me sending them the replay. Not once in ever. In fact, it makes sense to send it to the ones who bought because they were excited enough to buy. And they are most likely the people to send the replay to other people that may have never heard of you.

[00:28:55] All right. Then I always say rinse and repeat. When you find you have a winning webinar that makes you money, keep rolling it out until it doesn't make money anymore or becomes obsolete. If you've done a good job of making it evergreen by being careful of what you say, I covered this in Part 1, episode 217. Anyway, if you're careful what you say and you'd make sure the copyright year is not on there, you can wait a year or more and roll out your replay again. Just dust that often announce it. I mean, you don't have to wait a whole year. Maybe three every three months you roll it out. So keep in mind, you may have an entire new bunch of people in your database that have not heard your webinar. Another important point that I've lived over and over during the years I've been selling my information products is that the first time I roll out a product, a person may not be ready to receive that product. They may like it. And they may just not know they need it. But for any number of reasons, they aren't ready to purchase. Six months or a year from now, they might be in a different place.

[00:30:06] So when you put the webinar in front of them again, they go through with the purchase. I mean, I just did that recently where I rolled out a webinar I hadn't played in fifteen months and it brought in fourteen hundred dollars while I was watching TV. Okay. So if you've decided webinars are a good vehicle for your business to thrive, it behooves you to heavily concentrate on your show up rate. There are great benefits for both corporate and entrepreneurial webinar creators to get people in their virtual seats. So for corporate people, you'll get much better and more enthusiastic attendees. That will give you a higher evaluations, which leads to a much better chance to future business for entrepreneurial webinar creators who want to sell directly on their webinars. The figures in the introduction, which is part 1, tell the story. You will absolutely make more money when you get more people to attend your events. Live or on hybrid replays then if you depend on people getting around to listen whenever they feel like.

[00:31:18] Good luck with this and let me know if I can help you out. Make sure you check out the screwthecommute.com/prospeaking if you'd like to get yourself into a serious intensive program that will help you become a high paid professional speaker. And I will catch y'all on the next episode. See you later.

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