Attendee Incentives
In the previous lesson, we explored the idea of Attendee Incentives as a way to lure attendees to your event.
(Okay, maybe it's not quite that malicious. Let's change the term to motivate and roll with that instead!)
In short, Attendee Incentives help us motivate our audience to attend your event. They do so by increasing excitement, portraying a sense of urgency, increasing engagement/buy-in, and promising additional value (often times exclusively to those that attend).
Since we're asking our audience for their time and attention, we need to make it worth their while. Attendee Incentives can help balance that exchange in our favor.
Types of Attendee Incentives
You have a lot of options when it comes to the types of Attendee Incentives you can offer: everything from free services, downloads, coupons/discounts, giveaways and contests, event tickets, guidebooks, electronics, physical items, formulas—pretty much anything can work.
However, it's important to align the incentives with the desires of your customer avatar and when possible, align with the topic of the webinar itself.
Let's say someone was running an event around kittens and decided to give away a free coffee maker. While coffee is awesome, it's inconsistent with the content and the audience's interests.
The better option would be to offer something kitten-related. Maybe a gift card to an online pet store, or a custom playpen, or even an all-inclusive photo shoot for you and your kitten.
Contests are also a great option, not only to increase attendance but to help generate buzz and excitement—structure the contest to leverage social media channels and with the use of hashtags and you'll get some free promotion too!
Hubspot mentioned they ran a recent campaign using a pre-webinar contest:
At HubSpot, we held a #WorkRemote hashtag challenge to support our webinar on working remote effectively, and we built this landing page to explain the rules and how a winner would be picked. (Note: Be sure to work with your legal team when planning any challenge or contest.) You could note in the promotional and reminder emails that "attendees are getting a special 25% discount on X," and include that discount code in the final slide of your webinar.
For any downloadable incentives that you plan on sharing during the event, you can anchor them to specific times to drive different types of engagement.
Maybe you have an early bird download for those that show up early and another for those that stay until the end.
In fact, one tactic might be to keep a wrap on the details. You'll still want to share a preview of the incentives leading up to the event and as the event gets underway to keep the excitement high, but this encourages your audience to stay tuned.
Of course, Attendee Incentives is an area that is ripe for outside-the-box creative thinking. As long as you keep your customer avatar in mind, you'll be in a great position to try different ideas to see what sticks!
Next, we'll discuss how to set up our pre-webinar email campaign for success.