Setting Up the Registration Process for Success

While crafting enticing reminder emails and performing thoughtful pre-webinar activities are crucial to driving attendance, the process usually starts earlier than that—as early as the registration process itself.

As mentioned in the previous lesson, designing a registration process that conveys the value your event will provide greatly improves the registration rate as well as the actual attendance rate of those registrants.

Nail this piece and you'll be in a great spot! Fail to do this and you'll see both registration and attendance conversions struggle.

We go in-depth on how to craft an effective registration process in our Registrations 101 course, so we highly recommend you explore that course.

As a summary, we cover:

• why an effective registration process is crucial
• how to design a great registration page, including a deep dive into all of the elements included on the page
• using aspects such as benefit-driven messaging and social proof
• and much more!

Attendee Incentives

Once you've laid out the foundation using the lessons in the course above, we can explore the use of Attendee Incentives: the offer of exclusive, scarcity-driven bonuses/gifts to improve attendance rates.

In short: How can we build excitement around your event, get them to buy-in early, and incentivize them not to miss out?

Here are a few ideas that work well:

• Contests
• Live Q&A
• Hot Seats
• Exclusive Discounts
• Special Bonus Offers
• Custom Content / Services

Considering the Replay

Remember that the full benefits of Attendees are had through live attendance—while viewers of the replay might still engage with the content (and even convert on your desired outcome), they don't impact the live webinar itself in the same way.

So it's important to make the decision early-on if you'll be excluding replay viewers from cashing in on the bonus, helping drive live attendance.

If your bonus is part of the content itself, you can create a separate replay for those that didn't attend (while those that were there live can get the actual webinar replay).

Build Excitement

Another strategy we can use in tandem with our registration process is using a bit of creativity to build excitement around your event.

Adding color to your registration process, particularly on the Thank You page after they've locked in the registration, is a great way to:

• leave a positive impression that will carry over until it's time to attend
• reward your newly minted registrant (and thank them—something that is often overlooked)
• deliver a glimpse of what's to come (and the promised value of your webinar)

You can do this through the use of witty copy, fun images or videos, or even quick handouts (pre-webinar checklists or preview content) that encourage buy-in.

So ultimately while the impact of any incentives or underlying excitement is a hard attribute to measure, it can be the difference between someone eagerly awaiting your event and forgetting about it altogether.

In the next lesson, we'll do a deeper dive into Attendee Incentives before moving on to pre-webinar email campaigns.