Webinar funnel guide: landing page, promotion, emails and automation

We wrote nine separate posts about webinars in 2020 and 2021, when everyone was suddenly running them. Five years on, the tools have changed and the audience has changed, but the funnel has not. This guide replaces all nine. It covers the registration page, the promotion, the email sequences before and after, the choice between live and automated, the platform, and the part most of the original posts skipped: measuring the thing against your CRM.

The short version is that a webinar is a lead magnet with a time slot. Everything that makes a lead magnet work applies, plus two extra problems: getting registrants to turn up, and getting attendees to do something afterwards.

Why webinars still work for B2B

B2B buying involves several people and takes months. A webinar is one of the few formats that can address a junior researcher, a team lead and a budget holder at the same time, because it teaches rather than pitches. It also produces a lead who has already spent an hour with you, which is a different quality of lead from a form fill.

The numbers behind that are older than we would like, but they came from named sources in the original posts and we have not seen better ones. InsideSales’ Optimal Lead Generation Methods report found 73 percent of B2B marketers rated webinars among the most effective ways to generate high-quality leads. Adobe’s research put the average webinar conversion rate at 19 percent, against 2 to 3 percent for most marketing channels, with webinar landing pages converting about 51 percent of visitors and about 36 percent of registrants attending. CFE Media and Trew Marketing found 72 percent of survey respondents would give their contact details for a webinar.

Treat those as ceilings for a warm audience. The point of a funnel is to get closer to them.

The funnel in six steps

1. A registration page with one job.
2. Promotion that sends the right people to it, before, during and after the event.
3. A pre-webinar email sequence that gets registrants to attend.
4. The webinar, which teaches first and sells last.
5. A post-webinar sequence, split by who attended and who did not.
6. Tracking that tells you which of the above actually produced customers.

Most webinar programmes have steps one and four and hope for the rest. The gaps are where registrants disappear.

Step 1: the registration page

A registration page is a landing page with one action. It should not have your main navigation, footer links or anything else that gives a visitor a second thing to do.

What it needs:

• A headline that says what they will learn, not what the webinar is called. If you are running ads to the page, the headline should match the ad. Visitors who see a different promise on the page assume they clicked the wrong thing.
• The date, time and time zone, large and unmissable. More people miss webinars because they misread the time than for any other reason.
• Three to five specific outcomes. “How to cut proposal turnaround from a week to a day” beats “Learn about sales efficiency”. Specific outcomes are what people trade their email address for.
• Who is presenting, with a photo and one line on why they are worth an hour. Guest speakers with their own audience are worth more than any ad budget, which we come back to below.
• A short form. Name and email. Company and role if sales genuinely needs them. Every extra field costs registrations, and you can ask for more after they attend. If you need more fields, use a multi-step form so the first step is easy.
• A button that says what happens. “Save my seat” or “Get the recording too” outperform “Register” because they describe the outcome.
• Proof. Logos of companies that attended previous sessions, a quote from a past attendee, or a count of past registrants. If it is your first webinar, use proof about you instead.
• A teaser video if you have one. A thirty-second clip of the presenter explaining what the session covers does the work of three paragraphs.

What it should not have: links away from the page, the whole content of the webinar written out, or more than one call to action.

The thank-you page matters more than most teams realise. It confirms the registration, tells them the calendar invite is on its way, offers an add-to-calendar button, and gives them one thing to do while they are still paying attention: share the webinar, read a related post, or book a call if they are already sure. Our guide to thank-you pages has ten examples.

Step 2: promotion, in three phases

Promotion is not one push before the event. It runs before, during and after, and each phase has a different job.

Before: fill the room

• Your own site. A notification bar, a banner on the pages your buyers read, and a link in the navigation for the two weeks before. Your existing traffic is your cheapest audience.
• Your list. Two or three emails to existing subscribers, spaced a week apart. The first announces, the second adds a reason, the third reminds.
• Content. A post on the webinar’s topic, published two weeks before, with a registration link. An interview with the guest speaker. A worksheet attendees will use during the session, available on the registration page.
• Social. Organic posts from the company and from every presenter. Pre-written posts that speakers and early registrants can share in one click. A short teaser clip.
• Other people’s audiences. The single highest-leverage move. A guest speaker or partner with a relevant list brings their audience with them and lends you their credibility. Ask every speaker and sponsor to email their list and post about it.
• Paid. Google Ads work when people are already searching for the topic; match the ad headline to the page headline. LinkedIn and Facebook work when you can target by role or interest. Retarget people who visited the registration page and left, and people who registered for past webinars but did not attend.

During: show it is happening

Live-streaming a segment, posting quotes as they happen, and having speakers share the session on their own channels does not add many registrants to this webinar. It adds them to the next one, because it shows people what they missed.

After: keep the conversation going

Make the recording available for a limited time, blog about what was covered, and announce the next session at the end of this one. The follow-up emails below do most of the work here.

Step 3: the pre-webinar email sequence

Registering is free and forgettable. Without reminders, most registrants will not attend. The sequence has four emails, each with one job, in this order.

1. Confirmation, straight away: what they gain. Thank them, restate the date and time, attach the calendar invite, and list the outcomes again. Link to one related piece of content so the relationship starts before the event.
2. A few days later: why it matters. Describe the problem the webinar solves and the questions it will answer. This is the email that turns a casual registration into an intention to attend.
3. A few days before: proof. Testimonials from past attendees, a case study, the speaker’s credentials. Registrants who have never heard of you need a reason to trust the hour will be worth it.
4. The day before and an hour before: urgency and logistics. The link, any software they need, a reminder to join a few minutes early. Short.

If your platform cannot send these, connect it to your email tool with Zapier or Make, and make sure every registrant lands in your CRM with the webinar as the source.

Step 4: the webinar itself

Two rules that held in every one of the original posts and still hold.

Teach first, sell last. Educational sessions outperform product demos for lead generation, because people give their time to learn, not to be pitched. If the content genuinely solves a problem, a short offer at the end feels like the natural next step. If the whole session is a pitch, they will not come back and they will not buy.

Run it live before you automate it. A live session tells you which parts land, which questions come up, and whether the offer converts. Only then is it worth recording and turning into an evergreen version.

Beyond that: rehearse with every speaker on the actual platform, keep it to about an hour, use polls and chat so people can participate without speaking, and partner with a company whose audience overlaps yours. A co-hosted webinar doubles the promotion and halves the work.

Step 5: the post-webinar sequence

The sale rarely happens during the webinar. It happens in the week after, and only if you follow up. Split the list into people who attended and people who registered but did not, and run the same four-email structure for each.

1. Within twenty-four hours. Attendees: thank them, link the replay, restate the two or three ideas that got the most questions, and offer the next step, whether that is a trial, a demo or a call. Non-attendees: no guilt, just the replay link with a time limit on it.
2. A few days later. The topics covered, the replay again, the transcript or slides, and one more piece of related content.
3. A few days after that. Proof from the session itself: what attendees said in the chat, a screenshot of the poll results, a testimonial from someone who acted on it.
4. The last one. The replay comes down on a date. Say so, and repeat the offer.

An offer that only attendees can take, with a real deadline, lifts the whole sequence. Examples that have worked: a free fifteen-minute audit, a short quiz with an instant result, special pricing until a date, or a guarantee on the first month.

Step 6: live or automated

An automated webinar, also called an evergreen webinar, is a recording that plays on a schedule, with registration, reminders and follow-up running without you. You produce it once and it keeps generating leads.

The trade-offs are real. On the plus side: no calendar cost, one recording used indefinitely, and a funnel that runs while the team is closing the leads it produced. On the minus side: the content has to stay useful for a year or more, you cannot reference anything time-sensitive, and interactivity has to be designed in rather than happening naturally. We cover the recording side in detail in our post on pre-recorded webinars.

Three things make automated webinars work rather than feel like a YouTube video with a form in front of it:

• Scheduled screenings rather than instant play. A session that starts at the top of the hour, with a countdown on the registration page, keeps the sense of an event. Most platforms also offer a just-in-time option for people who want to watch now.
• Honest urgency. A deadline that is real for each registrant, such as an offer that expires three days after their screening. Tools like Deadline Funnel handle per-person deadlines and time zones. Fake scarcity is noticed and it costs you the trust the webinar just built.
• The same follow-up as a live session. Reminders before the screening, a split sequence afterwards, and a chase for people who registered but never watched.

Platforms built for this include EverWebinar, EasyWebinar, StealthSeminar and WebinarNinja. Demio handles both live and automated sessions. Each simulates a live room to some degree, with scheduled chat questions and attendee counts; use those features sparingly and never claim a live audience that is not there.

Choosing a platform

Whether live or automated, the checklist is the same:

• Capacity for your expected audience and for more than one presenter.
• A registration page you can design, or a way to use your own page and post registrations into the platform.
• Reminders and follow-up emails, or a clean integration with your email tool.
• Polls, chat and Q&A.
• Replay hosting with an expiry you control.
• Reporting on registrations, attendance, watch time and clicks on the offer.
• An integration with your CRM that carries the source of each registrant, not just their email address.

The last point is the one to check hardest. A webinar that produces forty registrations and three customers is only worth repeating if you can see which three, and where they came from.

Measuring the funnel

Four numbers, read together:

• Registration rate: registrations divided by visitors to the page. This is the page’s job.
• Attendance rate: attendees divided by registrations. This is the reminder sequence’s job.
• Offer rate: people who took the next step divided by attendees. This is the webinar’s job.
• Customer rate: customers divided by registrants, thirty and ninety days later. This is the only number that says whether the webinar paid for itself.

The first three come from the platform. The fourth needs the registration to reach your CRM with the webinar and the traffic source attached, and closed deals to be joined back to it. If your CRM, your analytics and your ad platform give you three different answers, fix that before the next webinar. It is the most common reason a webinar programme gets cut when it was actually working, and it is what our conversion tracking service exists for.

Where to start

If you have never run one: pick a topic your analytics already show people care about, build the registration page and the two email sequences before you promote anything, run it live, and measure the four numbers. If you have run several and the numbers are flat, the page and the reminder sequence are almost always where the leak is, and they are the cheapest parts to fix. We build registration pages and the follow-up as one job, because a page that converts at fifty percent is worth nothing if a third of the registrants never turn up.

Written byWaseem BashirFounder and CEO, Apexure

Waseem founded Apexure in 2015 and has led its work on 3,000+ pages for 300+ clients since. He writes about what the team sees after the click, which is pages, forms, tracking and the systems behind them.

More posts by WaseemYouTubeX