How to Automate Your Webinar Follow-Up Emails for Higher Attendance & Conversion

Was your last webinar a huge success or a complete flop? Did you get hundreds of attendees or just a handful of them (3 of which were your team members)?

If you are struggling with attracting viewers for your webinars, we might have the right answer for you.

Webinar follow-up emails are crucial if you want a successful webinar.

Seriously, if you don’t have follow-up emails or don’t send them with the correct content or frequency, then stop any other webinar preparation.

Think about it.

How many webinars have you signed up for in the past six months — I’m guessing a few. 

Now, how many did you attend — not many, I guess?

Here’s why? 

1. You see free webinars as not being valuable (there’s just too many of them.)
2. According to FindStack, most people register for a webinar 8 days before the event. Yes, without good follow-up emails, we forget to attend.
3. You need to feel like it’s going to be rewarding, and most don’t.

Even the most appealing webinar registration pages, however enticing, need to follow up both pre and post-webinar to be successful.

The attendee’s rate will be poor otherwise.

But fear not.

In this article, you’re about to learn how to avoid this.

You’ll learn the best lead nurturing techniques to use, both pre and post-webinar, and we’ll also show you how to target those that didn’t attend. 

By the time you’ve finished reading, you’ll have proven webinar email templates and know everything about using automated email follow-ups to make your webinar a success.

Let’s jump in.

How do you write a follow-up email for a webinar?

The process behind writing emails for your webinar depends on whether you’re targeting pre or post-webinar attendees.

They’re both essential but require completely different approaches to your emails.

For example, pre-webinar emails focus on getting your leads to attend, intending to motivate, remind and encourage them to show up.

Post-webinar emails, on the other hand, consist of targeting two different segments.

1. Attendees
2. Non-attendees.

Both pre, post, attendees, and non-attendees are important, so we’ll discuss them all. But first, let’s start with the pre-webinar emails.

Pre-webinar 

Webinar invitation email

Before you can start sending any webinar follow-up emails, you must invite people to join and book your webinar.

The following template works well:

Subject options:

• [Exclusive webinar] Learn how to (achieve the most prominent benefit)
• Invitation to webinar
• (Live webinar invite) Are you interested in (solving a problem)

Email body:

Here’s a great example from Jason Swenk:

Webinar confirmation email

You have your squeeze page set up and ready to take registrations. Once a lead signs up, the email sequence begins.

The first email to send out is the webinar confirmation email.

You send this email immediately after the lead signs up for the webinar. It’s a simple approach, but one that you need to treat with the utmost importance.

Typically you start taking registrations around 7-10 days before the event, so it’s important to tell your subscriber to bookmark the webinar link and add the date and event to their favorite online calendars.

Subject options: 

• [Confirmation] Your webinar link & important information 
• [Confirmation] your webinar Link
• [Confirmation] Congratulations, you’re signed up.

Email body:

Here’s a fantastic webinar confirmation example from DoodleWarriors. Notice the P.s. section that mentions the free gif, additionally enticing people to attend the webinar:

First reminder (5 days before)

Next is the first reminder email that you should send out around five days before the webinar.

Again another simple approach as the following template shows:

Subject options: 

• [Webinar Reminder] Our appointment is in five days
• [Webinar Reminder] You don’t want to miss this event
• [Webinar Reminder] 5 days to go

Email body:

Second reminder (1 day before)

Send the second follow-up email reminder 24 hours before the webinar starts.

This email is similar to the first reminder one but with a little bit more excitement added.

Subject options: 

• [Webinar Reminder] See you tomorrow
• [Webinar Reminder] You’re going to love this
• [Webinar Reminder] Friendly reminder about tomorrow

Email body:

Final reminder (60 – 10 minutes before)

Send the final email 10-60 minutes before the webinar starts.

This email is your final chance to get your lead to attend, so add a touch of urgency, and throw in a surprise announcement.

Subject options: 

• [Webinar Reminder] We’re about to start
• [Webinar Reminder] Starting in 30 minutes
• [Webinar Reminder] Live event starting soon

Email body:

Summing up — pre-webinar emails 

The above email sequence will help you get more attendees to show up live. In addition, it’s a good idea to show them what they will be learning in the webinar — this will help keep them motivated to watch the event.

The following example from Ryan Levesque is a great way to do this. He provides tangible benefits that will stay in the mind of the subscriber.

Take a look:

Spend a bit of time creating the emails and setting them up in your email editor, and don’t forget to automate and personalize your follow-up emails to increase your open rates (we’ll cover how to do this towards the end of the article, so stay tuned!)

Post-webinar 

We now move on to post-webinar emails.

There are 2 sections — one for those who attended and one for those who never.

Both are important to increase your conversion rate.

On24 reports that the average attendance conversion rate for a webinar is 58%, and the average attendance is 48%. 

So, you’re going to have to put in some work with your webinar follow up emails to:

1. Increase your conversion rate
2. Increase your attendance rate

Let’s start with those that attended the webinar.

Thank you for attending the webinar email (1 day after the webinar)

The first post-webinar email is the thank you for attending email. In this email, you say thank you for showing up live and inform the attendees about the replay.

The following template works great.

Subject options: 

• [Webinar Replay] Here’s Your Recording
• [Webinar Replay] Recording & Questions
• [Webinar Replay] Recording & Quick Message

Email body:

Q&A email (3 days after the webinar)

This email will answer some Q&A about the special offer you were selling on your webinar.

Subject options: 

• Q&A Plus Announcement
• Your Questions Answered
• Let’s Clear Things Up.

Email body:

Take a look at the example below — it’s from the One Ten One Hundred and shows you how they use email to announce a Q&A session:

You could copy this approach if you want your Q&A email follow-up to be a bit more visual.

Offer closing soon webinar (5 days after the webinar)

The offer closing email is the final email sent out to those that attended but still haven’t purchased.

Subject options: 

• Final Call: Closing Down Today
• Last Chance — Grab Your Place
• We’re Pulling The Plug: Act Now.

Email body:

Email sequence to target those who didn’t attend

The final set of post-webinar email follow-ups is for the non-attending subscribers.

Just over half of all those who registered won’t turn up to watch your webinar live.

For whatever reason, they never say down to listen to what you had to say.

However, there’s still a chance to claw some of them back with a behavioral email campaign specifically targeting them.

Modern email automation software like Encharge enables you to send an autoresponder series of emails to those who perform a specific behavior.

For example:

If a lead clicked on the buy now button but never purchased, you can set things up, so a series of automated emails are sent to them targeting the reasons why they likely never purchased.

And with webinars, if a lead is registered but never turned up, you can target them with automated emails to try and convince them to watch the replay (we’ll cover how to do this in a bit).

That’s what the following templates will do, but first, you will need to segment your audience.

Segmenting your audience

You can segment your audience (leads, customers, etc.) in many ways, but for the benefit of this article, we will focus on email activity and behavior.

You set certain conditions that trigger a response. 

If a lead registered for the webinar but never turned up, you can segment them to be targeted with a series of emails.

Once the trigger is activated, the emails get sent.

You can use the following templates to send out to the segmented list of those who never watched the webinar.

Email 1. Sorry you couldn’t make the webinar email (send 1 day after the webinar)

Subject options: 

• You Missed The Webinar (Here’s A Replay)
• Replay Of The Webinar (Time-Sensitive)
• Webinar Replay Just For You

Email body:

Webinar closing email (2 days after the webinar)

Subject options: 

• Time’s Running Out (Here’s The Replay)
• Time-Sensitive Replay: Watch Today
• Webinar Replay (Time Running Out)

Email body:

The example below shows you how Teachable writes an email follow-up with urgency, benefits, and also linking to the webinar replay:

Final call (3 days after the webinar) 

The final call email is the last email you send the non-showers in the sequence.

Subject options: 

• Shutting The Replay Down In A Few Hours (Act Now)
• Final Call: Webinar Replay Closing Down
• Last Chance (Watch The Webinar Replay Now)

Email body:

If you’re not showing a replay of the webinar but will be having another live showing, then look at the following email example from AdsAccelerator. 

They offer the subscriber another chance to watch the live event as it happens. You could send an email like this to the non-showers automatically using your email automation software.

How to set up automated webinar follow-up emails

In this section, we’ll share a step-by-step guide on setting up automated follow-up emails for your webinars.

Before we start with the actual guide, there are 2 critical things that you need to consider:

• The marketing automation tool that you are going to use.
• The type of webinar you want to run.

Choosing a marketing automation tool for your webinar follow-up emails

Some webinar platforms come with the option to send automated emails. However, these emails won’t be as robust or easy to edit as those you can set up in a dedicated email marketing or marketing automation tool. 

Apart from that, with a dedicated tool for emails, you get the flexibility to build advanced follow-up journeys. Things like: resend email to people that didn’t open.

Last but not least, you can see your email engagement metrics (like opens and clicks) for your webinar emails, along with the rest of your email communication.

If you decide to go with a marketing automation platform for your webinar emails, you must carefully review if the platform can integrate with your webinar tool.

When it comes to integrations, there are 4 options:

Native webinar integrations 

Some webinar platforms support native integrations with the major email marketing tools like Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign. 

The drawback here is that a webinar tool can’t support all of the email marketing/autoresponder platforms out there, so your email tool might not be supported. If that’s the case, you have to look into one of the other 2 options.

Zapier 

Connector platforms like Zapier (or one of its cheaper alternatives like Integrately or Pabbly Connect). Almost all email marketing and webinar tools have a Zapier integration, so this option will be available in nearly all cases. 

The drawback is that if you run high-volume webinars, Zapier can get quite expensive quickly.

Webhooks 

Webhooks are a universal standard of sending information between tools. It’s free, fast, and highly reliable (often more reliable than native integrations and Zapier). If you want to go with this option, you must ensure that both the webinar tool and the email marketing tool support webhooks. More specifically, the webinar tool has to be able to send webhooks, and the email tool must be able to receive them. Hint: Encharge has a powerful Webhooks integration that allows you to receive webhooks. 

The only drawback of webhooks is that some webinar platforms offer them as a paid add-on or make them available on their higher-tier plans. Even then, webhooks are usually much cheaper than Zapier as you don’t pay for each webhook request.

API

This is the most advanced and flexible out of the 4 options. If the email tool and the webinar platform both support APIs to connect data, you can hire a developer to build the integration. Unfortunately, this method requires coding, so there is no way to make it work if you are a non-technical person.

Regardless of which option you decide to choose, you have to evaluate the available actions supported by the webinar tool. In other words, what actions can the webinar tool send to the email marketing tool?

These actions will be used to trigger automated emails, add tags, and segment your audience in the marketing automation platform.

Here is a list of some of the critical actions that you need to watch out for when evaluating the webinar tool:

• Registered for the webinar
• Attended the webinar
• Missed the webinar
• Webinar replay is available
• Webinar replay is about to expire
• 48 hours before webinar
• 24 hours before webinar
• 6 hours before webinar
• 1 hour before webinar
• Webinar starts
• They leave before…
• They stay until…

The more actions you can use, the more personalized your webinar follow-up emails will be.

The type of your webinar

The second thing you want to consider before you start automating your webinar emails is the actual type of the webinar. 

There are 2 common types of webinars:

• Live, one-time webinar – standard webinars that you do at a fixed date and time.
• Automated, also known as “evergreen” webinars – pre-recorded webinars that leads can subscribe to on an ongoing basis.

Each webinar type requires an entirely different email automation setup. So let’s review each one separately.

How to set up emails for a live webinar in Encharge

The standard live webinars are much easier to set up. 

You simply select the right segment to send the emails to (for instance, “Subscribed to Webinar” or “Haven’t attended” webinar) and send fixed time-based emails to that segment before and after the webinar date and time.

Segmenting webinar users 

How you segment the webinar audience would depend on how you send the webinar data to the email tool (see the previous section). 

In Encharge, you will segment based on field data or events. For instance, you will pass all webinar data to Encharge through a webhook and map the appropriate fields to the profile of the person like this:

Automating the emails

Once you have the data in Encharge and you can segment, you have to create a flow.

You can create a Flow that starts with the Time Trigger step. For example, if your webinar begins at noon on Nov 10, and you want to send an email 30 minutes before the webinar starts, you will set up the Time Trigger step like this:

And the flow to send the email like this:

Then, you can prepare a flow with all of the pre and post-webinar emails like this:

How to set up an evergreen webinar with Encharge — a real-life example

Automated or evergreen webinars are relatively more complex to set up in terms of emails. 

Below we are going to examine how Doodle Warriors automate the emails for their masterclass evergreen webinar.

First things first: what webinar tool are Doodle Warriors using? 

They are using Stealth Seminar — Stealth Seminar is a powerful platform for automated webinars that has robust support for Webhooks and several advanced features like the ability for the attendees to choose the time of the webinar (essentially emulating a live webinar).

List of the supported webhooks in Stealth Seminar:

Doodle Warriors are using Stealth Seminar webhooks to automate their emails in Encharge. They have created 6 automation flows for the webinar:

Note that you can group all of your automations in a single flow. Still, this method gives them more flexibility and is easier to organize, especially when using Folders in Encharge.

Let’s examine some of the flows they have set up.

Registered for Portrait Masterclass

Since Stealth Seminar supports various webhooks for their webinars, it’s super easy to trigger emails based on people’s actions. 

In this flow, Doodle Warrior are sending an email when someone confirms an email:

They are using the Registered webhook from Stealth Seminar with our Receive Webhook step. 

A critical part of this setup is to map all of the webhook data to fields in Encharge. You can create custom fields for the required data fields and map them in the step. 

Notice how Doodle Warriors are mapping the event (action name), the title of the webinar, and other helpful information. You will use this field data to create segments or as dynamic merge tags in your emails (see below).

The dynamic webinar data is then used in the confirmation email as merge tags. That way allowing Doodle Warriors to send unique emails for the evergreen webinar:

Last but not least, notice how they use the Add Tag action to tag people that have registered for the webinar. Tags are an easy way to keep track of your users and create relevant segments.

Replay Available – Portrait Masterclass

Another interesting follow-up email part of the Doodle Warriors masterclass webinar is the webinar replay flow. 

Doodle Warriors are sending 2 emails for webinar replays, creating urgency by notifying the user they have 48 and 24 hours respectively to watch the replay.

For that flow trigger, they are using the Replay Available webhook from Stealth Seminar.

And here’s the email: 

Advanced webinar segmentation

Thanks to the powerful webhooks of Stealth Seminar and the Receive Webhook feature of Encharge, Doodle Warriors are able to create advanced segments. For instance, all people that have watched less than 85% of the webinar.

To achieve that Doodle Warriors are using the “They stay until…” webhook from Stealth Seminar and the Add Tag step in Encharge like this:

Then, it’s just a matter of creating a segment with that tag:

Using that segment, they can target almost 10,000 people that left early and create highly personalized customer lifecycle campaigns.

Webinar follow up emails stats and tips

Specific tips and stats for webinar email follow-ups can help you with open rates and conversions.

Being aware of them is essential for any business using webinars:

1. Personalize Your Emails: a recent article on Linkedin states that 36% of people want companies to offer a more personalized approach to them — and at the same time, 74% say they’re frustrated when emails are not personalized.
2. Most webinar registrations happen on a Tuesday.
3. Segmentation of your audience is essential for sending effective webinar follow-up emails.
4. 73% of B2B marketers claim that webinars produce the best leads.
5. 65% of webinar hosts claim that automated email marketing campaigns are the best strategy for promoting webinars.
6. A/B split test your email subject lines.
7. Roughly 29% of people register for a webinar on the day of the event — so make sure you send the webinar reminder on the day of the event

The bottom line on webinar follow-up emails

Webinars are a great way to get leads and customers for your business — there’s no debate.

The more people who watch your webinar, the better your sales conversion will be. 

More than half of your webinar registrations will not turn up to the live event, so targeting non-attendees is an absolute must. In addition, with average sales conversion rates being around 10-15%, the idea of not targeting non-buyers who attended the webinar is also unthinkable.

You simply have to target them all.

You’re leaving money on the table otherwise.

Webinar follow-up emails are the best marketing tools you have to work with alongside your webinar.
Use the templates provided, combined with behavioral email automation services like Encharge, and watch your conversion and sales rates improve.