Catchy title, isn't it? I'm referring to "dead leads" -- The ones that didn't turn into hot prospects or customers. Too many companies focus their webinars purely on two groups... Existing customers and new leads. But Gary pointed me to an article on HubSpot entitled "1,200 Leads in 4 Weeks: A Lead Nurturing Success Story." In the article, Prashant Kaw lays out the results of a four-week program at HubSpot where they used webinars to re-engage with past leads that hadn’t matured.
The results are impressive. Prashant writes that on average they “re-awakened” just over 300 cold leads and 47 lost opportunities per webinar. I can’t imagine a company that wouldn’t be happy with that kind of result.
You might be saying to yourself, “What’s the big deal? We always send out invitations to our house list, and that includes every lead we’ve ever received.” Therein lies the problem. If you are going to make a program like this work, you have to target both the content and the pitch to the specific subset of your audience you want to reach. New leads need introductory material. You are introducing yourself and your products/services for the first time. Existing customers need more advanced material that assumes a familiarity with your offerings.
Cold leads need something in the middle. You don’t want to bore them with the same introduction that was ineffective the last time they saw it! And you can’t go overboard with details, inviting them to watch webinars designed for customers. You need to advance their understanding of your offerings and work on practical applications and benefits. Tell them in the invitation that the content is built especially for people who have seen an introduction already, and that this session will give them additional value and benefits. Then make it happen.
The biggest decision for you is your call to action. Do you want to encourage receptivity, or do you want to stimulate proactive behavior? If you plan to contact each attendee after the webinar, make that clear. Tease your audience with what they will get out of accepting your follow-up call or reading your follow-up email. Your job is to get them anticipating the additional contact and ready to listen to what you have to say.
If you want to keep things on an inbound basis, your job is harder. You need to give your listeners an overwhelmingly compelling reason to click a link or request more information. It is exponentially harder to get people to take action on their own than to get them to respond to your actions. One of the best things you can do during your webinar is to get their hands on the mouse or keyboard. If they are interacting with you and participating in your presentation, they are a little more likely to carry that interaction forward into a post-event action. If they just sit there and passively listen to you for 60 minutes, it’s tough to suddenly change the dynamic and ask them to take action at the very end.
Read the article. It should get you thinking about the ways you segment your invitation lists and the ways you target your webinar content. One size does not fit all. If you want to reconnect with cold leads, you need to make it happen with a conscious plan.
