How LeadPages Tripled Webinar Revenue In One Day (Hint: It’s Not Due To More Attendees)

Tim: Audience engagement, sure we all want it. We think it translates to measurable results at some point but how do we prove it? Well today, we’re using a podcasting cliché and turning the tables on yours truly, that’s right, I’ll be today’s guest. LeadPages content marketing rock star Jeff Wenberg will be asking me the questions because I wanted to find out if increasing the engagement on our webinars would result  in a higher sales volume and boy, did it ever.

Using today’s tactic, we tested two consecutive webinars and ended up tripling the revenue on the second one even though it had 130 less attendees. The best part, no complicated technology, no long learning curve you could do this on your next webinar. So I’m Tim Paige, the conversion educator here at LeadPages and this is ConversionCast.

Jeff: Alright what’s up Tim? Welcome to ConversionCast.

Tim: Oh, Jeff, thanks for having me on.

Jeff: Man, I’m so excited. So tell me what were the results that you’re going to be talking about today?

Tim: Yeah. I love this. We’re talking about webinars and in this particular webinar, we did a webinar with one of our top affiliates, somebody who are just like so ecstatic, can’t believe that this person is on your side, you know, it’s such a great person but we ended up. We did two webinars back to back days and it was at the same time both days. The same traffic source it was on a single webinar registration page with two dates on it and with the same traffic source and all that kind of stuff. We ended up on the second day with 130 fewer attendees  but we tripled the revenue even though we had 130 fewer attendees

Jeff: Oh my gosh, that’s awesome.

Tim: Yeah, pretty fantastic.

Jeff: That is incredible. So I can’t wait to get into the details of how you did all that and everything but before we do that, Tim why don’t you tell us you know, who you are and what you do?

Tim: I love this. I am the conversion educator here at LeadPages which means I deliver wonderfully educational content around how to improve your website’s results and your business’ marketing efforts. So I speak at live events, I host a podcast called ConversionCast. You should check it out. It’s every Monday. I do our webinars and I’ve done over 400 webinars in less than two years.

Jeff: Oh my goodness. [Laughs]

Tim: [Laughs]

Jeff: Oh my goodness. What do you think your average a week for webinars?

Tim: I average eight webinars a week.

Jeff: Good lord. That’s awesome.

Tim: In some weeks it’s significantly more and every once in a while I get a slow week where it’s like only one a day.

Jeff: Absolutely. Yeah, that’s an incredible pace.

Tim: Thanks man.

Jeff: Alright so Tim tell us kind of more detail about the case study that we’re talking about with the two different webinars.

Tim: Yeah, it sounds great. So like I mentioned it was one of our biggest affiliates and we have planned this webinar a little bit in advance but the way that the affiliate promotes it was kind of short notice. Like there weren’t, I think it was like four days of marketing. But it all goes to one webinar registration page. There are two date options and you can pick which date that you want. So there were no differences in traffic source. A lot of times I feel like you know, people have these things where like oh I increase my conversion rate by 30% but it was the first one was with cold Facebook ads and the second one was warm traffic to the existing email list.

Jeff: Great.

Tim: But in this case, it was exactly the same traffic source. It was even the same registration page and it was on a Wednesday and a Thursday which we found no difference in conversion rate between Wednesday and Thursday and we’ve been doing Wednesdays and Thursdays for a long, long time. So the only thing that changed between day 1 and day 2 besides the total number of attendees was that on day 1, I did the whole presentation without answering questions until the Q&A at the end.

So what we’ll do is we welcome everybody to the webinar. We call out a few names, say hello, welcome people to the webinar. We present the content, we do the offer for LeadPages and then we do a Q&A and the affiliate was reading questions and I was answering the questions back. That was day 1 and we still had a great number. The revenue number was still fantastic. I’m not going to share specifics but it was still you know a great five-figure revenue number for one webinar.

Jeff: Right. Uh-hum.

Tim: Well the second day, 130 less people showed up and that’s probably just because a lot of them joined the first one, they picked the first available webinar, and I answered questions throughout from start to finish. When people would ask a question, I would answer. Now we had a lot of people on so I know I didn’t answer every single question but —

Jeff: Great.

Tim: –you know, as I went relevant questions I would say somebody would say oh you know, how do I or do you integrate with let’s say InfusionSoft. I would say yup, we integrate with InfusionSoft in fact that’s what we actually use at LeadPages so —

Jeff: Great.

Tim: -you know, it’s a great quality integration. You know?

[0:05:01]

Jeff: And you just kind of engaged them throughout the process?

Tim: Yeah, exactly right. I was just answering questions throughout. It didn’t feel like to them it was like I didn’t make them wait until the end. They got that engagement as they went. If there was something they didn’t understand, they could get an answer right away so that they didn’t have to get stuck on one particular thing.

Jeff: Right.

Tim: Then we can move on to the next part. And in doing that, —

Jeff: Sure.

Tim: –that was the only change, same presentation everything. We ended up tripling the revenue that we did from the first one with even less people on the webinar.

Jeff: Oh my goodness. Wow, that is incredible, dude. So do you think it is a direct result of that engagement right away and like you had mentioned people not getting stuck on one thing that they wanted to know about where the just tune everything else out or what do you think was kind of the differentiator the two?

Tim: Yeah, I’ve tested a lot of things around that when it comes to webinar. I’ve tested different things like getting on super early like 20 minutes early and just talking to people for that whole 20 minutes. I’ve tested getting on literally right at the top of the hour and starting the webinar. In that case, I actually didn’t notice that much of a difference. Where I did notice a difference though was getting on five to ten minutes early, it doesn’t have to be super long and just asking people to mention their name and where they’re from right at the beginning of the webinar and I read every single one of them.

Now every once in a while we have a webinar that’s you know, maxed out, I’m not going to read a thousand names.

Jeff: Right.

Tim: But I try to read as many of them as I can and the first thing that it does it shows them that you’re actually live. You’re actually there with them that it’s not prerecorded and people like to hear their own name. It’s just a weird subconscious thing. We feel good about it. It’s something special to us, it’s our name. So they feel kind of special and then you know answering the questions throughout doing those two things yes there’s an increased sense of engagement. It overcomes people’s biggest objections because you never know that person that wanted to know if we integrate with InfusionSoft although it’s right there on our website, you know, maybe they just didn’t scroll down that far. Maybe they just watched the video. They didn’t see that integrates with InfusionSoft and went oh well I just don’t know. So I’m not going to get it if it doesn’t integrate and then maybe they moved on.

Jeff: Yeah.

Tim: Wears on the webinar, they ask that question, I answered it and maybe they’re like great, okay well that was the biggest thing now I can move on with the training.

Jeff: Uh-hum.

Tim: So I found that the more you engage with people, the higher your conversion rate will be and of course there’s the more affinity that your audience will have for you and for your company because they felt like you cared about them. But yeah definitely the increase in engagement, the question I get about this a lot though is if people are asking all these questions, and you’ve got this content and probably you’ve got a certain amount of content that’s supposed to last a certain amount of time, one doesn’t that tend to make your webinar a little bit longer and beyond that, doesn’t that, can’t that frustrate some people? Like won’t’ you lose some people that are like get on to the content, I don’t care about these questions.

Jeff: [Laughs]

Tim: And yes, actually I have found that we had less drop-off weirdly enough, we had less drop-off on the webinar where I didn’t answer questions as we went on day 1 whereas on day 2 we actually did lose some people because I was seeing people type in stuff like okay, we get it, you know you’re answering the questions, move on with it.

Jeff: Uh-hum.

Tim: But that drop-off it was so small and insignificant compared to the sense of engagement from the people that were that did stay.

Jeff: Uh-hum.

Tim: That it kind of offset it.

Jeff: Yeah. I feel like kind of the same way I’ve experienced when hosting webinars that the people that were going or that do end up purchasing your product those are the people that are there asking questions because they actually want to know and the people that probably fall off aren’t the ones that were going to buy anyway. They just wanted to get the content and get out of there.

Tim: Right. Yeah.

Jeff: And I felt that like that those questions answering them throughout it almost spurs on conversation with everybody that kind of has questions about various thing about your product.

Tim: Yes.

Jeff: That you can knock those out right away so then when it gets to the pitch it’s like oh well cool, I’m all set, let’s do this.

Tim: Yeah and they’re not focusing on that one hang-up that they had 45 minutes ago.

Jeff: Yeah.

Tim: That they sat there and stood on for 45 minutes with like well I still need to get this question answered this thing that’s bugging me and yes you might get to that in the Q&A but at that point, maybe they saw your pitch. And although it was a great offer, maybe they saw that it was let’s say somebody with $1,000 maybe they saw that $1,000, they were like forget that, I don’t even know if it’s going to work for me.

Jeff: Yeah. Right, right. Just answer my question.

Tim: Right, right, whereas we were able to answer their question early on and it does solve that. You know, a lot of people don’t like to hear us on ConversionCast talking about the why, like why does it work. But in reality, and sure it is somewhat speculation but the interesting thing is we’ve tested this again.

[0:10:05]

I actually tested it many more times because I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a fluke with this particular affiliates’ audience.

Jeff: Sure.

Tim: We’ve tested it with other affiliates and tested it on our own internal webinars and consistently this proves to be the case that when you answer questions throughout, the conversion rate increases. But that first one, the first time we tried it was the biggest jump in results and again that can partially be attributed to that affiliate’s audience liking the engagement. But even with different affiliates that I would be blown away, we still found that to be the case.

Jeff: Alright, Tim, dude, that case study is phenomenal. I really appreciate those results and I feel like not only are the results super interesting gut I feel like people that are hosting webinars are going to get a lot of the tips that you shared with us today. So Tim, thanks for being on ConversionCast.

Tim: Awesome and thanks for stepping into the interviewer role. I appreciate you coming on and helping us do something a little bit different this week.

Jeff: Hey, you got it.