Thursday, June 11, 2020

Why You Need Webinar Landing Pages in 2020 [Best Practices & Examples]

It’s 2020. The ordinary ways we do things have been disrupted left and right, up and down. Circumstances have forced many businesses to shift their brick-and-mortar operations and real-world activities online. 

So it’s fair for a marketer to ask:

“Is now a good time to be running webinars?

The short answer is, now’s a great time.

Marketing departments are slashing their networking budgets. In some places, gatherings like conferences and workshops won’t be in the cards for quite a while. Some of us are still in lockdown, with little to do but binge-watch crime documentaries on Netflix. And others are busy looking for new ways to level up their skills. 

The result? If anything, webinars are only going to blow up. 

If you’re hungry for an opportunity to take a bit of that attention away from Netflix, let’s look at what webinars can do for your business and how you can create webinar landing pages that turn visitors into registrants.

What can a webinar do for my business?

It’s no secret that savvy marketers and businesses love running webinars. After all, webinars can be an easy way to achieve multiple goals:

  • Webinars can help fill your funnel and generate more leads—and fast. If you’re a techy, you can automate this process too, saving you even more time. (For a concrete example, see how Thinkific took advantage of the Unbounce integration with ActiveCampaign to secure thousands of leads on autopilot for an online summit.)
  • Webinars give you a platform to educate your customers, build stronger bonds, and boost product engagement. An easy way to do this is to demo your product live and use it to execute the key points you’ve covered. 
  • By educating your customers, you’re establishing authority and brand expertise. According to 99firms, “92% of attendees expect a live Q&A session at the end of the webinar.” That’s right: they expect it. They actually want you to teach them something. To demo something that might improve their lives. To sell them something that might give them value. They’re inviting you to build closer relationships and engage with them.
  • You’re networking and making yourself look smart via your guests’ expertise, boosting your own authority. It’s called the Halo effect. When you bring on stellar guests, their best qualities reflect onto you. Plus, your guests’ target audiences get to learn about you. Talk about a quick and easy way to expand your reach.
  • Affiliates and potential partners might approach you if they see an opportunity. Finally, offering to run webinars together can be a powerful incentive for partnering up, especially if you can offer the resources, know-how, and network to do it well.

When done right, webinars are an easy way to cover every stage of your funnel. With all that upside, we’re shocked more companies aren’t running webinars. (How about a Netflix model for webinars? We’d tune in.)

Want to take your webinar campaigns up a notch? If you’re already using webinars for your business and want a quick way to boost your registrations, try starting with a high-converting webinar landing page template.

A webinar landing page is a no-brainer 

You can be the William Shakespeare of webinars, delivering brilliance, entertainment, and wisdom in one perfect package. Without a half-decent landing page to score some signups, though? Well, you’d be lucky to draw a crowd of crickets.

That’s why promoting your webinars is so important. If you have seats to fill, you’ve got three options: 

  1. You can build a stripped-down registration page that’s easy to set up but doesn’t really convince people to convert. Too often, these pages have lengthy forms with so many unnecessary fields, you might as well be filling out a tax form. You also have no ability to A/B test them. 
  2. You can get your web devs and designers together to create something with tons of visual appeal—but this option takes a lot of time and money that you may not have right now. (Totally understandable if you’re trying to get up and running quickly.)
  3. You can use landing pages to help you avoid both these problems. Webinar landing pages can be a better option when it comes to running time-sensitive campaigns because you can literally set one up and get running in minutes. And if you’re a believer in wowing your target audience with beautiful design, creating one is still very easy, because you can use templates that have already been tested in the wild.
Photo by J. Kelly Brito on Unsplash.

Webinar landing page best practices

When it comes to landing pages for webinar registration, you could fill an encyclopedia with all the best practices out there. To get you started sooner, let’s stick to the few established and actionable practices that’ll reap some of the greatest rewards.

1. Before you can create a compelling landing page, you need a strong topic.

Choose a topic that grabs your audience’s attention. Ideally, it should be contemporary, relevant to the problems they face, and very actionable. Once the webinar is over, your audience should be left energized, since the next steps will be crystal clear. 

2. Invite a guest to connect with new audiences.

Sure, you can rely on your star power to draw a small crowd. But that’s not getting the best bang for your buck. What’s a webinar if you show up all by your lonesome? 

Lonely The Simpsons GIF
“But my mom says my webinar is cool.”

One amazing way to multiply your reach is by leveraging your guests’ audiences. Keep in mind, these people aren’t a cold audience either. They’re already warmed up because you’re working with someone they already trust. That means they’re more likely to buy from you. 

Plus, if your guest is selling a complementary product or service, this could lead to some profitable partnerships, with many cross-selling opportunities to follow. (Imagine, for instance, an ice cream vendor teaming up with a company that makes nothing but ice cream cones. Brilliant.)

3. Get the most out of your webinar efforts by following up with your registrants. 

Send them promotional material before and after they’ve signed up for your webinar. With their permission, you can continue to nurture them by sending valuable (as in relevant and helpful) content once in a while—and keep strengthening your brand authority while you’re at it.

4. Don’t treat your webinar like a one-and-done.

What if—for some oddball reason—you host your webinar just once? Does that mean you can only send traffic to it for a single campaign?

Not a chance. Simply continue to run cold traffic to your webinar landing page, where your target audience will sign up for the recording with enthusiasm. Though they can’t ask questions, they also don’t have to wait for a specific time to watch. (Below, I’ll show you a super-cool example of a signup landing page for a recorded webinar.) 

5. Repurpose your webinars for other channels. 

If you know a good video editor, ask them to slice and dice your webinars into little clips that feature your best highlights. Share these on social media, embed them in your blog, and use them in your ads to continue to drive traffic.

Inspiring examples of webinar landing pages 

In this last section, we look at several landing pages that have performed particularly well by following the principles of conversion-centered design.

Built using Unbounce, these examples are some of the best webinar landing pages we’ve seen across many industries. (We’ve kept conversion rates private, but all the pages here convert between 9% and 50%.)

1. Tailwind

Image courtesy of Tailwind. (Click to see the whole thing.)

Tailwind’s webinar signup page has got to be one of my favorites. Talk about getting so many things right. 

The visuals immediately grab your attention, along with the clear copy and smart use of social proof. But it’s also an excellent example of the congruence principle of conversion design, since all the elements on the page are in alignment, driving toward a single goal. 

Let’s start with the attention ratio, which is the number of things your visitor can do on a page versus the number of things you want them to do. The attention ratio here is a beautiful 1:1. Notice that there isn’t a menu or other external links, and all the CTA buttons all serve the same conversion goal.

Did I forget to mention there’s no intimidating contact form in sight? You’ve got to click on the button to pull it up. The contact form asks for your “best” email. (I wouldn’t blame you if you thought this is a tad simplistic, but it does tickle my fancy.)

Finally, the drop-down menu on the form segments subscribers based on their specified needs. Talk about keeping things simple yet elegant.

Tailwind also does a fantastic job of presenting their guest, a proven and well-known authority in her space. In fact, we can’t tell what Tailwind is about simply by looking at the landing page. That’s because the focus is entirely on what the target audience is going to get. Not a word about the business just yet. (No hard sell.)

And that’s how it’s done. 😘👌

2. Bandzoogle

Image courtesy of Bandzoogle. (Click to see the whole thing.)

This straightforward landing page from Bandzoogle is a fantastic example of clarity. The headline uses a proven copywriting formula: “How to do X without Y”. It works because it promises to teach you something while removing a traditional barrier. 

You have to love the body copy too. It’s simple, straight to the point, and opens by hitting on a major pain point shared by many musicians: the frustrations of booking a tour. 

The bullet points below are also worth closer scrutiny. Each one is 100% focused on the target audience and doesn’t beat around the bush, with zero fluff. It’s clear no copywriter is showing off here.

Then there’s email capture text. It informs the target audience that the webinar has already been recorded. Sure, this statement might catch them off-guard, but I’ll bet you the target audience appreciates the honesty and will trust you more in the longer term. (Besides, the information is still relevant.)

And their contact form? You can’t even call it that. It’s only asking for your email. And note how they weave their privacy policy into the fine print underneath. Brilliant.


3. Libris

Image courtesy of Libris by Photoshelter. (Click to see the whole thing.)

If you thought short-form landing pages couldn’t do it all, one quick look at Libris’ landing page will change your mind. Libris understands that motion, more than anything, is the very first thing that captures the attention of the human eye. 

But the footage isn’t showing any random attention-grabbing event. It’s a clip of two football teams walking out into the field. (Remember “sports”? That thing we used to do outside?) The focus though rests on the attendees holding up their cameras and phones to capture the event, not the actual event itself.

The powerful copy reinforces this concept throughout the landing page. What makes it effective is its focus on “you” from beginning to end, keeping it simple and hyper-relevant to the target audience. 

But my favorite part about this? It’s the chatbot in the bottom corner that pops the question, “You hungry?” How could you not be tempted to answer that? (And, yes, I am hungry.)


4. Vyond

Image courtesy of Vyond.

This landing page for a weekly webinar scores leads and signups for Vyond on autopilot. (Sweet.) The headline is pretty clear, and the primary brand color is immediately recognizable by the target audience. 

The 44-second video builds trust by introducing a human face, Vyond’s customer success training manager. But it quickly moves past the intro to display some striking visuals that showcase the Vyond app, as well as its ease of use. 

The main CTA is “Register for the Webinar”, but there are two anchor CTAs, one sitting on each side, which both ensure that the reader stays on-page.

It’s good, but as with any landing page, a healthy mindset is to “Always Be Testing.” With #ABT in mind, I’d try switching up a couple of things here: I’d recommend A/B testing against a shorter-form variant, and using Smart Traffic to see how the page performs with fewer fields. 


5. Unbounce 

I hate to brag, but this last one ticks all the boxes. Yes, it’s a webinar registration landing page by Unbounce, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be impartial.

Click to see real thing (opens in a new tab).

Just look at that event logo in motion. This page is oozing confidence. And it isn’t offering a single webinar recording, no. It’s got a whole jumbo 14-pack of knowledge bombs ready to be consumed in a single sitting.

And that headline? “It’s not just you. Marketing has gotten harder.” Oh my. You read my mind. (Is it getting hot in here? Just me?)

Then comes the social proof from the big industry names. And would you look at that day-to-day event breakdown? These both help showcase established authorities who are to share insider information throughout the event. 

In fact, that’s what this webinar page is designed to look like: a conference that just happens to be taking place online. Sure, we ran Marketing Optimization Week a few years ago, but it’s a relevant example of what you can do today to create exciting online events and webinars that’ll continue to pay off in the future. This page has converted nearly 7,800 times, and it continues to generate leads to this day.

Using Unbounce to set up your webinar landing page

I remember the first landing pages I tried to build by hand. I still wake up in cold sweats. I can still feel my partner reaching for my arm in the dark: “Another nightmare? Couldn’t get your elements to align again, huh?” 

I wish I knew about Unbounce then. Using it to get your webinar landing page up and running is easy. 

To get started, just pick a landing page template from the hundreds available. (Be sure to check out the advanced filters.) Tweak it to match your email or ad campaign if you’ve already got one running, or build the whole thing from the ground up. 

Then, drag and drop and adjust to your heart’s content, all without having to write a single line of code. (But if you really need to scratch your coding itch, you always have the option of inserting custom code to fit your needs.) 

Once you’re happy with your template, you can duplicate it to set up a variant or two to automatically optimize it with Smart Traffic

And you’re all set. (Really. No more nightmares.)

Ready to answer the call (to action)?

Landing pages and webinars go together like french fries and ketchup. There are huge benefits of pairing them together to bring your events online and generate more leads and sales. If you’re convinced—heck, even if you’re not—why not start a free trial and try out one of the high-converting webinar landing pages in our template library? 



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