Discover proven webinar strategies for course creators to maximize engagement and boost sales.

Ready To Learn Effective Webinar Strategies To Sell More Online Courses?

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone asked me “Do webinars work to sell online courses?”. This question is often followed up with an anecdote of how they endured a 90-minute sales pitch with absolutely no value and that’s the last time they’ll ever sign up for a webinar. #beenthere 

So if you’ve wondered about using a webinar to sell your courses, or if you’ve run webinars and have given up, this post will help you jump back in with success. 

What you’ll learn:

• Why webinars are still one of the most effective ways to sell online courses in 2024.
• Common mistakes to avoid so that your audience loves your webinar AND buys your course.
• How to get more sales and better engagement on your next webinar. 

Why I love Selling Courses Through Webinars (and why you’ll love it too) 

I love any strategy that will get me two birds with one stone and webinars are pretty good at doing just that. 

Webinars are a great way to build your list. 

Whether you’re a complete beginner who’s never promoted a course, or a seasoned launcher with many live launches under your belt… list building should be at the top of your list of priorities. 

Webinars are designed to sell our courses but they also help boost our list-building efforts and get us in front of new audiences each time we promote our webinars. 

So when you look at a webinar as an exercise in building your warm audience, you’ve already succeeded just by promoting your webinar. 

Filling your email list with hot leads is the first reason I love using webinars for audience building but not the only one. 

The second thing I love about webinars as tools to create warm audiences is the live interaction you share with the people join your webinar. They may not have known you from a bar of soap just a few days prior and now they’re hanging out with you for a good part of their afternoon. 

Once you spend 60 or 90 minutes with someone, and you’ve looked into their eyes (albeit via Zoom) and heard their tone of voice, you know if this is someone you trust and want to buy from. 

Few other lead generation activities warm an audience up like a webinar. 

But, we’re not just interested in the audience-building qualities of our webinars! 

Do webinars work to sell online courses?

Do webinars work to make sales?

Do webinars work to build a profitable business?

The answer is…

It depends. 

Follow the tips I’m sharing here and you’ll have a profitable webinar on your hands in no time. 

Common Mistakes To Avoid When Using Webinars To Sell Your Online Courses 

After spending nine years filling my clients’ webinars with hot leads using Facebook and Instagram ads, I can say with confidence two things will NEVER be the reason anyone’s webinar falls flat and this may surprise you.

Reason 1: You didn’t have the right people registered for your webinar.

Reason 2: Your ads were too expensive so you didn’t get enough people you needed on the webinar. 

Now, before you come after me with pitchforks and tiki torches, hear me out…

Neither of these reasons has anything to do with what you say on the webinar, in your email copy, in your ad copy, and on your sales page and THAT is where your conversions come from.

Nine out of ten times the problem with webinars that don’t convert has more to do with messaging and less with how many people registered or how much you paid for the leads.  (read that again!)

So to help you, avoid these common messaging mistakes here’s a list of common webinar launch mistakes and how to avoid them:

• Not building your list before announcing your webinar. Avoid this mistake by starting your list-building efforts (and your list-building ads) long before you start promoting your webinar). A warm email list is worth more than cold leads you purchased a week before your launch. 
• Not providing a clear reason they should attend your webinar. Take your time to survey your email list and match the title of your webinar to address their deepest pain points and desires. If your webinar title describes what they’ll learn instead of what the benefits of what they’ll learn are, you’ll get a lower registration rate. Leads don’t care about what you can teach them, they care about what that will do for them!
• Not following up your webinar with a clear sales journey that helps them get answers to their burning questions. The webinar is the starting point of their sales journey, not the end. Follow up your webinar with a series of emails that help them see why your course is the best solution for their problem. 

Now that you know the 3 biggest and most common webinar mistakes to avoid, let’s look at what works well if you want to get hot leads that buy your courses to sign up for your webinar. 

Tips To Sell More In Your Next Live Webinar

Hosting a webinar can be a scary experience. I’ve hosted many webinars and I can honestly say that some of the first ones….well, yikes!

There are a few critical pressure points in a good webinar funnel and knowing what they are will help you the next time you plan to host a live webinar to sell your online courses. 

So if anyone asks me “Do webinars work to sell online courses?” I share these tips with them to ensure they only use webinar strategies that are proven to increase sales.

Here are my top tips for increasing attendance and conversion rates in a webinar funnel. 

• Build a hot audience before you host your webinar. Make it easy for yourself and take the pressure off by building your email list first and inviting your warm list to join you for the first few runs of your webinar. If you knew how many times I’ve had to watch good people ugly cry over the amount of money they lost because they ran ads to cold audiences before testing their webinar on their warm audience, you’ll want to cry too! Please build your list, and present your webinar to them first. If that works well, fill your funnel with all the cold leads you can get from ads and make loads of money!

• Use ads to boost sign-ups. But Salome, you just said don’t use ads. No, I didn’t! I said to use ads to cold audiences to fill your webinar AFTER you know your webinar converts to warm audiences. Once you’ve done the work to ensure that your webinar converts to your warm audiences, you’ll be able to experience the joy of filling that webinar using ads and it will be a new level of success you achieve in your business. I want that for you so don’t ignore this advice!

• Make sure they show up. Once they’ve signed up for your webinar, they need a reason to show up live. We know that when people show up live there’s a better chance they’ll convert to sales during the webinar while you are live. The more registrants you can get to show up live, the better your sales results will be. A good live show-up rate is about 25% so keep that in mind when you set your goal for the number of registrations you aim for. Create a good email sequence to remind them when and where to show up live and have the join link ready for them in every email you send. 

• Send out a replay. Life happens and sometimes your lead will miss your webinar but still be eager to hear what you share. We like to send out the replays of our webinars once all the live classes have ended. If there are still some live webinars coming up and someone asks for the replay I will encourage them to try to attend live at a different time first. Once all the live webinar events have run their course, only then will I send out a replay and I make sure that my audience knows that the replay expires in 48 hours so that they know there’s urgency to watching the recording. 

• Create a sales email sequence. This may sound obvious but most of the sales will come from the communication you send to your email list after the webinar has ended. People need to hear sales messages many times before choosing to buy. Your leads have attended, and now they’re considering if they want to buy. If you leave them now, you’ll lose the sale. But if you send out a carefully crafted email sequence where they see testimonials from others like them who have had success and you answer their burning questions your sales rate will increase dramatically. 

• Close with urgency and scarcity. Use the psychological effect of urgency and scarcity when you end your live webinar and again when your live launch ends to help your lead move from indecision to choosing to buy or not to buy. Urgency is created by using deadlines and scarcity can effectively be created with bonus content. This may be the motivating factor your lead needs to make a decision.

• Track every point in your webinar funnel. When you create your webinar funnel, you’ll notice how you’re strategically moving your leads from the top of your funnel, where they agree to attend your webinar, through a series of “gates”. As they move through these “gates” or conversion points,  the number of leads who progress through to the next phase will be warmer leads which means they’re getting closer to saying yes to purchasing your course. We must track data at every conversion point or ‘gate’ to know where we can improve the next time we launch. 

Here’s a list of the most important conversion points you want to track in your webinar funnel to know what to do next time to improve your results. 

• Ad cost per lead.
• Webinar registration page conversion rate.
• The number of webinar leads you got from social media and your email list separately.
• The number of webinar registrants that showed up live.
• The number of sales you made live on the webinar.
• The number of people who watched the replay.
• The number of sales you made after the live webinars ended.

Do Webinars Work To Sell Online Courses in 2024? Heck Yes!

If you’re selling an online course priced between $400 and $5,000 a well-planned and well-executed webinar will be the best addition to your business this year. 

Now you know what the biggest mistakes are to avoid and how to increase your results for your next webinar launch so that you create more revenue, and more profits and use webinars effectively to sell more online courses. 

If you've been wondering “Do webinars work to sell online courses?”…now you know!