Better Conversions to Cold Traffic Using Free WebinarsIf you have a high priced product or service like a coaching course or done-for-you consulting, selling directly to cold traffic is almost impossible. It’s rare for someone to whip out their credit card and spend a thousand dollars or two after seeing just one of your ads.
Most people that sell high priced items online understand the need for warming your traffic. They might have a small, free product to get them to sign up for their email list. Then they send the new email subscriber regular emails with free content. This content is designed to introduce the business to the potential customer, tell their story, demonstrate authority and expertise, indoctrinate them into their tribe, build trust, and eventually start promoting products. This entire process can take weeks or even months between first generating a customer lead, and then actually making money.
However, there is an easier way, and since you’re already reading this article, you’ve probably already guessed it. Utilize free webinars.
A Shortcut That Works
Free webinars are one of the best possible lead magnets for cold traffic if your eventual goal is to sell a high priced product or service. A good webinar can do what weeks or months of content dripping does, all within a presentation that only takes an hour or two.
People sign up for the webinar because you are offering the solution to something that they see as an obstacle. You certainly help them with their problem, but during your presentation you are also showing your authority, building massive trust, and seamlessly switching to a well-designed sales pitch. Before they know it, your cold traffic lead is buying your high priced item because your presentation has overcome any and all possible objections that they have.
There is no better way to get high conversions of a high priced item to cold traffic than by offering a free webinar.
Have you ever seen advertisements in your local area for a free seminar? This can be for someone teaching how to be a real estate agent, or maybe it involves some kind of personal self improvement. The reasons these types of free seminars are so popular is because they work. They attract tons of cold traffic, people that have only seen a quick ad. During the seminar, the presenter tells their story, builds authority, builds trust, and then switches to an amazing sales pitch for their high-priced coaching or course. A good number of these people, who had never even heard of the presenter before the seminar, end up getting up and going to the sales counter at the back of the room to purchase a course that can easily cost thousands.
The online webinar model does this exact same thing. The difference is that you’re leveraging the broad-reaching power of the internet. You have an endless amount of traffic sources, so you can scale far beyond simply doing seminars in a rented hall at a hotel near the airport.
Maximizing Webinar Signups
Since you’ll likely be running paid advertising, it’s important to maximize how many people are actually signing up. This will help ensure that you get the best possible return on ad spend. As long as you have a profitable ROAS, you can quickly scale your advertising campaign, and drastically increase your revenue.
So, what kind of webinar will attract the most people?
It needs to be simple, yet solve a major obstacle that is holding them back. If you are selling a course that teaches a valuable skill, what is the first major step in learning this skill? How can you show them how easy it really is to get started? What negative myths do they believe about this thing that is stopping them from achieving their goal?
By keeping the webinar topic simple and promising to fix their major pain point regarding your niche, you should get a high number of signups when promoting your webinar to the right people.
If you’re running paid advertising, your ad should either be a video or long form copy that focuses on this major pain point and offer your completely free webinar as the solution. Your ad should tell the condensed story of how you once were exactly where they are, until you figured out the secret of how to get where you are now.
If you’re making the right offer to the right people, and using a great story that demonstrates that you were once exactly where they are now, your signup numbers will be very high and your advertising costs will be much more manageable.
Before the Webinar
To maximize your eventual sales from your pitch at the end of your free webinar, it’s important to start indoctrinating your leads from the moment they sign up, before your webinar even starts. While this isn’t a long process like weeks or months of drip fed content, a well-designed email or two from the moment they sign up until the time of their webinar later that week, will go a long way. Here are some quick examples of things you should send them in an autoresponder sequence after they first sign up.
The first thing you want to do is plant the seed of reciprocity. This means that you give them something of great value, and they will instinctively feel the need to reciprocate which usually helps lead to them buying your product. Your webinar is going to do a lot of the work for you here by providing a ton of value. However, they are already expecting this value. The trick is to give them something they aren’t expecting. This can be something as simple as a free gift like a cheat sheet, a short e-book, or a even a short, but helpful, preliminary video. Make sure whatever you give them is tied to the same thing that they are signing up for. Don’t mention this free gift anywhere in your initial ad, this needs to be a surprise after they have signed up.
Next, you want to demonstrate your authority. This can be something as simple as talking about how so many people have gone through this free webinar, and sharing some quick testimonials of what it has done for them. This social proof from past attendees helps solidify you as an expert in their mind. It helps build trust that you are the person who knows how to solve their problems.
You need to send out emails reminding people when the webinar is about to start. People signed up, but you need to be sure they actually show up. If people aren’t attending the webinar, they aren’t being pitched your high priced offer, and you’re not making sales. In the reminder email, mention a little extra bonus or free gift that you’re going to be giving out at the end of the webinar. Keep it mysterious. Not only will this help making sure people show up, but it will help keep them watching throughout the entirety of the presentation. At the start of your webinar, be sure to remind them to stay until the end for this secret bonus.
The Power of The Story
It’s incredibly important to have a great story as part of your webinar presentation. The beginning of your webinar should tell your personal story. This should be similar to your initial ad that got them to sign up, but you should expand and elaborate.
As you tell your story, you want to talk about your journey of how you started just like them. You need to talk about the problem you had, the pain it caused you, and the frustration of not being able to solve this problem. By showing them that you went through exactly what they are going through, they will connect with you on a deeper level. You understand them.
During your story, you need to talk about your big “aha!” moment. This is the epiphany that you had, or the thing you learned, or whatever else it is that led you from where you used to be, to where you are now. It is even more effective if you can share some ups and downs along the way. It doesn’t need to be just one moment where everything got better. For most of us, we figure something out, then have another problem we need to solve, and back and forth for a little while. Your prospects will be happy that you went through so many struggles to figure things out, because you are going to be able to help them skip all of that trial and error that you went through.
After you’ve gone through your story, you need to actually spend a little time teaching them the thing they signed up for. This shouldn’t be a long lesson, it should be short, but effective. Think of your quick educational segment as a larger overview of what your course is going to teach.
Seamless Transition from Free Training To Sales Pitch
At this point, you’ve told your story, built trust with your audience, and delivered on what the webinar promised with the short educational segment. Now you need to transition into the sale pitch.
To do this seamlessly is pretty easy. Your educational segment has already begun to pre-sell this for you. Your lesson should have told them something along the lines of, “If you want A, you need to do B.” Of course it’s going to be longer than that, but that will be the gist of it.
After you’ve taught them the important lesson and want to begin selling your course, you should say, “And if you need some additional help, I’ve broken down that entire process into these simple, easy to follow steps that tons of students have used to achieve their goal much faster.” If you’re selling a high priced service, it just needs a little bit of a modification. “And if you want to save yourself the time and energy it takes doing this yourself, I actually have a done-for-you service that does this exact thing.”
This transitional statement allows you to go from your lesson right into talking about the important details and benefits of your product or service. If you’re selling a course, now you can give an overview of each module within the course and how it will help your prospect. If you are selling a service, you can go over each part of your service and what it will do for them.
Value Stacking
As you are talking about your course or service, you should be talking about the value of each of these individual parts. Think of how infomercials do this. They stack everything that will be included in the package and assign a dollar value to each part. “This part alone people regularly pay $4,000 for.”
As you list all of the items and add up the value for everything, you then offer your lower price at the end of the stack. “If you purchased all of this separately, it would cost you $12,560, but today I’m offering you everything for only $1,997.” This doesn’t need to be your exact price, but your price needs to be mentioned last after you’ve already broken down how expensive the product should be based on the value.
Lastly, make sure that the total value of everything you’re listing is at least five times the actual price of your product or service like in the above example.
Automation
Once you have been doing your free webinar presentations for awhile, you’re making sales, and you have a positive ROAS, it’s time to scale up with automation. Use a webinar platform that lets customers choose their time later in the week, and run your webinar as a pre-recorded video several times per week instead of live presentations.
This allows you to scale up your advertising budget, and gives you much more free time.