If you’ve never hosted a webinar before, it can be tough knowing where to start. To help navigate the webinar hosting process, we’ve compiled the 12 most important webinar statistics to know below. These webinar statistics will help guide you through hosting a webinar that attracts attendees and makes them glad they viewed your presentation.
1. Your Webinar Should Be Between 30 and 45 Minutes Long
Before you pick your webinar topic, it’s important to consider the first entry on our list of important webinar statistics: webinar audiences prefer attending webinars that run between 30 and 40 minutes long.
As shown in the above graph, webinar statistics show that 41% of attendees prefer attending 30 minute-long webinars and 44% of attendees prefer webinars to last 45 minutes.
These webinar statistics also show that only 5% of webinar attendees prefer webinars that last just 20 minutes and only 10% want to attend sessions that last one hour.
If you can’t get your webinar to fill at least 30 minutes without adding in filler content, it’s time to rethink your topic. Find one that can easily fill those 30 minutes.
At the same time, if your topic demands more than one hour, these webinar statistics should convince you that it’s best to divide the presentation into two or more parts. This will come with a couple extra challenges, but they’ll be worth it if it means that the length of each webinar fits into this ideal range.
2. People Will Only Commit to One Webinar Per Week
The second entry on our list of webinar statistics is all about time commitment. Research shows that people will only commit to attending one webinar per week, which means you cannot be lazy when it comes to organizing and promoting your webinar.
Your targeted webinar attendees may be interested in a number of different types of webinars, not just the ones that have to do with your industry. Nonetheless, these webinar statistics hold: people only view one a week, on average.
What this means for you is that your webinar isn’t just competing against those from your competitors but all other webinars out there that a viewer could possibly be interested.
Keep this in mind as you put your webinar together. You have all kinds of competition vying for your market’s attention.
3. Morning is Best for Hosting Webinars
Next, let’s talk about when you should host a webinar. Conventional wisdom has usually been that it’s best to host webinars in the afternoon (after people are off work so you know they’re free).
Other popular webinar times are around noon or one o’clock, since it’s over the average lunch hour.
However, webinar statistics show that 10 or 11 o’clock in the morning is actually the time people prefer most.
Only about 16% of people like webinars to be scheduled at noon or later. That’s about the same amount of people who would actually prefer 9am.
Webinar statistics prove that the majority of people would actually prefer webinars to be hosted at either 10am or 11am. The latter was the preference of 26% of viewers with 11am being the winner with 32%.
4. Tuesdays Are Best for Hosting Webinars
With the above webinar statistics, you now know what time of day to hold your webinar, but how about what day of the week? This is just as important.
Tuesday is the big winner here. However, Wednesday and Thursday were close behind, so any of those three days should be fine.
The clear indicator here seems to be the fact that people want plenty of time to plan around attending webinars. That’s a good sign, though. It means people are taking these programs seriously.
As Monday and Friday tend to be the busiest days of the week (and the ones people are most likely to take vacation days on), it makes sense to avoid them like the plague.
5. You Absolutely Must Include a Q&A at the End of Your Webinar
The most lopsided of our webinar statistics is about Q&As. If you’re not already hosting live Q&A sessions at the end of your webinar presentations, it’s time to make a change.
92% of webinar attendees want a live question and answer session at the end of a webinar.
Therefore, you should factor your Q&A sessions into the overall running time of your webinars (per the webinar statistics we covered earlier). Most Q&A sessions are about ten minutes long, but you might find that the sessions typically facilitate are shorter or longer as time goes on. Simply modify the amount of time you leave for your Q&As as necessary.
When you first begin hosting webinars, it can be tough to anticipate the questions you’ll get. In fact, you might not get any questions from your audience at all. Just because they like Q&A sessions doesn’t actually mean they’ll ask questions.
As such, make sure you have a few canned questions planned and ready to go. Treat them like an FAQ, so if no one is asking questions you can simply tell your audience you’ll cover the common ones you usually get. This might also help your viewers think of some of their own.
6. Be Passionate and Interesting
Being passionate and interesting is always a good idea, no matter what the context.
That being said, these are still important webinar statistics to look at because they also show what doesn’t work when you’re hosting a webinar.
When people were asked about what engages them most, they reported that visual slides weren’t as engaging as one might assume. Only about 15% said they were engaged by slideshows and other visuals.
The same amount mentioned interactions between speakers and attendees. Therefore, while Q&As are still important to include, don’t spend the majority of your webinar trying to talk to your audience. It turns out that most people don’t care if you do.
Webinar statistics show that 32% of attendees said they felt the most engaged when the webinar host was passionate and energetic. Practice adding as much excitement into your voice as you can muster, as this will keep your attendees happy and engaged throughout your webinars.
Finally (and not surprisingly), interesting and relevant content won the day. Webinar statistics show that 38% of attendees cited this as the thing they engage with the most.
While these might not be shocking webinar statistics, keep this in mind when you’re coming up with a webinar title. As we’ve already covered, headlines are extremely important. Make sure the name of your webinar lets people know it’s going to be interesting and relevant.
7. Webinar Statistics Prove You Need to Go Long with Promotion
About 29% of your attendees won’t register for your presentation until the day of the event itself. However, webinar statistics also show that 17% of your attendees will probably sign up more than 15 days before the big day. That’s nearly half of the people who will attend.
Therefore, you need to make sure you have a nice long promotional cycle to attract every potential lead. Use everything from social media posts to blogs to emails to give yourself as much of a chance as possible to let people know about your webinar.
8. Send Your Emails Midweek
Speaking of your emails, midweek is the best possible time to send them out to your potential audience. These webinar statistics almost completely mirror the ones we covered above about when to host your event.
Tuesday is best, but Wednesday and Thursday aren’t bad. Monday actually takes fourth place as, come Friday, people just want to do what it takes to get out the door and enjoy their weekends.
Obviously, Saturday and Sunday are terrible days for promotional emails, much less webinars.
9. About a Third of Those Who Sign Up Will Actually Attend Your Webinar
While all of the webinar statistics on this list are important, this is the one that the majority of people tend to fixate on the most. After all, at the end of the day, one of the most important success metrics for a webinar — arguably, the only one that matters — is how many people actually attended.
The ratio of registrants to attendees is surprisingly consistent. While you can always work to improve these webinar statistics for your company, about 35% to 45% is the average.
That’s a very strong number, though, so if that’s where you’re consistently landing, consider your efforts successful and only work to boost them after you’ve optimized other features of your webinar.
If you’re falling below 35%, something is definitely wrong. The other webinar statistics in this article should give you some idea of what has to change so that the number does, too.
10. The Average Number of Webinar Attendees Is 148
Another important metric to aim for from our list of webinar statistics is 148. This is the average audience size you should be looking for when you host webinars. If you apply this to the last statistic, you’ll need to have about 500 people register for yours even before you can hope to get roughly 150 people to actually attend. Of course, that’s only if you’re getting a third of your registrants to do so.
Also, if you take out webinars that only had 100 people attend from the survey that produced this statistic, the average jumps all the way up to 392. Therefore, don’t get too comfortable with 149. While that’s a good milestone to hit, there’s clearly plenty of room for improvement you could work toward.
11. Record and Replay Your Webinars for Best Results
Everyone is going to have different goals for their webinars. If you’re using it to set up a limited time offer or the webinar comes with a price, it makes sense that you wouldn’t want to replay it in the future.
That being said, 28% of people who watch webinars signed up to do so after registration was over. This number appears to be growing steadily, as well. The takeaway would be that people don’t necessarily care if the event is live or not. It may also speak to a growing on-demand culture that expects things like Netflix and Hulu to deliver content when it’s convenient.
Therefore, consider leaving webinars up for as long as possible to gain increased views. These webinar statistics may also identify the fact that people from all over the world want to watch webinars but can only do so when it’s convenient depending on their time zone.
12. The Cost of a Webinar Differs Greatly, but Almost Everyone Is Paying
Finally, it’s become clear that you need to invest money into your webinar. At the very least, it should cost $100 to produce a webinar. However, the average swings from $100 all the way up to $3,000.
If you’re currently not spending a dime and relying solely on free software for your webinars, you’re probably not getting the results you were hoping for.
Everyone’s webinar is going to be a bit different, but you should now have a much better understanding of what yours should probably entail. If you’d like more help putting on a successful webinar, check out BigMarker today.
Read the full article on the BigMarker blog: http://blog.bigmarker.com/12-important-webinar-statistics/
Sources:
https://www.readytalk.com/blog/christine-nguyen/12-webinar-stats-you-need-to-know
http://bizibl.com/marketing/download/2016-webinar-benchmarks-report
https://www.slideshare.net/GoToWebinar/6-webinar-stats-you-should-know
