Entry #89: Holy Crap! 54% live webinar conversion rate. All is not lost.

This is the 89th post in a series. The first post can be found here.

Progress report

I definitely needed a win. The last few weeks have been tough, and motivation was really flagging. I spent $5,600 on generating just 130 registrations to a live webinar, and I didn’t have much of anything going for the pre recorded version I’d been running.

I gave a live webinar this morning at 10 a.m. EST.

As I said, I focused on making the entire webinar a lot shorter, and refining the pitch.

The live webinar this morning resulted in a 54% close rate, which is pretty insane.

But before we analyze the numbers, here’s a few things I changed.

1. The webinar was a lot shorter. I cut out about 50% of the slides. I didn’t do a live usability test, I cut down the slides about my backstory, and I cut out 90% of me walking attendees through the free resources they get for registering. It took about an hour and fifteen minutes to get to the pitch, which is still a bit too long, but it’s better than 2.5 hours like the previous version.
2. I lowered the price of the bundle from $497 to $349, just to see what would happen. I plan on bringing it back to $497 (or at least testing it again).
3. I added a countdown timer to the checkout page, set to 27 minutes. After the countdown timer goes to 0, the user is redirected to a different page with a more expensive bundle offer.
4. I didn’t send anyone to a sales page from the webinar. Instead I had a bit.ly link straight to the checkout page, which I think makes so much more sense. The landing page is a long, written pitch. But I give the same pitch in the webinar, and you want to send your users to a checkout page when they’re still excited from just having heard the offer.

Other than that, the actual content and delivery of the webinar was identical.

But, this should sink in a bit. I was generating a 0.8% conversion rate from my Facebook campaigns to the original webinar version.

Today, I had a 54% conversion rate. That’s a 6,650% increase (or about 60x).

Let’s go through the numbers (and also explain why this isn’t a total win).

I spent $5,460 on this specific webinar this past week.

Registrations: 127

Avg CPA: $43

I didn’t think a $43 CPA would ever be in the range of profitability.

Live attendees: 13

Sales: 7

Attendance rate: 10.2%

Conversion rate: 54%

The firs thing to note is the poor attendance rate. When I saw just 13 live attendees, my heart sank, and I was prepared for another failure.

Total sales revenue from the webinar: $2450

ROAS (so far): 44.8

So, while this wasn’t profitable (yet), I still consider this a major win.

just proving that a 54% conversion rate is even possible is enormous. I was thinking that I wouldn’t get past a 10–15% conversion rate, even under the best case scenario with the best targeting.

I’m still running email campaigns to the 115 or so registrants who didn’t attend, and I’m hoping to pick up a few sales that way. If I do, this experiment could quickly turn profitable.

But even if it doesn’t, let’s analyze what I’d have needed to be profitable from direct webinar sales this morning.

I would have only needed a 23% attendance rate to break even.

Maybe Friday morning isn’t the best time for a live webinar. Zoom doesn’t let you export your registrants before the webinar starts for some reason, so I wasn’t able to email everyone myself with a customer reminder at the time of the webinar.

If just another 17 people showed up, it’s fair to predict a break even scenario.

We can also look at this from a CPA perspective.

What CPA would I have needed to break even (assuming the same lousy 10% attendance rate).

I would have been able to pay up to $19 / registration to break even, even with a 10% attendance rate.

Let’s see if we can move both metrics in the right direction.

With a 20% attendance rate, I’d have needed a CPA of $37.80 to break even.

I think it’s very doable to get the CPA down to $20 and the attendance rate up to 25%.

If I can get there, let’s look at a scenario with 1,000 registrants, and a 30% conversion rate.

Avg CPA: $20
Registrations: 1000
Total Cost: $20,000

Live attendees: 250
Sales Conv Rate: 30%
Sales: 75
Revenue: $26,175
ROAS: 1.3
Profit: $6,175

Based on what I saw today, the above scenario seems very achievable.

It’s a lot better than my original, most optimistic outlook where I needed to keep the CPA to $3-$5 at a maximum.

But in any event, I’m really happy that I was able to generate a 54% conversion rate this morning.

Here’s my understanding of what happened:

1. The webinar being shorter made a huge impact. Zoom analytics showed a 100% attentiveness rate, which basically means that all 13 attendees were around for the entire webinar. Very few attendees in the previous version were even around hear the pitch, let alone decide if they want to buy.
2. The attendees were my core audience. Males between the ages of 24 and 35, all in the US. This is also why the CPA from Facebook was so expensive. But I plan to open things up more.
3. The live format is just better. The little mistakes, pauses etc., give the entire presentation a very natural and authentic feel. The attendees knew it was live, and that made a difference.
4. The price was a little lower. I don’t know for sure if that made a difference, but it’s fair to assume that it did (although, no one chose the split pay option).
5. I really used scarcity to my advantage, in an authentic way.

I think I’ll continue with some live webinars over the next few weeks, refining the campaigns, testing different days, and seeing what works best.

This is a big step in the right direction, and I’m glad I decided to go back and revisit the webinar, even after all the time and work that went into multiple iterations of the first webinar.

The attendance rate was shoddy, and the CPA was high; both factors resulting in today’s presentation ultimately being unprofitable. Hopefully, I’ll pick up some additional sales with the email follow ups.

And one last thing. Today taught me that 90%+ of your webinar sales are going to happen at the time of the webinar. You may get a handful through email follow ups, but the vast majority of sales will be attendees who are excited about the offer in real time, at the time of the webinar.

Happy Passover.

Happy Easter.

Keep on truckin’
- Isaac