Why Webinars Are the #1 Way to Sell Your Online Courses
Education is more important than ever in today’s fast-moving world. If you aren’t keeping up on new trends and technologies, you’ll get left behind.
But people aren’t learning in the traditional style that we’ve become accustomed to for so long. For centuries, most people associated education with graduating from high school and college.
But as you know, the learning doesn’t stop there. As Jim Rohn said, “Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.”
The motivational speaker was right, self-education is what separates average people from extraordinary high achievers. Luckily, you don’t have to go back to school to keep learning. Now, you can learn pretty much anything in an online format.
When it comes to education, new content comes in all shapes and sizes. You can self-educate from free content, paid online courses, content delivered straight to your inbox, live events or through an education platform such as Teachable.
Not to mention, the e-learning space is booming (900% since the year 2000)! If you’re an online course creator, the hard part isn’t creating the course, it’s selling your offer.
But I’ve found one method is more effective than the other when it comes to selling your expertise – webinars!
Why Webinars Are So Effective
So why are webinars so effective? Let me share my story to illustrate…
I mean it when I say webinars changed my life. Before I started using webinars to sell my YouTube course in 2012, sales were sporadic at best.
I knew the program was amazing but I couldn’t get students to enroll. Nothing I did ever seemed to generate consistent revenue selling my programs, until I started using webinars.
Even though I wasn’t a very confident speaker in the beginning and had a lot of fear when running webinars, they still converted very well. Plus, the more webinars I ran, the more comfortable I became and the more my sales increased. Within one year, I had generated over $250,000 of revenue from my online course!
Fast-forward eight years later and webinars are still a highly-effective marketing tool to help grow your business. Here’s why webinars are still so effective in 2020 and how they can help you advance your course.
Build Trust
Arguably the biggest benefit of webinars is that you can build trust quickly with your audience. If you’re doing a live training, you can build more trust than any other social media platform as you are actively engaging with attendees. Webinars allow you to converse with attendees in the chat box, answer their questions, and run polls to keep them engaged throughout the event.
As opposed to a YouTube video or social media post, where it’s hard to establish a real connection with your audience. Not to mention, the trust is often developed much quicker with webinars as most of them are between 45-90 minutes. It could take months or even years to establish that type of rapport from other social media channels.
Remember, people only buy from people they know, like, and trust. Webinars can help you do just that quickly and easily!
Give Value Up Front
Another reason to love webinars is that they allow you to give value to everyone who attends. Even if they don’t become a paying customer when you pitch your offer, attendees can still learn valuable lessons during your training.
Plus, don’t forget the “Rule of 7” in marketing. As a Balance Small Business article said, “The Rule of 7 is a determination of the average number of impressions a brand must make on a member of their target market before making a sale.”
While you might have some customers buy the first time they see your offer, it usually takes more than one interaction before most people buy. By providing value and getting people in front of your offer regularly, you are more likely to convert them in the future.
Scalable
Finally, webinars let you scale a lot easier than most marketing methods such as live events or sales calls. Think about it, with webinars you can have hundreds of people attending your events and seeing your offer.
You get to teach, and they get to learn… from the comfort of your home or office (and theirs)! You also don’t have to travel to live events, miss time with your family, worry about the hassle of flying.
Plus, with automated webinars, you can run training 24/7/365. With EasyWebinar you can easily turn a high-converting recording into an automated webinar that works even when you aren’t!
This way, people around the world (regardless of time zone) can always attend without you having to show up live. Automated webinars will help get your offer in front of more people, build your list, and grow your business on autopilot.
The Two Biggest Reasons to Use Webinars
In my 8+ years running webinars, I think every business needs a webinar for at least one part of their business. They can help with onboarding, running sales webinars, and a variety of other reasons.
Aside from being wildly effective, I’ve also found there are two reasons that stand out more than anything else.
1. Grow Your Audience
When it comes to creating content, not all platforms are created equal. For example, you could have millions of subscribers on YouTube or tons of followers on Instagram, but what would happen if your account disappeared tomorrow? Would you have an email list to keep your business going or would you panic?
With webinars, you aren’t leaving the fate of your business in the hands of a third party platform like Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. Instead, webinars let you grow your audience by acquiring their email for signing up to attend.
So even if you lose all of your social media and followers tomorrow, you still have your own list of warm leads. Plus, an email list is still the number one way to communicate with your audience and sell your programs.
Just look at one of our most successful EasyWebinar users, Amy Porterfield. Using webinars, she grew her email list to 250,000+ high-quality subscribers!
While I’m not saying you shouldn’t create content for social media, don’t forget to collect emails as well. This way you are protected if another social media apocalypse happens like it did in 2019.
2. Increase Sales
The second main reason to use webinars in your business is to increase sales. While webinars will almost certainly build your email list, they should also help you increase sales as well. Webinars allow you to get your offer in front of more people without running live events or hiring a sales team to close over the phone.
There are two ways to increase sales with webinars:
- Run more live webinars and tweak your presentation to increase conversions. Test out your registration page, slides, webinar length, and pitch to find what converts the highest. With a small budget for paid ads, you can easily test and tweak to find what your audience loves.
- Run automated webinars. While live webinars tend to convert slightly higher than automated ones, they also require you to be in front of your computer more often. Luckily, with EasyWebinar, you can easily convert live into automated webinars without a ton of tech skills on your end. This way you can grow your business and save your time to work on other projects.
As you can tell, webinars make it a lot easier to grow your business and increase sales than other marketing tools. But don’t just take my word for it, check out this short video from one of our partners – Teachable. Here’s a little bit of background on the company.
Teachable is a top online course platform that helps all types of people sell their expertise online. Their platform makes it easy to create and sell beautiful online courses.
Whether you’re a first-time course creator or a seasoned veteran, Teachable has everything you need to run a successful online course. They have over 310,000k active courses on the platform and instructors have generated over $657m+ in revenue.
Click here or below to watch the short video from Teachable to learn more about the effectiveness of webinars:
Recap
Remember, word of mouth and webinars are two of the best ways to keep growing your business. While word of mouth will always help your sales it’s hard to scale on WOM alone but webinars are something you can get set up fast to make consistent sales.
As Jessica Catorc, the head of partnerships at Teachable, said in the video, “Webinars aren’t just a great tool to grow your business, they are one of the best ways to connect with your audience. And for people to really see what you’re about and what your mission is.”
Not only can webinars help you connect with your audience, but they tend to have higher conversions than any other platform as well. As Andrew Guttormsen from Teachable said, “We have 25,000 paying customers right now and at least 30-40% came from webinars.”
As he mentioned in the video, Teachable tried 10-15 ways to acquire new customers. But the one that just kept working was webinars!
Final Thoughts
2020 is your time to start taking advantage of the power of webinars to grow your business (even during a pandemic). At EasyWebinar, we want to make it as simple as possible for you to launch so you can keep tweaking and testing out new strategies as you become more advanced running webinars.
But if you get overwhelmed thinking about running your first webinars, here are some resources to help you move forward:
Next Steps
Are you using webinars for your online business yet? If not, you could be missing out on a marketing tool that could increase your conversion rates and grow your business.
While there are a lot of options, we’re 100% confident that EasyWebinar is the best all-around webinar platform. We are an easy-to-use webinar software that makes high converting webinars a reality.
Sign up for a FREE 14-day trial for EasyWebinar to get started today!
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