If working at home in the last year has taught us anything it’s this — staying focused isn’t easy. In today’s world, people have shorter attention spans than ever before. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to keep people engaged with your webinar content. 

Let me explain…

First off, let’s think the big picture about what makes a highly effective webinar. At the end of the day, there are only three metrics that set up your conversion rates. 

1. Registration page rate
2. Attendance rate
3. Engagement rate 

The first step is getting people to register for your event with a high converting registration page. Without this step, even if you run the best webinar ever, it doesn’t matter as no one will be there to watch. 

The second metric is your attendance rate. You need to get people to show up so they can learn from you and hear about your offer. And finally, you need to make sure people stay engaged and attentive during your webinar. 

Today, that’s exactly what we’re focusing on – your engagement rate. At EasyWebinar, we have a ton of tools to help you keep your audience engaged to hopefully increase your conversion rates. That means more sales, more impact, and more income.  

So if you’re running webinars, I’ll show you some crafty and creative ways to make sure your webinars keep people engaged. If you’re not running webinars yet, you will want to follow these guidelines to help you hit the ground running. 

Let’s get started…  

EasyWebinar Features to Keep Your Audience Engaged

Chances are you’ve probably attended a few webinars before as an attendee. Sometimes you might have been super engaged and immersed in the content, while other times you might have been multitasking behind the scenes. 

Look, I get it, multitasking while a webinar runs in the background is something we’re all guilty of at times. But the more people that are multitasking during your webinar, the harder it is to get them to buy when you make a pitch. Plus, it means they won’t learn as much and likely won’t value your training together either. 

So it’s up to you to make your webinar incredibly engaging and fun. But don’t worry it doesn’t take any psychological tricks or anything like that. Instead, our systems are built to help make it easy for you to keep your audience engaged. 

Check out these EasyWebinar specific features, integrations and recommendations to keep audiences totally engaged in every webinar you run. 

Create a Dialogue in the Chat Box 

Think back to a professor that you didn’t like in high school or college. Chances are, you didn’t like their class because they were boring and spoke at you, not to you. 

Conversely, the good professors were probably the ones who had more of a dialogue, not just a one-sided conversation at you. Sound about right?

They’re also probably the classes you learned and remembered the most from too.

So what’s the reason? 

Dialogue. 

At EasyWebinar, we make it so you can do that as well with your webinars via our chat box feature. Throughout the webinar, you want to get active in the chat box to make it two-sided conversation. The more you can get people to engage and interact, the better. 

Here’s how… 

From the moment people start to sign on, begin by asking them questions… the easier, the better. When people sign on, ask them where they’re from, how they’re doing, and simple questions that yield a response. You want to get them in the habit of responding when you ask questions throughout the webinar.  

Keep doing this as you teach and at several key points of your event. Then, at the end of your webinar, make sure to save time for a Q&A section to answer any bigger questions they might have. Plus a Q&A is a great way to learn more about attendees, help overcome objections, and answer questions about your offer.

Poll Your Audience

While the chat box is great for creating a two-way dialogue, some attendees are too shy to hit the chat button. But that doesn’t mean to ignore them.  Instead, to keep them in the conversation, use our polls feature as well. 

Polls require less from their end (simply a click of the mouse) and still keep them engaged. I always recommend EasyWebinar customers try to use 2-3 polls in a 60-minute webinar. Space them out every 10-15 minutes to keep their attention and make sure they stick around until the end.

Not only does this help with engagement, but it also lets you learn more about your audience too. You can also use this data in the future to help you find content topics, headlines for your email newsletters, and more. 

Display Offers Strategically 

The third feature from EasyWebinar to take advantage of is our “offers” tool. 

If you’re running a traditional sales webinar, you’ll want to unveil your offer strategically. As you transition from teaching to pitching, make sure that you display your offer at the right time.

This is easy to do with our user-friendly setup too. Before your event, make sure to add your offer details and URL. Then, when the time is right, hit the “Display offer” so it goes live in the chat box. If you have more than one offer, you can also upload multiple ones as well.

You can also choose to add a timer to your offer to get them into action mode. This is a great way to add some urgency from your attendees and works great with a special, fast action bonus only available to live attendees. 

EasyWebinar Analytics 

Finally, don’t forget about our analytics tool as well. Even if you don’t consider yourself a “numbers person” you’ll want to study your insights for each webinar. 

Think of your event like a big game the way athletes prepare for competition. The way athletes get better is by studying game film and making adjustments week to week. As an entrepreneur, you want to study your game film (aka your webinars) to learn how to improve with each presentation that you run. 

Inside your dashboard, you can learn a lot about each webinar and specific users. You also have access to poll data, offer information (who clicked, who didn’t etc.), and chat text which you can export as well. 

Plus, when you scroll down you can see how much each attendee watched your event and your replay. By studying these metrics, you can learn if people leave early during a specific time frame or maybe part of your slides needs some improvement. 

The more information you have, the better webinars you can create. Please, do not skip this step! 

Webinar Engagement Rate – 5 More Strategies

But no matter how many great features we offer, you still have to produce valuable content to keep your audience’s attention. Here are five bonus strategies to help you keep your audience engaged and attentive throughout your webinar. 

Use a Webinar Workbook

Here’s an expert hack that I don’t think nearly enough people use – a webinar workbook. 

A webinar workbook makes it easy for your audience to follow along with you and fill in the blanks. This will make them much more likely to pay attention, instead of trying to take notes on their own. 

Here are a few tips to creating a webinar workbook:

• Include a title page with your name, webinar name, and website
• Outline the content but leave parts blank so they have to fill in the information.   
• Hire a graphic designer on Fiverr to make it look professional and follow your webinar color theme. 

You can easily add your workbook directly to your thank you page so they can download after registering. Plus, I’d highly recommend including it in the confirmation email in case they missed the link on the thank you page. Then, when you start your webinar, make sure to remind attendees to open the workbook to follow along. 

Nail Your Intro

As you know, first impressions are everything. 

With webinars, especially automated webinars, you want to get to the point… sooner rather than later. If you ramble on for 10 or 15 minutes, people will leave before they can learn anything. Plus, they’re much more likely to not register for a future webinar too.

Needless to say, your introduction is important. Within the first few minutes of your webinar, get right into why they showed up and how you’re going to help them today. Focus a lot of your time on the benefits and how your webinar can help them with their problems!  

Also, it’s a good idea to tell them why they should stick around until the end. Let them know you have a free bonus for people who stay and include the value of it as well. 

For example, I like to say something like “Make sure you stick around to the end of this training so you can get my free (Insert your resource) valued at (insert value) just for hanging out with me today.”

Create Epic Slides

With webinars, you really only have two ways to keep people’s attention; what you say and what is on your slides. Since a lot of your audience are visual learners, having an engaging slide deck is key to keeping their attention. 

To make your slides even more engaging, think about buying a professional deck (something like Graphic River) and then hire someone to create it.  

Click here to learn more about creating an epic slide deck. 

Don’t Run Too Long

Don’t forget about your webinar length as it impacts your engagement rate as well. Keeping people engaged for 45-60 minutes is one thing, but 60-90+ minutes is entirely different. 

Related: Key Statistics about Webinars 2023

Unless you’re a seasoned webinar professional, stick with 45-60 minutes. Much longer and it’s hard to keep your audience to stick around and hear your offer. Ideally, you want to pitch around the 40-45 minute mark and then save time afterward for questions and answers. 

Ask For Attendee Feedback

Finally, make sure that you ask your audience for feedback about the webinar. Keep it between 3-5 questions (tops) and send out a survey in your followup email after your promotion is over.

Keep your surveys simple and ask the questions that will help create better webinars in the future. Here are some sample questions you can use: 

• What can I do to make this better?
• What was your biggest takeaway from the webinar? 
• Did you learn more about (Insert your webinar topic)?

Final Thoughts 

Between all of our tools and these five bonus strategies, I’m confident that can increase your webinar engagement rates (and hopefully conversion rates too).  

As a reminder, make sure to:

• Ask audience questions and tell them to hit the chat box. 
• Use polls throughout the webinar to keep people engaged and learn more about your audience. 
• Upload your offer before your webinar so you can unveil it at just the right time.
• Study your analytics inside your EasyWebinar dashboard to learn more about each event and spot any trends. 

And I have one more strategy too: keep your energy up! 

So many people start the webinar excited but fade as time goes on. Instead, do everything you can to be as passionate about your webinar from beginning to end. 

Remember, energy is contagious and it will transfer to your audience as well. 

Next Steps 

Start using all these features to create the most engaging webinars ever. 

If you’re already an EasyWebinar customer, log into your dashboard and check out analytics of past events. And if you recently ran a webinar, send out a quick survey to get feedback about it. 

If you aren’t an EasyWebinar customer yet, I invite you to try our amazing, all-in-one webinar software. With several plans, I’m sure there is a great option that will help you grow your business. 

Click here to take advantage of our 14-day FREE trial and see all the amazing features of EasyWebinar.