The New Role of Webinars in e-commerce Product Sales
As you saw, last year changed everything we know about the traditional business model. While the world was already shifting online before last year, the pandemic and lockdowns accelerated the trend at a rapid pace.
The businesses who adapted had record setting revenues last year, despite a worldwide pandemic. The businesses who didn’t however, suffered huge losses and sadly, many businesses had to close their doors forever.
But one company who dominated 2020 was Amazon and really, e-commerce as an industry. While it was growing like crazy already, lockdowns and social distancing made retail shopping incredibly difficult. Since people didn’t stop shopping, they just turned to online shopping aka e-commerce.
The e-commerce industry just keeps booming!
Check out some of these statistics according to BigCommerce:
- E-Commerce will make up 22% of global retail sales by 2023.
- In the United States alone, e-commerce sales are expected to surpass $740 billion by 2023.
- 22% of global retail sales will be thanks to e-commerce by 2023. To give context to this growth, 14.1% of global retail sales were e-commerce purchases in 2019.
E-Commerce is the future and if you’re in the industry, it’s important to keep finding ways to be part of the trend. Quite frankly, webinars might be the answer you’re looking for.
Webinars for E-Commerce
You might be thinking, webinars for e-commerce? Seriously, are you crazy Casey?
Look, I get it. Most people think of webinars as a tool for selling services and digital products. And I get it because we have so many successful course creators and coaches using our platform.
Since these services are often delivered on video calls and webinars, it’s one of the best ways to sell your products and services online. Whether you’re selling a $47/month membership or a $997 digital course or even a high ticket offer… webinars convert!
But as an E-commerce brand, they can also do wonders as well. Think about, webinars work for selling digital products so much for two main reasons.
First, they help you build the know, like, and trust factor with your audience. For someone to buy anything online, there has to be a certain level of trust with the business or individual. From my decade of digital marketing experience, webinars build trust faster than any other sales mechanism.
Second, they are extremely scalable. Thanks to automated webinars, it’s never been easier to create valuable training and content that can work while you don’t.
In the e-commerce world where volume is everything, this is a huge win! Plus, they can work in all kinds of levels of your funnel to help increase engagement, move buyers along, and help make the sale.
Here’s the thing, savvy entrepreneurs everywhere are finding ways to build better relationships, and connect authentically using webinars. This results in greater sales for their e-commerce platforms, one of the few “silver linings” of COVID-19.
How to Use Webinars for Your E-Commerce Business
As I mentioned in past blog posts, webinars can do a lot more than just sell your online products or services. Heck, you don’t even need to offer anything with webinars if you don’t want to with a free, no pitch webinar.
We even have tons of EasyWebinar users who use webinars for:
- Onboarding new clients
- Using them to upsell new items
- Pre-sell future offers (or get beta testers)
But they are still a great way to sell almost any product or service as well, including physical ones. Here are some outside the box ways to use webinars for E-Commerce.
Create Brand Loyalty
Yes, the world is shifting online; but, that doesn’t mean that shoppers don’t want a relationship to brands they work with. Quite the opposite; instead, people want to build relationships even with businesses where transactions are primarily online!
The old saying “People buy from people they trust” is still 100% true. Webinars can help you establish trust more than any other medium! Plus, they can help you stand out from the crowd as most e-commerce businesses aren’t taking advantage of webinars yet. Become an early adopter to win big!
Product Education via Q&A Webinars
Another way that webinars can help your e-commerce brand is by educating consumers. Because let’s face it, clients shopping online today are more savvy than ever and want to know a lot of information before they buy anything. Depending on the purchase price, they might do a ton of research before hitting the buy button.
With webinars, you can share what makes your product special, show them how it works, and answer any questions. This is where webinars come in extremely handy as you can do live and automated webinars for education!
Plus, instead of waiting for reviews from consumers to learn more about your offer, you can get feedback during and after the webinar. With the live chat box, attendees can submit questions and help you tweak your offer or messaging as needed. By learning more about your consumers, you can create new products, adjust your marketing, and so much more.
Generate More Revenue
Webinars can help you generate more revenue in two main ways.
First, it can help you upsell existing customers as you expand your product offerings and roll out new offers. Since you already have their email on your list, you can run existing customer webinars to inform them about new products and services. Plus, you can offer some sort of discount for already being a loyal customer.
Second, if it’s an educational webinar, you can run them as paid webinars to individuals who aren’t customers yet. Even if it’s $7-$20 for them to join a low-cost webinar, it’s a great way to cover ad costs, grow your email list, and get people familiar with your brand.
Remember, a buyer is a buyer is a buyer! If you can get people to buy a low-ticket product, they’re more likely to buy a higher one in the future.
Help Your Brand Online
E-commerce needs one thing more than anything else to thrive – leads! Without a consistent lead source, scaling your business is nearly impossible. While paid advertising is what most e-commerce marketers do, SEO and organic search traffics is greatly underutilized. Yet, SEO can provide “free” organic leads for years to come!
When you run webinars, it can help expand your presence online to grow your email list and rank higher in search results. If users have a great webinar experience they’re more likely to share your website, offers, and social media handles. SEO has so many factors to consider but the more people liking, commenting, and sharing your brand online can help your content rise up in search.
Over time, this can help you generate organic traffic instead of relying solely on paid advertising. Plus, with webinars, you can easily repurpose content for other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Since most webinars are 30-60 minutes long, it’s easy to grab shorter clips from your event and post on other platforms. Repurposing will help you not have to create unique content for each one and have more people see your message.
Show Off Testimonials
What makes people buy more than anything else?
In my opinion, it’s social proof. People want to know that others have used the product or service before they invest their hard-earned money.
Since clients are researching, make sure you control your brand as much as possible. One way to do that is use webinars to show off happy client testimonials. By showing real people using your product or talking about it, you can get them one step closer to hitting the buy button. You could even interview past buyers for a type of Q&A as well.
Black Friday-Cyber Monday
I probably don’t have to tell you that the time of Black Friday through Cyber Monday is a make or break for a lot of e-commerce brands. According to data from E-Commerce Guide, “Black Friday has grown from $1.93B to $7.4B in 2019.”
Needless to say, it’s a massive opportunity for you to leverage webinars for the biggest sale of the year. You can even use them leading up to the event, offer a pre Black Friday special, and more.
>>Click here to learn more about creating an epic Black Friday sale.
Final Thoughts
As you can tell, there are tons of ways to use webinars in your e-commerce business. In a time when the world is shopping online more than ever, it’s vitally important to adapt. When you pair the power of online buying with the high conversion rate of webinars, it can become a game changer!
Don’t forget, just because people are shifting online doesn’t mean they don’t have a connection to brands they love! While e-commerce makes it harder than walking into a retail store to build a relationship, it’s now easier than ever.
Not to mention, webinars can help you learn more about your buyer, their buying habits, and keep your ear to the ground on feedback. Plus, you can use webinars to show off new offers, educate your consumers, and have an amazing virtual experience.
If you’re an e-commerce business, now is the time to use webinars to grow your business in 2021.
Next Steps
As E-Commerce continues to grow, we want to help you scale! With EasyWebinar, we’re making it easy to use webinars in your e-commerce business.
When you join a plan with one of our FREE trials, you instantly gain access to:
- Live webinars: Run highly engaged events, interact with your audience via live chat, and share your message in pixel perfect, high definition quality. Live webinars will help you test out new offers, learn from your audience, and build tons of trust with your audience.
- Automated webinars: While live webinars are great, don’t forget that EasyWebinar is an all-in-one platform which means automated webinars too. Automated webinars will help you scale without more effort on your end. Not to mention, you can take a successful live webinar and turn it automated with the click of a button.
- Integrations: Finally, EasyWebinar integrates with your favorite software to make your system work perfectly in your e-com business. We integrate with tons of payment processors like PayPal, Strip, SamCart, Thrivecart and more. This makes it easy for you to have your systems work together and provide the best user experience at checkout. Plus, we also integrate with Zapier for other tools that aren’t fully integrated with EasyWebinar yet.
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