Even free webinars cost time.
So how do you get more people to show up?
Jay Schwedelson, President and CEO Outcome Media, shared a few ideas—and their results—with B2B Forum attendees in 2024.
Get Jay’s ideas to drive attendance in the clip or transcript below.
Jay returns to B2B Forum this November with even more research-backed knowledge and best practices you can use to drive demand…
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Why do you register for a webinar?
To get the on-demand link, that’s in blue that you’ll watch later.
And get the on-demand link that you’ll never watch, that’s everybody in Orange.
That’s what we do.
We register for this crap and we’re never going to watch it. 0% chance you’re ever going to watch it, right?
So here’s the thing, and I’m going to talk about getting people to show up.
We need people to show up.
People who show up live to webinars convert to pipeline 400% more than those that watch the on-demand version because they’re really invested. They really care.
Nobody cares when they watch on-demand. And we’re just like, “okay.”
It’s like Netflix again:
“Okay, cool. You can’t make it? Cool. Watch whenever you want. Awesome. No problem.”
What are we doing? We’re not content creators. That’s not our job.
Our job is to get sales. To get new customers. To get a pipeline.
Stop thinking to yourselves, “we got to get out the content. What’s our content calendar?”
You’re not content creators!
We are trying to get our businesses to not go out of business, although that’s what we’re trying to do. We need people to show up to our webinars.
On demand equals no demand, okay?
We need to get out of the routine that everything just needs to be available.
Sorry, you’re not going to make everybody happy. That’s okay.
Webinar show-up rates, year-over-year, are down 25%. Show-up rates!
How many webinars do you really show up to live? Like none. Okay?
I just sat in my hotel room right before this and I had to do a webinar. There were 700 people registered. Okay? 42 people showed up.
That’s horrendous.
I almost didn’t want to show up and I was speaking! Okay?
Nobody shows up anymore! That’s where we’re at. That’s where we’re at!
So here’s something that marketers are doing that’s working really well.
This idea of “attend to receive.”
If you attend, you get something. Attend to receive.
Give something extra for showing up, okay?
Webinar show-up rates rise 35% when there is exclusive content for live-only.
People that show up live get something. They get something really cool.
Like what? “Only live attendees get the Q3 trends report.”
And you have to put that in your promotions, in your subject line, in your headline, in your landing pages. If they show up, they get the trends report. Only if you show up, right?
Exclusive Q&A session: it will not be available on demand.
“Oh, I got to show up. I want to do the exclusive Q&A.”
Early access to product releases, for beta access. If you come. Live.
Live-only discounts. Have a reason for people to come.
Live matters. And this is where we’re failing. This is where we are failing.
It’s so easy. Why not? Okay?
The other thing is creating urgency with your webinars.
It is very, very hard to create urgency with your webinars, because who the hell cares?
“Oh my God, I’m going to miss out on the webinar,” said nobody ever.
So what you can do is speed-to-registration. It’s increasing registration rates by 40% where you do things like, “the first hundred to register, get the blah, blah, blah.”
“The first hundred to register, get the blah, blah, blah? Oh my God, I want the blah blah, blah. I got to get in there quicker.”
You’re creating some urgency. That is what works in marketing. The number one tactic in marketing is urgency.
The other idea is, only the first hundred to register get the on-demand access. Oh boy, does that work really, really well.
Now you’re like, “well, that’s not good. Everybody’s going to want it.”
It’s really simple. Here’s what you do.
Let’s say on average you get 50 people that register for your webinars. You just double the number and you say, “okay, only the first few hundred people to register get the on-demand access.”
Nobody knows how many people register for your webinars, and that way everybody gets it.
Hooray. Everybody wins.
Is that wrong? Maybe.
I don’t know. Who gets hurt? Nobody gets hurt. Everybody wins.
This is how we talk about the name of the session, “New Test Ideas.” This is it. This is it.
So what to watch on-demand. They won’t watch on-demand.
People who watch on-demand only are 72% less likely to register for the following year’s event.
(Oh, 10 minutes. That means I could do 400 more slides.)
So you got to get them to not just watch this on-demand garbage…
So I put on an event, I just put one, I put on a bunch of events. My company, we just put on an event called Guru Conference. It was like three weeks ago, the world’s largest email marketing event. We actually ended up having 24,000 people register. We had Sarah Jessica Parker there. It was great.
And then I put this social post out there:
“No on demand.”
What?!
Lemme tell you something. Lemme tell you what happened.
I’ve been doing this event now for three years.
Year one of the event, I had 14,000 people register. We had full on demand. We had 51% show up. It’s a virtual event, 51% show up, free virtual event with total on demand.
I was very upset with only 51%, even though that’s not a bad number.
So I said, the next year, I told my team, “screw everybody. No on demand at all. I don’t care what time zone you’re in. I don’t care what you do. I don’t care about anything. You didn’t get on demand.”
We had a 62% show up rate. A lot better.
I probably got, I don’t know, 300 to 400 emails.
Some of ’em saying I should die.
A lot of ’em saying, “who the hell do you think you are that I can carve out two days of my life to go to your crap?”
I mean, it was like, I should frame something. I did a podcast episode where I just read some of them. They were unbelievable, what people were saying.
But anyway, so after that, we were like, “well, let’s try something different.”
So what did we do this year?
This year we had 24,000 people register and we came up with a new idea and it worked really well.
It was called Earned on Demand.
And what we did was, if you show up for 60 minutes, it triggers the on-demand link for the event.
So people had skin in the game. They showed up for an hour, they get the full thing.
This was awesome.
We had a 71% show up rate.
And what I’m saying is, you could do things differently.
You don’t have to play the same game that everybody does.
Were people still pissed?
Yeah, some people were pissed. I don’t care. All right? Don’t care.
Published July 22, 2025
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