---
name: webinar
description: "Use when planning, promoting, or running a webinar meant to convert — deciding the offer before the title, building the registration + reminder funnel, scripting the run-of-show, or splitting post-event follow-up by segment. Triggers: 'plan a webinar', 'webinar that converts', 'people register but don't show up', 'webinar got attendees but no sales', 'reminder email sequence', 'no-show replay follow-up', non-obvious: 'my live attend rate is only 30%', 'how do I transition into the pitch without it feeling salesy', ES 'montar un webinar que convierta', CA 'fer un webinar que vengui'. NOT the slide visuals themselves (that is presentations), NOT the registration page copy (that is landing-copy)."
tags: [webinar, conversion-funnel, run-of-show, registration, follow-up, marketing-brand]
recommends: [presentations, landing-copy, content-engine, newsletter, lead-gen, cold-outreach, sales-pipeline, calendar-scheduling, email-connector]
profiles: []
origin: risco
---

# webinar

Run the webinar as **one conversion event from end to end** — from "we should do a webinar" to "we closed deals from it." You own four coupled phases in order: decide the offer, fill the seats, run it to convert, follow up by segment. You do not own the artifacts the specialists make. The slide visuals, the registration page's final words, the recurring content calendar, the standing newsletter — those get handed to siblings. What you own is the funnel and the run-of-show that stitch them into one timeline. A webinar is a sales conversation scheduled in advance; design the conversation, not the talk.

## When to use

- Planning from scratch: deciding the offer / single next step before the title or any slide.
- Choosing live vs automated/on-demand for the goal and audience size.
- Writing the run-of-show: hook → teaching → permission transition → stack → offer → close → Q&A.
- Building the 4-week promotion schedule across email + organic + paid social.
- Writing the pre-event reminder sequence (confirmation → 24h → 1h → 5-min) that drives show-up rate.
- Designing the segmented post-event follow-up (attendees vs no-shows vs replay) in the 0–72h window.
- Rescuing a webinar that gets registrations but no-shows, or attendees but no sales — diagnosing which funnel stage leaks.
- "Montar un webinar que convierta" (ES), "fer un webinar que vengui" (CA).

## When NOT to use — route instead

| The ask | Route to |
|---|---|
| Design the slide deck's visual layout / build the actual slides | `../presentations/SKILL.md` |
| Write the final words on the registration landing page | `../landing-copy/SKILL.md` |
| The recurring editorial calendar this webinar is one slot inside | `../content-engine/SKILL.md` |
| The standing newsletter / general nurture program | `../newsletter/SKILL.md` |
| Source and score the target list you'd invite | `lead-gen` |
| Cold DMs/emails inviting individuals one-to-one | `../cold-outreach/SKILL.md` |
| Work the deals the webinar generates through stages | `sales-pipeline` |
| The investor/vision deck delivered to a room | `pitch-deck` |

The test: if the deliverable is the *event funnel, the run-of-show, or the promote-and-follow-up timeline*, it is webinar. If it is the *slides*, that is presentations. If it is the *registration page's copy*, that is landing-copy.

## Decide the offer first

**Before the title, before a single slide, write down the ONE thing this webinar sells — or the single next step it asks for.** Why: the teaching only lands if you reverse-build it from the offer. A pitch bolted onto a finished talk feels like an ambush; a talk built backward from the offer feels like the obvious conclusion. The opening story plus the teaching should do ~80% of the selling, so the ask at the end is a small step, not a leap (Graham Cochrane $100k webinar template 2025; Best Seller Publishing 2025).

State it in one sentence before anything else:

```text
This webinar sells: [the $1,500 6-week cohort]
The single next step we ask for: [book a 15-min enrollment call by Friday]
The 2–3 false beliefs the teaching must break: [1] ... [2] ... [3] ...
```

If you cannot fill that in, stop. You are not ready to pick a title. Everything downstream — the hook, which beliefs the teaching dismantles, the stack, the follow-up CTA — is derived from these three lines.

## The funnel you're optimizing

You are optimizing five numbers, not one. Anchor every plan to **registrants**, because roughly half of them never show up live — median live attend rate is ~41.6% of registrants; B2B averages ~35–45% (Univid Webinar Report 2026; ON24 2025 Benchmarks). If you plan for "attendees," you under-fill the top and over-promise the close.

```text
Registrants  →  Show-up (~42%)  →  Engaged  →  Converted  →  Post-event
  reminder         interaction       offer        follow-up      replay/segment
  sequence         (polls/CTA)        + close      0–72h          ~25% of sales
```

Diagnose by stage when something leaks:

| Symptom | Leaking stage | The lever |
|---|---|---|
| Lots of registrants, weak live turnout | show-up | reminder sequence + SMS (see below) |
| Good turnout, audience goes passive/drops | engaged | mid-session polls + live resource CTA |
| Engaged room, no sales | converted | the offer/stack and the permission transition |
| Live went fine, pipeline went quiet | post-event | segmented 0–72h follow-up |

### Live vs automated/on-demand

Pick by goal, audience size, and repeatability — not by what feels more "premium."

| | Live | Automated / on-demand |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | launches, high-ticket, real-time Q&A and urgency | evergreen offers, always-on lead gen, time-zone spread |
| Audience | one concentrated cohort | trickle of registrants over weeks |
| Conversion driver | live interaction + scarcity | replay reach (40–44% of all views) |
| Cost | one production, full team | build once, runs unattended |
| Risk | one shot; weather/tech can sink it | feels canned if you fake "live" |

Default to **live for the first run** of any new offer (you learn the objections), then automate the winner.

## Run-of-show

The skeleton, with the 80/20 selling rule baked in:

```text
1. Hook (0–5 min)        — the promise + the story that earns the room's attention
2. Teaching (5–40 min)   — break the 2–3 false beliefs, one block each, proof per block
3. Permission transition — explicitly ask to switch modes before you pitch
4. Stack + offer         — what they get, framed against the cost of staying stuck
5. Close (the ask)       — the single next step, with a clean deadline
6. Q&A                   — handle the live objections; do NOT re-open the teaching
```

The transition is where most webinars die — the speaker lurches from "value" to "buy now" with no bridge, and the room feels sold-at. Ask permission and name the shift:

```text
Bad:  "...and that's the framework. So anyway — I've got something to show you.
       For just three payments of $500 you can..."

Good: "That's the whole method. Now — some of you want to implement this alone, and
       these slides are enough to do that. For the rest who'd rather we do it with you
       over the next six weeks, can I take two minutes to show you exactly how that
       works? Then we'll open it up for questions."
```

The "Good" version gives the room a choice, which lowers resistance — and it earns the pitch instead of springing it. Place a poll roughly every 10–12 minutes so the teaching stays a conversation. The full annotated, timed template — hook block, the per-belief teaching blocks, the stack/offer mechanics, poll placement, and how the stack changes by offer type — is in `references/run-of-show.md`. Hand the slide *visuals* for all of this to `../presentations/SKILL.md`.

## Promote & fill seats

Start promotion **~4 weeks out**; email is the dominant channel (~86% of teams), then organic and paid social (Amra & Elma 2025). Earlier start + multi-channel = more registrants. The channel mix, email-led:

```text
T-28d  announce            email to list + organic posts
T-21d  value teaser        what they'll learn (one belief preview) + paid social on
T-14d  social proof        past-attendee result / agenda reveal
T-7d   urgency builds      "one week left", second list email
T-1d   last call           final registration push across all channels
```

For the registration page itself, write a **brief** and hand the page to `../landing-copy/SKILL.md` — do not write the final page copy yourself. The brief names: the single promise (matches the offer line above), the 3 belief-shifts as bullets, the date/time with time-zone, the host + credibility line, and the one CTA ("Save my seat"). Where this webinar sits in the wider calendar belongs to `../content-engine/SKILL.md`. The full dated promotion table lives in `references/email-cadence.md`.

## Reminder sequence — the show-up lever

This is the highest-leverage block in the whole funnel and it is not optional polish. **Day-of reminder emails drive ~38% of total live attendance, and the "5 minutes before" email gives the single biggest boost** (ProperExpression). Adding SMS lifts registrant→attendee from a ~56% baseline to as high as 71% — a ~27% lift (Amra & Elma 2025).

```text
Confirmation (instant)   calendar invite + what to expect + "add to calendar"
T-24h  email             one reason to show up live (the thing replay won't have)
T-1h   email + SMS       link + "starts in 1 hour"
T-5min email + SMS       "we're going live now — join link"   ← biggest single lever
```

Send the calendar invite via `calendar-scheduling`; if you're wiring the sends programmatically, `email-connector` owns the transport. The full row-by-row cadence with the metric each touch moves is in `references/email-cadence.md`.

## Run it live

Interaction roughly doubles lead conversion: **interactive webinars (mid-session polls + a live resource-download CTA) converted attendees to MQLs at 38% vs 19% for passive slide-only decks** (Amra & Elma 2025). Build the interaction into the run-of-show, don't improvise it:

- A poll roughly every 10–12 min — the first inside the first 5 minutes to set the norm that this room participates.
- One live resource CTA mid-session (a downloadable the offer builds on) — this is also your engagement flag for follow-up segmentation.
- Watch chat; pull 2–3 questions into the teaching by name. Save the rest for Q&A.

Pick the platform from attendee count + session length + budget, not brand (StackScored 2026; Riverside 2026):

| Platform | Fits | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Demio | small live, ≤50 attendees | Starter ~$49/mo, 3h session cap |
| Livestorm | mid-size, polished | per-credit ~€2.50/unique-attendee — 3,000 live ≈ €7,500/event, expensive at scale |
| Zoom Webinars | large, familiar | scales to 10,000+ |
| Riverside | large + studio-quality recording | scales to 10,000+, strong replay asset |

## Follow up by segment

**Conversion is segment-specific** — one follow-up does not fit all. High-engagement attendees convert to sales conversations at 12–15%, passive at 3–5%, replay-watching no-shows at 2–3% (Martal 2025). And the window is short: follow-up open rates drop from ~58% within 24h to ~31% after 48h (Default.com). Send the first touch in 0–24h, then 2–4 touches over 5–7 days. The follow-up is half the revenue — **~25% of webinar-related sales happen post-event, and 40–44% of total views come from replay** (DigitalApplied 2026; Cloud Present).

| Segment | First touch | CTA matched to readiness |
|---|---|---|
| Engaged attendee | 0–4h | direct ask — book the call / claim the offer before deadline |
| Passive attendee | 0–24h | replay + the one objection they likely have, then the offer |
| No-show registrant | 0–24h | "you missed it — here's the replay", time-boxed |
| Replay-only viewer | on watch | offer + deadline, lower-commitment next step |

Hand the *recurring* nurture program (people who don't convert this cycle) to `../newsletter/SKILL.md`. Hand the *deals* the webinar generated to `sales-pipeline` to work through stages. You own only the 0–72h conversion window.

## Metrics scorecard

Report these five and judge against benchmark — vanity registration counts hide every real leak:

```text
Registration count        — top of funnel (necessary, not sufficient)
Show-up rate              — registrants → live; benchmark ~42% (B2B 35–45%)
Engagement rate          — poll responses / live CTA clicks per attendee
Conversion rate          — segment-split: engaged 12–15%, passive 3–5%, replay 2–3%
Post-event %             — share of total sales closed after the live event (~25%)
```

## Anti-patterns

| Bad | Why it leaks | Good |
|---|---|---|
| Pick the title, then figure out what to sell | the teaching can't reverse-build; the pitch feels bolted on | write the one offer + next step before the title |
| Plan capacity off "attendees" | ~58% of registrants never show; you under-fill | anchor every number to registrants, assume ~42% show-up |
| One confirmation email, no reminders | day-of reminders drive ~38% of attendance — you forfeit it | confirmation → 24h → 1h → 5-min, add SMS |
| Slide-only, no interaction | passive converts to MQL at half the rate (19% vs 38%) | a poll every ~10–12 min + one live CTA |
| Lurch straight into the pitch | the room feels sold-at and resistance spikes | the permission transition — ask, name the mode switch |
| A 20-minute pitch block | selling should be ~20%, the teaching ~80% | story + teaching do the selling; the ask is a small step |
| One follow-up email to everyone | conversion is segment-specific; you waste the engaged and annoy the cold | three paths — attendee / no-show / replay |
| Follow up "next week" | opens halve after 48h; pipeline goes cold | first touch 0–24h, 2–4 touches over 5–7 days |
| Report registration count as the win | hides which stage actually leaked | the five-number scorecard, judged vs benchmark |
| Fake "live" on an automated webinar | the moment the audience notices, trust collapses | be honest it's on-demand, or run it genuinely live |
