It’s one of the cardinal rules of webinars—they’re best used as the top of your sales funnel, with a focus more on education than sales.
Getting too salesy in your webinar can erode trust. Nothing makes an audience more annoyed than agreeing to spend 40 minutes of their precious time on an informative webinar, only to find they’ve signed up for a sales pitch.
However, you cansell directly in your webinars. It just takes a little finesse. Here are a few tips.
Earn your sale by educating. Before you get to any sales pitch, earn it. Give your audience what they’ve come for—the information and education they’ve expressed an interest in. This will, hopefully, impress them with your expertise, which is a powerful sales tool in itself. It will also build up a sense of goodwill that makes people more likely to buy.
Make an exclusive offer. People love exclusivity, and offering a discount on your product or services at the end of your webinar is a great way to get people to attend and buy. The discount should be only for people who attend the webinar, and available for a limited time after. This also creates a sense of scarcity that drives sales.
See Also:How to Boost Your Webinar Attendance Rate
Whet their appetite. This may not work for everyone’s business. However, if there’s a possibility of giving people a hands-on way of experiencing what you offer during the seminar, try to work it in. For instance, if your business has to do with web design, offer to critique some audience members’ websites during the webinar. Or if you’re offering software, incorporate a live demo that lets audience members try it out.
Offer something for free. People love free things. You’re already giving them a free webinar and you can extend that generosity by offering something else for free at the end, just for webinar attendees. A free product, consultation or critique would work.
This might be work-intensive for you, and if it is, you could also offer it as a prize for a randomly-chosen attendee or manageable number. This would hopefully lead into encouraging attendees to purchase further products and services.
It’s possible to sell directly during webinars, but you have to do it right. Keep it subtle, save the sales pitch for the end, and earn your “right to sell” by offering lots of valuable information up front. Build in excusive offers for webinar participants or give them a taste during the webinar, and you should be able to make money directly from your webinars and follow-up marketing.