When it comes to webinars, getting even half of registrants to attend live is the stuff of legends.
So when Mike Berry told me he recently got a massive 72% of registrants to show up live, I couldn’t believe it.
Surely this must have been a tiny webinar — getting 36 out of 50 registrants, for example, wouldn’t be out of the question.
Nope. Out of 375 registrants, 270 showed up live for Mike’s webinar.
This was legit. And I was dying to learn from his approach.
We hopped on a call and he walked me through all the possible factors that went into his success so all of us can duplicate his approach.
After all, the more people you have showing up live for your webinars, the more people you’re likely to convert. That was certainly the case for Mike, who went on to generate 40 sales of his online course (for a whopping 10% conversion rate of registrants).
Check out our conversation below!
Check out Mike’s business here.
Breaking Down Mike’s Webinar Strategy
First, let’s take a closer look at Mike’s business so we can understand why this strategy worked so well for him.
His Company: Mike and his wife, Kristin Berry, are the co-founders of The Honestly Adoption Company. They help foster and adoptive parents be the best parents they can possibly be for their children.
Their Products: Mike and Kristin sell a variety of online courses, along with both group and 1:1 coaching.
The coaching program is their primary product and highest revenue generator:
The webinar was designed to sell one of their online courses, which in turn is a great funnel into their coaching.
The Key Factors Behind Generating a 72% Show Up Rate and $6,000 in Sales
Mike and Kristin are no strangers to hosting live webinars for their audience. But they definitely had never experienced numbers like these before.
In fact, their last webinar only had 70 out of 198 registrants show up (35% showup rate) and 10 sales (5% registrant conversion rate). AKA normal numbers.
So…what changed?
Mike believes there were 3 factors at play.
Factor #1: Spiking Email List Engagement with a Simple Content Plan
In 2022, Honestly Adoption didn’t do the best job keeping their email list engaged with regular content.
They sent occasional emails, but there wasn’t a specific plan in place to consistently nurture their relationship with subscribers.
In January, that changed.
Mike implemented what we call the Simple Content Plan here at Growth Tools.
It’s an easy way to keep your list engaged without having to spend hours creating content from scratch week after week. We recommend it to many of our clients.
For Mike, it looked like this:
- 1 email per week.
- It includes a couple of quick paragraphs teaching something they learned behind-the-scenes in their business that week.
- Plus links to a few free resources.
“Essentially, it just points them toward current free content we have on our podcast and blog, popular resources that we found to be really helpful for us, and then some behind-the-scenes teaching,” he said.
Check out one of Mike’s recent Simple Content Plan emails here.
These emails have averaged a 30-40% open rate and 3-4% click rate since Mike started sending them in January. With an email list of 14,000+ people, that’s pretty dang good!
What does this have to do with the success of Mike’s webinar?
More engaged email list = more webinar engagement.
“I think [the content plan] had a lot to do with the amount of people that signed up for this webinar,” he said. “Because it was to a warm audience, which wasn’t the case a year ago.”
Factor #2: Picking a Killer Webinar Topic
We can’t overlook the fact that this was a totally different webinar topic than the lower performing webinar Mike previously ran.
Your topic/title is always going to have a big impact (either good, bad, or neutral) on engagement.
And this time, Mike knocked it out of the park.
He titled this webinar, “How to Effectively Respond to Your Child’s Behaviors: A 4-Step Blueprint to Help You Bring Calm in the Chaos.”
Compare that to his previous webinar’s title: “How to Move from Surviving to Thriving as a Caregiver.”
Notice the key difference between the two: the new webinar title focused not only on taking care of yourself as a parent, but also on your child’s behaviors.
Which is a parent likely to be more concerned about?
It’s safe to assume this topic/title influenced the increase in engagement as well.
Factor #3: Enticing Registrants with 2 Free Webinar Bonuses
To encourage registrants to attend live, Mike offered 2 free bonuses:
- Bonus #1 (Show Up): Everyone who simply showed up live to the webinar got what Mike calls a “greenroom teaching.” Basically, it’s a recorded video where he expands on a few of the concepts taught during the webinar. Incredibly simple to make.
- Bonus #2 (Stay to the End): Everyone who attended the webinar to the end got a 5-page PDF called The Caregiver Survival Guide. This was a brand new guide Mike created specifically for the event.
While Mike had offered stay-the-the-end bonuses in the past, this was his first time offering a show-up bonus.
He mentioned the bonuses in 2 places leading up to the webinar:
- The P.S. in the second post-registration email.
- A bullet point in the second-to-last post-registration email.
So if we step back, the formula for Mike’s incredible attendance rate was:
- A highly engaged, warm email list: he achieved this by simply sending 1 nurture email per week in the 4-5 weeks leading up to the webinar.
- A killer webinar topic/title: it cut right to the core of his audience’s #1 pain point.
- Webinar-only free bonuses: he incentivized people to attend live and stay until the end.
This is a formula anyone can replicate to immediately boost webinar registrations, attendance, and, ultimately, sales.
Want me to find the growth opportunities in your coaching or course business? Let’s talk.
Mike’s path to increasing revenue started with one important step — talking to our team at Growth Tools.
We study your business, identify the key strategies that can help you grow quickly, and then coach you through implementing them.
Want to see what that would look like for your business?
Book a Strategy Call with my team and that’s exactly what we’ll show you.
Grab a spot on our calendar here to get started.
On the call, we’ll show you:
Growth opportunities you’re currently overlooking in your business.
The step-by-step process you can use to take advantage of those opportunities.
What it would look like to have my team individually coach you through the entire process (like we’re coaching Mike).