The DIY Guide To “Just In Time” Webinars
Chances are good you’ve at least been on a webinar, and if you’re in our audience it’s likely that you’ve run at least one yourself.
We know many of you run live webinars all the time, and it’s been a huge cornerstone of your business. With good reason… they often convert like gangbusters.
But what about running automated webinars?
There’s a lot of different tools out there to run automated or “evergreen” webinars. We’ve used many of them, and a lot of them carry some pretty excellent functionality.
(Some popular platforms are EasyWebinar and EverWebinar).
But what if you want to run a “just in time webinar”, without all the other stuff?
Well, that’s exactly what we’ve been doing for the better part of a year, and we’ve been getting questions about how exactly we pulled it off in such a simple package.
The product we’ve been running this for is called The Ultimate Contest Funnel, and you can see this funnel live here.
If you were wondering the same thing, then today’s your lucky day 🙂
NOTE: The full set of email swipes, along with all the automation we use for this campaign, are pre-built into Campaign Refinery.
All good evergreen webinars have a few of the same basic pages:
- Registration
- Registration Confirmation
- First Run Training
- Replay
- (Optional) Replay Bonus
We’ll run through each of these, as well as give you information on which plugins we used, how long timers were set for and how many emails we use for each step.
Registration Page
We like to keep things pretty simple for the registration page. This means letting people know the BIG IDEA (viral share inducing contest funnel), as well as 3 things they can learn while on the training.
It’s worth noting that we followed Russell Bruson’s “Perfect Webinar” training to lay the basic foundation for how this training was actually created. Based on the webinars I’ve seen lately, it seems that most people are following this format now as well.
On this page, we’re using Optimize Press as our page builder along with some very subtle custom CSS.
You should be able to easily reproduce a similar page with most page builders, or grabbing a template from the Optimize Press marketplace.
Two things you’ll notice about this page.
- We are able to seamlessly say today’s date on the landing page.
- There’s an automatic countdown for less than 15 minutes when you first land on the page
The date inclusion is a nifty little guy. It’s a free plugin called “Dynamic Dates” by Jason Hendricks. [Link to plugin page]
It hasn’t been updated in ages, but is simple enough it will likely continue to work for a long time.
Once installed and setup, you just use a WordPress short code to have your WordPress site call in today’s date.
The countdown timer is just a built-in one that comes with Optimize Press, and it configured to restart it’s timer from 14 minutes and 52 seconds when it reaches zero.
It will, however, keep it’s countdown consistent even through refreshes of the page. It will just reset back to 14:52 after hitting zero when a refresh occurs.
Registration Confirmation Page
On our registration confirmation page, we want to keep them moving right along pretty quickly.
So on this page, instead of giving them upwards of 15 minutes in the countdown, we trim it down to under 6 minutes. (5 minutes and 43 seconds to be exact).
Previously, we used to let this timer run longer before it automatically redirected to the training page. But we were seeing a drop off rate that seemed high, so we cut it down to this and our actual attendance doubled.
The plugin we’re using for this automatic redirection, since the Optimize Press timers won’t force redirect the page is called “Evergreen Countdown Timer” by IntellyWP [Link to plugin page].
It’s worth noting that we found the free version to suit our needs in this case.
Here’s a screenshot of our settings, set the redirect URL of your actual training page:
Content wise, the confirmation page is a chance to re-affirm that the prospect has made a great decision to join you.
We also provide a link to some slightly redacted slides. It’s the actual slides we plan to use without the offer, and with key elements blanked out.
This creates an information gap for prospects who can only fill it out by attending the training, and it genuinely helps with taking notes because a lot of the text is there already. It just needs a few key details filled in to be complete and be a useful resources for attendees to fall back on.
For good measure, we included a like button for our page to pick up some organic likes along the way and show some social proof.
First Run Training Page
For the actual training page that we automatically redirect to, we definitely modeled a regular webinar look and feel.
There’s a bio of the presenter, brief description and some other calls to action such as putting their phone on Do Not Distrub.
Additionally, we included a button that emails our support desk with any questions they might have. This allows us to get back prospects who watch the training but don’t get their questions answered during the actual training.
The video we used covers many of the truly frequently asked questions so it answers most questions right away, but we get a surprising amount of questions through this button.
It’s a highly effective way to make sure you close all the holes in your presentation that you can’t possible think about during even multiple runs of it.
People are going to have unique questions, and you need an ability to give unique answers. If you do this, you’ll make more sales of your product or service, period.
There is a whole 2nd half of this page that doesn’t reveal itself until we reach the “pitch” portion of the video.
Optimize Press makes this easy by setting a section (or multiple) to only appear after X seconds.
Some quick calculator math makes this pretty simple to set the delay correctly.
Limited Time Replay Page
Depending on who you ask, some may tell you that replays are great… others may call you an idiot for including replays.
I understand the reasoning behind both.
Include a replay, and at least in our experience, you’ll make more sales.
Never do a replay and you’ll train your audience that it’s show up live and get value or miss out completely.
When it’s a “just in time” webinar though, we feel that replays are a way for those who had to leave early to see all the content. Afterall, they may have landed on the page and made time for some of it, but hadn’t put away the full time for it from the get-go.
Below our video we include a timeline bar that shows where the content is, the solution (instead of calling it a pitch), and then how much of the video is Q&A.
Even further down the page we have a buy button, and then we include a written version of our frequently asked questions in case someone was interested but had a question and didn’t want to skim through the video to know if our solution was going to work for them or not.
The countdown on this page is set to 48 hours, and after that expires (it keeps track via cookies), it will redirect a refresh or return visit back to the home page.
(Optional) Replay Bonus Page
While this part is optional, we can’t think of any reason you’d leave this out.
Doing a ‘flash bonus’ is a great way to stack value of your offer and incentivize a second look.
In this case, we already included a surprise bonus interview with ad traffic guy Justin Brooke. And while every single customer would get this interview anyway, it had never been mentioned in our marketing materials before this point so we decided to position it as a flash bonus.
Everything else about the page is the same as the regular replay page, with the exception that the countdown timer is set to 12 hours instead of 48.
Email Automation For This Campaign
All this magic is tied together by marketing automation.
Yes, a lot of the on-page mechanics are a few simple WordPress plugins, but keeping the messaging consistent and reminding prospects that your offer is going away soon is they key to making this all really work well.
In total there are 9 emails sent for the auto-training followup.
(It’s worth noting that we have a whole different sequence to convince leads in other parts of our funnel to sign-up for this auto-training in the first place).
During that sequence, we have a goal of “UCF Purchase” which looks to see if anyone has purchased the Ultimate Contest Funnel, which in that case we would immediately stop sending them the reminders and bonus announcement emails.
Doesn’t make any sense to keep trying to convince people to buy who have already bought.
Below is a top level snapshot of this campaign as it lives inside of Campaign Refinery’s free library, which will auto-populate all email swipes, create tags, your opt-in form as well as the same automation rules we use.
What do you think? Are you going to consider setting up your own “just in time” webinar similar to this?
Hit me up on Twitter @ProvenCampaigns to let me know!
