7 Reasons to Use More Than Email to Promote Webinars and Teleseminars

7 Reasons to Use More Than Email to Promote Webinars and Teleseminars
By Jenny Hamby

Email is the most common tool used to promote webinars and teleseminars. It’s particularly effective because it easily allows an event promoter to stay in touch with prospects and continue marketing the event right up until the last minute. This is important because most registrations for webinars and teleseminars occur in the final 48 hours before the event. However, relying only on email marketing can be detrimental. Here are 7 reasons to use more than email to promote your webinars and teleseminars.

1. List fatigue. If your subscribers get bombarded by emails constantly, it’s possible that they will become less responsive. They see your name constantly, so it becomes easy to skip messages. This is particularly true when your emails are usually promotional. Readers assume that your messages are only trying to get them to buy something, so they delete your emails and move onto something more interesting.
2. Poor customer relations. If subscribers believe that your messages are designed only to get them to buy something, some may become angry with you and remove themselves from your list. As a business owner, you are focused on generating revenue. Viewed from this angle, unsubscribing from your list is simply a subscriber disqualifying themselves as a good customer for your business and, therefore, may be an acceptable cost of doing business. But some organizations, such as associations, may need to be more sensitive to subscriber complaints about the amount of email being sent. Members may become so unhappy that they’ll decline the opportunity to renew their membership – a price that’s too high to pay simply to get more people on association-sponsored webinars and teleseminars.
3. Spam filters. Although you ask clients and members to put your email address on their email whitelist, you have probably discovered that your messages are still blocked by spam filters from time to time or with certain subscribers. If you are relying only on email to promote your webinar or teleseminar, some prospects may never even hear about your event if your messages are mistakenly intercepted by a spam filter.
4. Appeal to a wider audience. The more tools you use, the more likely you are to connect with any particular individual. Some people respond to email; others tend to ignore it. Some people response to social media; others don’t. Still others read direct mail, while others don’t even glance at it. Using multiple marketing channels creates more opportunities to connect with your audience via their preferred channel of communication.
5. Appeal to non-email users. There are people who not only don’t like receiving promotional messages via email, they don’t use it at all. My sister recently started a new job and was surprised to discover that two of her coworkers don’t know how to use email. A close friend of mine only started using email within the past year. A client of mine knows that an entire segment of its database doesn’t use email (at work, at least) because the work environment doesn’t allow them to have convenient access to a computer.
6. Appeal to younger subscribers. Generally speaking, Generation Y tends to communicate more with texting and social media. If you incorporate these additional forms of communication into your marketing mix, you may be more apt to grab the attention of these younger subscribers.
7. Create a more stable marketing program. Depending on only one marketing tool can be risky. If the tool suddenly becomes unreliable, you’ve endangered your entire marketing program. For example, consider companies that relied primarily on fax marketing. When the Do-Not-Fax regulations went into effect, they had to scramble to find new ways to reach prospective customers. The more marketing tools you use, the more stable your program will be and the less impacted you’ll be if one tool stops working.

Using a multi-channel marketing approach allows you to build a more stable and robust marketing system to promote your events. One way to approach this task is simply to incorporate more marketing tools into your mix. If you have the resources and capability to do so, you may want to invite prospects to tell you what their preferred method of communication is and then build different marketing sequences to communicate with each group of subscribers.

Jenny Hamby is a Certified Guerrilla Marketer and copywriter who helps consultants, speakers, and coaches promote their own seminars, workshops, teleseminars and webinars. Get your free copy of her e-course, 31 Secrets to Seminar Promotions.

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