A couple of you asked for examples of promotional copy that we’ve seen to be effective in supporting clients’ marketing efforts. Rather than share specific client examples, I’d prefer to give you some overall tips that reflect our Best Practices for effective promotion. You can also check out our posted Best Practices link for even more specific suggestions.

When you think about it, your email marketing copy makes or breaks your ability to get the right leads and a lot of leads for your webcasts or white papers. You’ve got to break through the clutter right from the get-go. This means your subject line has to work.

We have found subject lines that identify a benefit in the content or the product being promoted work a lot better than subject lines that “show off” the merits of the item being marketed.

IT prospects don’t initally care as much about why your content or solution is so superior to others. Rather, they are focused on why they should spend time reading the white paper or attending the webcast. They want to be educated, they want short-cuts for their due diligence process, they want easy to understand strategies. They want to know how to avoid wrong decisions or traps.

So provide them with this by organizing your content around these pain points. Examples of the most effective subject lines approaches we’ve used; “Ten Most Important Tips for researching Intrusion detection solutions”….” or “5 Key Strategies to evaluating (technology solution) ” or “The Complexities of (technology solution) simplified”.

The body copy following these subject lines may continue to discuss the problem the IT professional has around the subject at hand and point out how the white paper/webcast will offer sound advise or clear up confusion on the topic.

In general, put yourself in the mindset of the reader, the IT pro who has to research something, make a recomendation for a short list and eventually suggest a finalist. Your first attempts at capturing his attention must highlight what you can do to make this entire process simpler.

Same webcast - live vs. recorded, same amount of promotion targeting registrations. I’ll take the live any day, because I have seen a clear difference in both registrations and when we have people follow-up on recordings, we find a fair percentage has registered, but never actually viewed the content.

A major plus with a live webinar is a Q and A session, where people can get quick answers to their questions on the fly. Recorded webinars don’t offer this as effectively.

I’m also going to give a little more weight to a lead that takes an hour out of their busy day, that might not be convenient for them, but they do it anyway - vs. somebody that can watch it at their leisure (or not watch it).

No offense, but (title, topic, and timelessness) I agree are of utmost importance, but are also an excuse for low registrations by webinar vendors. I’m not looking to give anybody bad advice, I’ve been doing this a long time - both with vendors and within-house, I’m not speculating, this is a very large part of our lead generation.

Also in response to the question Karen L asks on how to determine webcast frequency - we took the approach of starting small and increasing the number of times we ran it. (we started with one a month and had it recorded to fill the gaps. ) If we sent out one mail promoting the webinar and filled it, it was time to schedule another, and so on and so forth for each coming month.

Would you be able to provide me with some samples of what you had written in the past? Some examples of topics from different angles would also be great.

Once again, thank you for your comments.

In terms of the question on how often and on what topic, we have seen very good traction for our clients from a formula of 2-1 for any given solution. That is, we set up a series of three webinars.

The first two events are designed to capture a wide audience and positioned as educational. If possible we use a partner or recognized authority within the space as a draw. There is very little pitching of the solution in these events, rather we are setting up the problem in general terms and discussing possible approaches, best practices etc. for solving it.

The third webinar of the series is a clear cut sales event, and is clearly labeled as such. While we see fewer attendees to these events, they are always more qualified.

For our educational webinars, we see registration in the 150 - 200 range with approximately 50% attendance. For our sales event, we see an average of 80 registrants with again a 50% attendance. We use primarily mass e-mail to drive registrations, using both our house list and enlisting our partner if any to do the same.

One way to increase your leads per dollar is to record your webinar and post it behind a registration page. We have found that with additional mentions in other promotion, we will see another 50% bump in the number of registrants after the event!

In answer to the barrier of entry for webinars, there are a number of companies that offer webinar services “by-the drink”. While the per-minute costs are higher, there is no commitment. As I am unsure of the rules for listing vendors, I invite you to contact me at bruce@hiddenforge.com for specific options.