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A well-executed evergreen webinar is a uniquely valuable sales tool since it lets you deliver a personalized sales pitch at scale.
In fact, the evergreen webinar we use to pitch our product (eWebinar) converts 25% of its attendees into eWebinar users.
So whether you’re a course creator selling your online course, a coach sourcing new customers, an entrepreneur or small business owner focusing on lead generation, or a SaaS salesperson doing non-stop demos, this post shares what we’ve learned about creating evergreen webinars that will drive conversions in your sales funnel and deliver an excellent attendee experience.
Top 6 Evergreen Webinar FAQs:
We’ll also introduce you to our product, eWebinar, which we built after years of struggling with other evergreen webinar software that couldn’t deliver the experience we envisioned.
Watch the quick 2-minute video below to learn what eWebinar is and how it works, or sign up for our 20-minute demo to get a detailed product walkthrough. Yes, we use our own evergreen webinar to pitch our product!
What is an evergreen webinar?
An evergreen webinar is a pre-recorded webinar that can run on autopilot for weeks, months, and even years because the content itself stays relevant over time. (Evergreen content = evergreen webinar.) Depending on the software you use to create it, an evergreen webinar may also have interactive elements, like a poll triggered to appear at a specific moment during the video or the ability for attendees to send the host a message.
From the host’s perspective, you only have to record the material once, and then you can distribute it infinitely. So the main benefit of an evergreen webinar for you is that it requires essentially no effort to run once it’s live.
From the attendee’s perspective, the main benefit of evergreen webinars is that they can get a detailed overview of a product or service at a time that is convenient for them (without being forced to talk to a salesperson first).
What are the key benefits of evergreen webinars?
Here are some of the key benefits of evergreen webinars for both hosts and attendees.
Top Three Benefits For Hosts
Scale webinar attendance effortlessly while saving time
With live webinars, you have to prepare for and lead every single session, so you probably only have the bandwidth to offer a handful of them. In addition, prospects in opposite time zones might not be able to find a session during the day, which can also limit attendance.
However, evergreen webinar hosting runs automatically without any effort from the host. This means you no longer have to host live webinars, which saves you a lot of time and effort (and makes your webinar infinitely more scalable!)
Detailed, qualitative customer data
On a live webinar, the host might take a poll or ask attendees to respond to a question in chat, but for the most part the attendee just sits there and listens. It’s a one-way conversation where you don’t learn much at all about your audience.
In contrast, eWebinar offers an impressive library of 16+ engaging interactions (including questions, quizzes, feedback, tips, and more), which you can use to ask prospects detailed questions. eWebinar then saves all responses, giving you a goldmine of qualitative customer data that you can use to better inform your messaging and marketing campaigns.
Increase webinar conversions with live chat
Live webinars let attendees ask questions in chat, but most don’t get a response as hosts don’t want to interrupt the flow of the presentation to pause and answer questions. In addition, large webinars often run out of time at the end to answer everyone’s questions. Not to mention shy attendees who may not want to ask questions in front of a group.
Obviously, if an attendee’s question or objection remains unanswered, they are not likely to convert.
Using an evergreen webinar solution like eWebinar solves this with a unique chat solution that enables your team to respond while the attendee is live or later at the team’s convenience. (We’ll discuss this in more detail later.)
Top Three Benefits For Attendees
Attend at a time that fits their schedule
Live webinars can only be done every so often because of the effort they require, and when they do happen they always need to revolve around the presenter’s availability, meaning the times might not work with attendees’ schedules.
With an evergreen webinar, the host can offer as many sessions as they want because they don’t have to attend a single one, making it easier for attendees to find a time that works for them.
Ask questions and get a timely response
Attendees join webinars because they expect to ask questions and receive a response. If attendees don’t get a response, they will probably feel annoyed. After all, each prospect gave you up to 90 minutes of their time, yet you didn’t answer their 30 second question.
To solve this, eWebinar enables you to give each attendee a thoughtful response to every question (either while they are live on the webinar or later at your convenience). No other automated webinar software has this capability.
A more enjoyable experience
If you’ve sat through a lengthy Zoom meeting or webinar, you know how boring it can be to passively sit and listen to other people talk. This is usually how attendees feel during live events. Sure, there might be the occasional poll to engage with or the host might shout out a question (drop a 1 in the chat if X!), but despite these mini-interactions, it’s mostly a passive experience.
In contrast, an evergreen webinar made with eWebinar makes it possible to add a new interaction (feedback, question, tip, link, etc.) every 3-5 minutes. This gamifies the webinar experience and makes it more fun for the attendee.
Read customer case studies for more benefits of evergreen webinars →
How do you create an evergreen webinar?
Below we’ll walk you through the step-by-step process to make an evergreen webinar with eWebinar. Through these steps, you’ll have an engaging and effective evergreen webinar in about 20-30 minutes!
Want more detail? Check out this entire post we wrote on the topic:
How to Create an Evergreen Webinar: A Simple Blueprint For Success
Let’s jump into it!
Step 1: Add Your Video
To add your video to the eWebinar platform, you can either upload the video file, paste a link, or use our Zoom integration to import it directly from Zoom.
Step 2: Set Your Webinar’s Availability
eWebinar offers three availability options for evergreen webinars:
- Just-in-Time Sessions: Just-in-time sessions are exactly what they sound like – there is always a session starting within minutes of the visitor landing on the webinar registration page. So the visitor is always “just in time” to attend the next session.
When visitors see that the next session is starting soon (with a countdown timer), it creates urgency to sign up, which helps increase total attendance. It also sets the tone that it will run like a traditional webinar that they can’t leave and return to later without restarting. This helps increase watch time and overall engagement.
- Convenient Recurring Schedule: If registrants can’t attend immediately, they’ll probably leave and forget to come back later. So offering your evergreen webinar on specific dates at scheduled times throughout the day that registrants can sign up for can help you capture those that can’t attend immediately.
For example, you could offer sessions at 10am, 12pm, and 3pm daily. So if the attendee lands on your registration page at 1:50pm and can’t attend a just-in-time session because they have a call at 2pm, they can register to attend the session later at 3pm or maybe even the next morning.
- Webinar Replays: Some people want complete control over the video (fast forward, play at 2x speed, etc.), so they prefer to access a webinar replay.
Most evergreen webinar software makes webinar replays accessible to attendees only after attending the webinar. However, eWebinar lets you give registrants the option to access the webinar replay without ever attending a regular session.
People often ask us, which scheduling option should I choose?
Is a convenient recurring schedule better? Or should I try just-in-time sessions? Or replays?
Our response is that increasing webinar attendance comes down to making your webinar available at convenient times for attendees. So we recommend offering all three availability options at once.
If you want to learn more about our scheduling options, check out this more detailed post:
How to Create an Evergreen Webinar: A Simple Blueprint For Success
Step 3: Set Up Email Notifications (Like Reminders and Follow-ups)
eWebinar three types of pre-written email notifications that get sent automatically by default (though you can adjust the copy and send schedule, as needed).
Here are the email notifications that get sent:
- Registration Confirmations: Registrants receive a registration confirmation email that contains a link to join their session and a calendar invite which they can add to their calendar. This helps registrants remember to attend and ensures they don’t schedule anything during that time slot.
- Reminders: Reminder emails are sent automatically to ensure people don’t forget about their upcoming session.
- Follow-up Emails: eWebinar offers two different follow-ups by default – one for those that attended your webinar and one for those that did not. For those that attended, the follow-up email includes a CTA, and you can add links to any helpful resources mentioned during the webinar. For those who did not attend, the follow-up email includes an invitation to watch the webinar replay or sign up for a different session. This helps maximize attendance rates and move them through your evergreen webinar funnel.
Step 4: Add Interactions (Like Quizzes, Questions, CTAs, Handouts, etc.)
Keeping people engaged with your webinar is challenging as you’re competing against email, Slack, social media, and other distractions for the attendee’s attention. So if attendees aren’t actively engaging with your webinar, there’s a good chance they will check out or leave.
While some evergreen webinar software enables you to add an occasional poll or question, it doesn’t allow you to build an engaging, interactive experience from beginning to end.
So when we built eWebinar, we decided to offer a robust library of diverse interactions (we currently offer 16, though that number is always growing). With so many interactions to choose from, you can add a new one every 3-5 minutes to keep viewers attentive until you make your sales offer near the end.
Here are a few of the interactions we support:
- Feedback
- Questions
- CTAs
- Special Offers
- Quizzes
- Links
- Handouts
- Contact Forms
- Conversion Alerts
Interactions are a goldmine of qualitative customer feedback as eWebinar saves all responses.
For example, if you ask a question like, “Have you ever purchased a coaching program before?” you can tailor your post-webinar marketing messages for two target audiences: those who said “yes” and those who said “no”.
Plus it’s easy and fun to add interactions to your webinar with our unique video timeline editor, shown in action below.
Step 5: Configure Chat
Chat is a key differentiator that makes webinars much more powerful marketing tools than regular videos.
Webinar attendees love that they can get answers to their questions in real-time, and hosts love that they can immediately answer objections to improve their conversion rate.
The challenge with chat for evergreen webinars is that attendees can send messages at any time around the clock. So it can be tricky to ensure each message gets a response in a timely way without tying up your team’s time.
Other evergreen webinar platforms offer chat that either:
- Requires a team member to attend every single session to respond to chat questions (otherwise, the chat questions disappear the instant the webinar room closes). This either defeats the scalability of evergreen webinars or sacrifices the quality of the attendee experience.
- Sends all chat questions directly to email (which isn’t really chat, is it?)
This issue is a key reason why we built eWebinar. We wanted a solution that gives you the option to respond immediately while the attendee is live on the webinar or later at your convenience, so that every single question gets a timely response and you don’t have to attend a single session.
We also didn’t want to leave attendees hanging, not knowing whether or not they had been heard or would get a reply to their question. Our autoresponder, which automatically messages the attendee after a few minutes of no response, ensures that never happens.
Here’s an overview of how our chat works:
- When an attendee sends a chat question, you receive an email notification (if you use Slack, you can also choose to be notified via Slack).
- The email notification includes a link to respond to the chat question inside eWebinar. (If you’re using Slack, you can respond directly from there instead.) This way, you have the golden opportunity to chat with attendees, counter objections while they are live on the webinar, and close the sale.
- If the team isn’t available to respond while the attendee is live on the webinar, eWebinar automatically informs them that their message was received, but they will get a response later via email. This ensures every question is answered, yet your team isn’t tied to the webinar around the clock.
- When the team does respond, the attendee gets a reply to their question by email.
So the main benefit of eWebinar’s chat system is that you never miss the golden opportunity to interact with prospects and answer key objections while maintaining the scalability of traditional evergreen webinars.
It’s also super easy to configure chat. All you have to do is:
- Set your preferences (i.e. choosing the reply-to email for messages sent via email)
- Select moderators (you can add as many as you like at no additional cost).
- Tweak the messages in the private welcome messages and autoresponder
Step 6: Customize Your Landing Page
eWebinar offers a host of registration page templates that anyone can easily customize with our drag-and-drop editor.
If you choose to use a third-party landing page builder instead like Unbounce, Leadpages, or Instapage, you can simply embed one of our marketing widgets onto that landing page to connect it to your webinar.
Step 7: Publish and Share!
Your webinar is now ready to be published! eWebinar offers a link that you can share anywhere across the web to drive registrants to your landing page. Or, you can share your webinar on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn with the share icons provided.
If you are looking for ideas to promote your webinar and generate more sign ups, like marketing to your email list or focusing on the SEO of your landing page, check out this entire post we wrote on the topic:
If you’d like to learn more about eWebinar, attend our demo (which is an evergreen webinar made with eWebinar’s software!).
Does Zoom do evergreen webinars?
Zoom supports what they call on-demand webinars, which are just gated videos. This functionality makes it easy for their users to publish recordings of live Zoom webinars and meetings after the events are over.
These are not evergreen webinars, however, because Zoom doesn’t offer any interactivity in them or chat – both of which are key factors that make evergreen webinars effective marketing tools.
It’s worth noting that eWebinar supports a Zoom integration, so if you decide you want to use Zoom to record the video for your evergreen sales webinar, you can easily import it when you are done with a click!
What is the best evergreen webinar software?
We’ve tested many different evergreen webinar software platforms over the years, and here are our top picks:
- eWebinar (our product)
- EasyWebinar
- Demio
- WebinarGeek
- EverWebinar (AKA WebinarJam)
If you want an in-depth comparison of these five products (including pricing information), check out this more detailed post:
5 Best Evergreen Webinar Software Platforms for Course Creators, Coaches, and Solo Entrepreneurs
eWebinar exists because our founder, Melissa Kwan, wasn’t able to find evergreen webinar software that satisfied her own needs when running her previous company.
So after selling that company, she decided to start eWebinar to solve the key pain points she faced running evergreen webinars.
The key differentiating factors she built into eWebinar include:
- Chat that enables hosts to respond live or later
- The most diverse selection of customizable interactions
- Unparalleled webinar availability options
While there are plenty of evergreen webinar software solutions available, these three features sets make eWebinar truly unique.
Here’s a more detailed look at each differentiator.
Key Differentiator #1: Chat that enables hosts to respond live or later
Evergreen webinars are convenient for hosts because they scale, though the scalability also makes it tricky to ensure attendees still receive responses to their chat questions.
With most webinar software, the tradeoff is either:
- Sacrifice scalability and have a team member attend every live session to ensure each chat message receives a response. Since chat questions disappear the instant the chat room closes, the attendee never receives a response to their question if it isn’t answered live.
- Sacrifice immediate response times and send every chat message directly to email. While this ensures every message gets a response, it also means that the team never has the opportunity to respond to attendee objections while they are most engaged and interested in purchasing.
eWebinar offers the best of both worlds by giving the team the opportunity to chat with attendees live when they are available or respond later at their convenience.
This is because the team receives a notification via email (or Slack, if you have it) immediately when an attendee sends a chat message. The team can then respond directly inside the eWebinar platform (or through Slack) and then get right back to their other tasks.
If the team is busy when the attendee sends a message, eWebinar lets the attendee know that nobody is available to chat at the moment — so they don’t think they’re being ignored — but someone will get back to them shortly.
From the attendee’s perspective, they get a response to every single question, which creates a great first impression with your brand.
From the host’s perspective, you have a direct line of communication with customers and never miss an chance to counter an objection that could prevent them from converting.
Key Differentiator #2: The most diverse selection of customizable interactions
There are plenty of evergreen webinar software solutions that offer a couple of interactions, like a CTA and poll. But with so few choices to work with for creating interactivity, it’s impossible to offer a truly engaging webinar experience. It’s why most evergreen webinar creators only include one or two polls throughout their entire webinar.
Unfortunately, if the audience is left passively listening for a long stretch of time, another distraction (like email or social media) might grab their attention and pull them away from your webinar.
eWebinar solves this problem by offering the most diverse selection of interactions of any evergreen webinar software.
Today, we offer 16 different interactions, and that number is always increasing.
With so many different interactions to choose from, plus the ability to add images and emojis to give them personality, you can add one every 3-5 minutes without it becoming repetitive or boring. Your attendees will actually enjoy the experience and stick around long enough to hear your sales offer.
Key Differentiator #3: Unparalleled webinar availability options
The easiest way to increase attendance rates is to give registrants as many options as possible for when to join your webinar so that it fits with their schedule.
eWebinar offers the three following scheduling options:
- Just-in-Time Sessions
- Convenient Recurring Schedule
- Webinar Replays
More importantly, eWebinar is one of only a small handful of automated webinar software that lets you offer all three availability options for your webinar simultaneously. Remember, its providing lots of options for registrants that increases webinar attendance.
If you’d like to see for yourself how eWebinar can help you create an effective evergreen webinar that accurately reflects your brand and clearly demonstrates the value of what you offer, join a demo of eWebinar today!
Attending our demo is also a great opportunity to understand how your prospects will feel attending your webinar as we actually use eWebinar to host our demo.
Create an Evergreen Webinar Today!
If you’ve already recorded the content for your evergreen webinar, you can publish it in less than an hour if you just take the action. To get started, sign up for eWebinar for free now!
And if you’re still not sure if eWebinar is the best choice? Join our demo to experience an evergreen webinar created and hosted by eWebinar and ask any additional questions!
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