Over the last year, we’ve collected robust information about webinar trends and best practices. What did we find out? First and foremost, the webinars are on the rise – 35% more online events were hosted in 2016 compared to 2015!

 

But we’ve also found out:

  • What is the best day and time to present your webinar?
  • What is the average webinar length?
  • What is the average attendance via mobile app?

 

All these valuable insights – and many more – have been collected in our 2016 Webinar Benchmarks Report & Best Practices. Grab a coffee and click play below!

 

DOWNLOAD FULL REPORT IN PDF.

 

2016 Webinar Benchmarks Report & Best Practices Introduction Over the last year, we’ve collected robust information about webinar trends and best practices that we believe will provide valuable insights and information as you break into webinars for the first time or seek new ways to improve your webinars. Our research is based on all events we hosted in 2016: • 554,060 events. That's 10,655 per week, 1,518 per day! • Lasting 31,184,160 minutes – or 519,736 hours. That’s 59 years and 4 months! • With 14,598,025 attendees. That’s almost 40,000 per day! Best day to present: Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday Scheduling and timing are important to help drive webinar attendance. Schedule your webinar on days when people are open and free. Everyone knows that Mondays are usually busy as people try to catch up from the weekend and plan out their week, so it’s no surprise that Mondays aren’t a great day for webinars. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are also bad for obvious reasons - it’s the weekend. That leaves Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday as the best options for hosting your webinar. Best times to run a webinar: 10:00 am - 2:00 pm Not only is there a best day of the week, but the timing of your webinar can have a huge impact on the number of attendees as well. First, try to pick a time that works for all time zones to allow more attendees to attend. Choosing a time that caters to both west and east coast is always ideal. Hosting a webinar during lunch hours is often a good idea, to give people the low-key option of watching your webinar while enjoying their lunch. Late morning or early afternoon are usually great times to host a webinar as well. Best Days to Send Invitations for Webinars Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday Promoting your webinar is what drives people to register and is the only way to get people to attend. The best time to send emails to promote your webinar coincide with the best days to host your webinar. This means that emails sent Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday will get you the highest open rate and the most webinar registrants. Keep this in mind when creating your promotional calendar for your webinar. Average webinar length 56 minutes While you can have successful webinars that run shorter than the average time, webinars that run over an hour usually see very few attendees remaining attentive into the second hour. The best option is to structure your presentation with the most important items at the beginning and less important items at the end because more people leave at the beginning if there isn’t something that draws them in. Announcing that there is a Q&A session at the end can encourage attendees to stay tuned to your webinar for a chance to have their questions answered. Create a post-webinar blog post to answer any questions you were unable to answer during the Q&A session — it can be a great way to connect more deeply with your audience. Registrant to Attendee Conversion Registrant to Attendee Percentage: 49% Average attendance: 26 attendees per event Although the average is 26 attendees per webinar, it takes almost three times as many registrants to get this turnout. This is for a variety of reasons. Some people may have signed up just for access to the recording. Some may end up being busier than expected. And some may forget what made them sign up for the webinar in the first place. Whatever the reason, the important thing to remember is that you still have an interested lead that you can nurture. Average attendance via mobile app 25% Although most businesses plan to do webinars from a desktop computer, an average of 25% of attendees tune in from their mobile devices. When planning a webinar, make sure your platform supports mobile with an up-to-date, user-friendly mobile app. This should include mobile-optimized polling and chat features. Also, when designing your visual presentation, keep in mind that mobile devices have much smaller screens than desktops. Create slides that have big visuals and avoid slides with large amounts of small text. Audience engagement and interactivity Measuring audience engagement can help you see how well your topic aligned with your audience and their level of interest. You can use this data to help you plan future webinars. However, no matter how interesting your topic, it can be hard to listen to just one person talk for an hour. To improve engagement and activity during your webinars, plan fun polls, questions, and surveys to spice things up. Here are the engagement activities people interacted with and the percentage: Group Chat – 53% Polls – 4.6% Q&A - 3% Average Webinar Ratings by Attendees 4.58/5 A best practice when hosting webinars is to ask for a post-webinar evaluation. Some webinar platforms do this for you by showing an on-screen message when someone leaves your webinar. Webinar ratings let you know where you stand with your overall presentation and provide feedback on what attendees liked and any areas where you can improve future presentations. Knowing this helps you be more prepared to deliver great content in every presentation, which will drive more leads, higher retention rates, and a better message. Conclusion We’ve learned a lot about webinars and webinar best practices through the analysis of data collected through our unique webinar platform. We hope this research and information proves useful to you as you embark on your first webinar journey or look for ways to improve your current webinar experience. All of the data and statistics represented in this report are based on our exclusive research. About ClickMeeting ClickMeeting was founded in 2011 by GetResponse, the leading email marketing platform. The idea was to provide a complete webinar solution for businesses, large and small. Over the next five years, ClickMeeting grew so much that, in 2016, it spun off as a separate company. Our mission is to be the premier provider of flexible, self-service webinar solutions that help you reach, engage, educate, and convert your audience. ClickMeeting is rich in features that help you before, during, and after your webinar.

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Posted by Agnes Jozwiak

Agnes is the Brand & Communication Director at ClickMeeting.

Time to move your events online. Do it with ClickMeeting

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G2Crowd

2 Comments

  1. Kristine Ghia Malicay August 10, 2017 at 4:16 am

    Is that time in EST?

    Reply

    1. Yes, it is 🙂

      Reply

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