Bringing Your Curriculum Online Due to COVID-19: How to Promote a Webinar Instead of Open House

As of March 27, 2020, the US became the first country to hit 100,000 cases of coronavirus. I’m sure the infection rates will start to plateau however even after the virus is contained there still remains a lot of uncertainty after that.

So for schools that hold classes in-person, there remains tension on when the next semester can be kicked off. Whether in-person classes are able to resume within 60 days or not it’s critical to make the investment of time and resources right now to bring your curriculum online, at least part of it. Bringing your curriculum online doesn’t happen overnight but doesn’t take a lifetime either with the right guidance.

After you’ve built out your curriculum online, here’s a break-down of the best learning management system for your school, you’ll need to transform your Open House to an online webinar. Here’s a step by step process of crushing your webinar:

 

1. Build An Optimized Registration Page

If you have a bottleneck on development and design, you can use off the shelf platforms to build these pages such as wix.com, squarespace.com, and leadpages.com. Do not create too many form fields. Every extra form field required to fill out will lose 5% of your prospects. Name and email are enough. Follow up the rest later. Explain the time

 

2. Automate the “Live” Webinar

You can do the webinar live however can you really do a live webinar every day because you don’t know when it’ll be the best time for your prospects. You’ll want to record the 1st live webinar and then automate it. You can use platforms such as webinarjam.com to host the first live webinar then automate future ones. If possible bring someone into the webinar to do Q&A live with a real person to convert these webinar attendees and invite them to the next step in enrollment. This is all possible through webinar.

 

3. Promoting Your Webinar

• Existing leads: The most obvious is distributing it to your lead email list and promoting it on your website
• Google Ads: if you’re already running ads target your existing keywords
• Facebook/Instagram Ads: promote it to people with the right target interests, try lookalike audiences based on your existing lead email list, and make sure to test different geographic regions.
• Buy Email Lists: contact relevant companies who have your target audience and propose to sponsor their next email newsletter promoting your school’s webinar

 

4. Email flow

• 2 Weeks Before: The Initial Invite – This email should have similar content to the landing page, letting your recipients know you’re having a webinar, telling them what it’s about, when it is, and giving them an easy way to register.
• 1 Week Before: The Reminder
• 1 Day Before: The Second Reminder – This email may be a little much for some contact databases (after 2 emails, the contact has probably made up their mind), but it’s always worth testing if you think it has a chance.
• 1-2 Days After: The Thank You Email
  • This may be the most important email in the workflow — besides the initial invite, of course. Break this email up into two separate emails:
  • Registrants: Send your registrants the recording of your webinar. They should not have to fill out a form to access this since they already did this when they registered. Include some social share links, and ask them to share it with their co-workers, friends, or family who would also be interested (but make sure the share links bring them to a landing page that gates the recording!).
  • Non-Registrants: Send the people who didn’t register a chance to still view the recorded version. If they couldn’t make the webinar that day or never got around to registering, this gives them the option to watch it at their own leisure. Provide them with the link to the landing you’ll create for the recording so you can measure and record conversions.

 

BONUS: Ask For An Expert To Be Guest Speaker

Even if you are an established expert, your webinar event will reap more benefits if you partner up with another expert. He/she will have his own audience. Besides, it will also deliver more value to your audience. In fact, it is known that you can get as many as 2x-3x boosts in webinar sign-up rate. This is especially helpful if your school is not well-known yet. Your visibility will also shoot up when you have a high-profile guest speaker.

Although this may be daunting, break this down into bite-sized action steps with the right team and streamline this process in a timely manner. This is a perfect time to focus and double down on your online efforts if you were ever considering it in the past. When life hands lemons make a lemonade factory. Stay safe and we’re praying you are healthy and things come back to normal soon.