We’re about to share with you a powerful piece of information for making Email leads into genuine customers. It’s all about running something called webinars. Let’s assume that you’ve culled a list of Email leads and that these people are now at least mildly interested in what you have to offer, at least enough that they want to hear more. They’re not necessarily customers yet or maybe they bought one product from you and now you want to convert them into steady, loyal customers. Here’s how you do it with webinars.
What Are Webinars?
Ever see a Cisco telepresence suite? It’s a really cool system where a series of flat panel screens are set up so that people can feel like they are in the same room and talking to each other. It has the screens set up to create a kind of optical illusion that makes it look like these people are on the other side of the table even though they are thousands of miles away. A webinar is not a telepresence suite.
However, a webinar does share a lot of the same kinds of features as a telepresence suite which is why we bring it up. In essence, imagine that the telepresence suite were to become a classroom where you could interact with a teacher and perhaps even other students who would ask questions. You’d be able to see a whiteboard where the teacher was putting notes on the board and you’d be able to hear the questions your fellow students asked and what the answer was.
That’s more like what a webinar is: It’s basically a cheap and inexpensive way to create a virtual classroom. It’s also a powerful way to take your initial Email leads and turn them into customers.
How You Can Sell to People From a Webinar
Nobody likes a hard sell. Trying to offer your customers a webinar where you simply spend their forty five minutes pitching a product to them is not going to get you anywhere unless you are doing something akin to the timeshare model (i.e. trade a two hour hard sell in exchange for theater tickets). Instead, the best way to use a webinar to turn Email leads into sales leads is to do the same thing you ought to be doing with Email leads: give the house away.
What?
Yeah, that would be our reaction at first as well. But hear us out. We don’t mean give everything away. We mean give away enough that people see that you are providing real value. For example, one company that offers social media optimization services did a one hour webinar where they spent 50 minutes providing genuinely useful information to visitors about how they could use social media to their advantage.
They also mentioned throughout that they had more to teach the people listening in and that a special offer would be made to them after the webinar was over. That special offer of course was an expanded course of study which offers even more value. Again, this took an initial interest from Email leads (these people all had to sign up to visit the webinar after all) and made it into something saleable by offering real value which could whet people’s appetites for more.
Bottom Line
Bottom line, if you offer a nibble, most people will want more. If you don’t offer a free sample though, your hard won Email leads will simply ignore you.