How to Use a Post-Webinar Survey to Convert More Leads

Webinars are a great way to engage your audience and generate more leads, but if you’ve gone to the effort of staging one, you want to make sure you’re maximizing your returns. Once the event is complete, it shouldn’t be the end of your communication with attendees. In fact, you want it to be the beginning of a long-term relationship.

A key component of that should be the post-webinar survey, which offers a unique insight into your performance, as well as what your customers want from you. Skip this step and you’ll be missing out on a mine of useful information.

Why request feedback?

Asking your webinar attendees for feedback is an integral part of the process of developing your virtual events and learning from them each and every time. The more webinars you host, the better you’ll become at it, but only if you’re keen to improve your skill set and take comments on board.

However, it’s not just about you and your organization, as asking for feedback will help to ensure your audience feels valued and engaged. In addition, they will have invested in future events after giving their input, which helps to build the relationship.

You may also find that despite having a good attendance rate, your webinar didn’t convert many leads, so feedback can help you find out why. Be sure to send the survey to those who RSVPed, but didn’t end up joining the webinar in the end, as they’re still part of your audience, even if you didn’t manage to reach them this time.

When to ask for feedback

The first step in requesting feedback is to prepare your audience for it, so you’re not putting them on the spot. At the end of your event, inform your attendees that you’ll be sending out a survey and the approximate time they can expect to receive it. This simple act will help to maximize the number of replies you receive.

You should send your survey soon after the webinar so it’s still clear in your attendees’ minds and they’re invested. Ideally, this should be within a few hours, so make sure it’s ready to go prior to the event. Your questionnaire can be bundled up in a follow-up email with additional resources to improve your open rate.

How to format your survey

There are a number of ways to format the questions in your post-webinar survey, but you should choose your approach with your end goals in mind. While keeping things brief can be preferred by your audience, you still need to gain enough information to be worthwhile.

1. Single choice questions

General demographic questions, like age, gender and role within a company can be asked with single choice questions. The answers to these can be beneficial when refining your audience and developing content that converts, but remember that not everyone will be comfortable with sharing it, so let them leave these fields blank if they wish.

2. Multiple choice questions

Use multiple choice questions strategically to establish whether things you believe to be true are in fact in line with your audience’s opinions. Also, canvas their thoughts on what your next online events should cover to keep them interested and inform your future content.

3. Open-ended questions

While open-ended questions may get fewer responses and are harder to analyze, they represent an important opportunity to let your audience tell you vital information. If an attendee has a thought about the experience they’re willing to share, but there’s not an easy way for them to do so, it’s unlikely they’ll go out of their way to express it and you’ll never know what they wanted to tell you.

4. Scale questions

Using scale questions is a popular approach to webinar feedback as they’re easy to answer and show respect for your audience’s time. Although their use is limited to showing you which areas you performed well in or could be improved, without the specifics of what would make your attendees respond better in the future.

Post-webinar survey questions

The specific questions you ask in your post-webinar survey will depend on the industry you’re in and the topics you covered in the seminar, but they should also be tailored to your goals. This will ensure the answers are as useful as possible and can be analyzed to drive more leads and convert them into sales going forward.

Some starting points for questions include:

• How much of the information in the webinar was new to you?
• Would you like to know more about this topic?
• Were your expectations of the webinar met?
• How likely are you to recommend this webinar to a colleague?
• How was your overall experience?
• What improvements could be made to the webinar?
• What would you like to see next?

Analyze and adapt your future planning according to the feedback

Having collected all this information, spend some time analyzing it to look for trends. Not only can this inform future webinars but it should give you a clearer idea of your target demographic, their pain points and the areas where your organization can improve.

Creating content around this data will help to convert leads by encouraging engagement in a targeted fashion. A webinar shouldn’t stand alone in a strategy but drive more conversions as it promotes movement through the funnel.