Whether you’re just starting with hosting webinars or you’ve been running them for a while already, there’s probably a couple of questions lingering in your dome:
What are the best practices for hosting webinars?
Are my webinar statistics and data normal in my niche?
How do I compare across my industry?
In this massive list of webinar statistics, you’ll learn everything you need to know about the webinar marketing trends, effective scheduling and engagement statistics.
You’ll also learn the best practices of promoting the webinar and what should you expect in terms of webinar registration and attendance.
These webinar statistics have been aggregated and combined from over a dozen of different reports and studies, so take everything you read with a grain of salt. And keep in mind that survey responses depend a lot on the selection.
Importance of Webinars in Marketing
The most recent webinar statistics definitely show an increase in weighted importance of webinars in B2B marketing strategy in general.
- The global webinar market is expected to reach $800 million by the year 2023.
- 85% of marketers, who use webinars as a marketing tool, say that webinars are a key part of their marketing efforts.
- In another study, 89% of marketers agreed that hosting webinars is the best platform for growing their businesses.
- It has to be said that hosting webinars is mostly a B2B marketing strategy, hence 61% of webinars are hosted by B2B companies. They’re becoming a fundamental part of B2B sales funnels.
- This number is far lower for B2C companies, with 17%
- It’s even lower for non-profits, with merely 11%
Overwhelmingly, marketers choose to create webinars in-house, instead of outsourcing.
- Furthermore, 73% of marketers consider webinars the best way to generate quality leads
- Smart marketers use webinars not just for sales, but also to create new original contet. 61% of marketers leverage webinars as part of their content strategy.
- Webinars are used a lot for product demos and onboarding. This is reflected:
- 26% of webinars are hosted by SaaS and technology companies
- 12% are hosted by financial services companies
- 11% are in the consulting space
- Less than 2% are in real estate, tourism and non-profits
Over 70% of webinar marketers say that webinars are either highly effective or mostly effective.
Hosting webinars can be incredibly lucrative for your sales efforts even as an online course guru. For example, Scott Britton made $11,286 from one single webinar. There are many webinar examples like this.
- 16,000 recipients received the promotional email
- 759 signed up for a webinar (conversion rate of 4.74%)
- 232 attended the webinar (attendance rate of 30.6%)
- 40 converted into sales (sales conversion of 17.2%)
Webinar Statistics for Costs and Spending
According to Redback webinar statistics, most webinar marketers are looking to increase their webinar spend in 2021.
But how expensive is to host webinars?
Webinars are not as expensive as you might think. For most marketers, it’s making less than 10% of their marketing budgets.
The biggest investment is your time and dedication to create a webinar marketing strategy, create the content and actually host the webinar.
- The webinar software itself is a marginal cost of $100 - $300 per month.
- In terms of equipment, you need a quality microphone, a webcam and decent lighting. This one-time upfront cost would set you back another $500, depending on the brand.
If you have a dedicated team for producing and delivering webinar content, the costs can go up to. But so would the sales and revenue that’s been generated by webinars. Be sure to track your webinar analytics and success, so you can make smart investments.
Webinar Software Statistics
There are tons of options when you’re choosing a webinar platform. Marketers who have a coherent webinar marketing strategy see the value in investing to a professional webinar software.
- Moreover, 78% of hosts use a designated webinar platform, instead of a video platform like Vimeo or YouTube (which only 5% of webinar hosts use).
The best webinar platforms today are online and platform-agnostic. That means attendees can easily join, regardless if they’re on PC, Mac or Mobile.
- However, still 93% of people attend webinars on a desktop computer.
- But that doesn’t mean you should neglect your mobile attendees, as 25% of webinar attendees say that they’ve watched a webinar on a mobile device.
Webinar platforms also give you the peace of mind that no technical issues would abruptly halt your webinar presentation.
Another benefit is to seamlessly integrate the webinar platform with your mailing list and email templates.
- 70% of marketers have integrated their webinar software with their CRM or marketing automation platform or both.
That’s why most webinar software platforms integrate with many email autoresponders.
Statistics About Planning the Webinar
- It actually takes time to come up with a topic, prepare the webinar contents and do outreach. Marketers usually take at least a 2 of weeks to produce a webinar
- Depending on the scale, it’s usually enough to have 2-4 people involved in planning and preparing the webinar.
When you’re planning a webinar topic, brainstorm multiple titles. Use power words to make it more attractive. Most effective webinar titles are:
- List topics (5 Key Techniques to … or 10 Ways to …)
- How-to (How to do … Effectively or Learn How To …)
Statistics About Scheduling the Webinar
- Webinar statistics speak that most marketers are committed to host about 2 webinars per month
- 14% of marketers host webinars at least once per week.
- Be mindful that most attendees can only commit to 1 webinar per week. Although, you can have different target groups, in which case it makes sense to host multiple webinars per week.
Statistically, the best weekdays to host your webinar is mid-week.
- More specifically, Tuesdays and Wednesdays tend to work the best. Wednesday is the best, with a response rate of 26%. While weekends only get a 1-2% response rate.
- Try to schedule your webinar into a morning time. Marketers report that 93% of webinars that happen in the morning are more successful.
- Studies have shown that around 10 AM – 11 AM tends to be the best time for running the webinar. Around 1/3 of attendees prefer 11 AM.
- A good rule of thumb for a webinar duration is 1 hour. That’s reflected in the average viewing time of 57 minutes. This statistic can be influenced by the 1-hour webinar as being a standard.
That being said, attendees prefer a slightly shorter webinar session. More specifically:
- 45-minute session is preferred by 44% of attendees
- 30-minute session is preferred by 41% of attendees
That being said, registrants are more willing to sign up for a 1-hour webinar. The sign-up rates are:
- 67% sign-up rate for 1-hour-long webinar
- 8% sign-up rate for 30-minute-long webinar
An interesting outlier here is pharmaceutical webinars, which are around 20 minutes long, on average. It’s interesting that their participation rate is 63%.
The lowest participation rate is in advertising, with around 33%.
Webinar Goals and Lead Generation
The primary objective for hosting a webinar is generating high quality leads, as stated by 35% of respondents.
- On another study, it was found that the goal for 60% of webinars is to turn leads into loyal customers
- On average, B2B marketers generate 500 – 1000 leads per webinar
- 75% of respondents use webinars to build their brand
- 76% of respondents boost their lead generation with webinars
- On other studies, hosts use webinars for:
- Customer onboarding and training (31%)
- Marketing and demand generation (29%)
- All-hands internal meetings (10%)
- Press events (8%)
Webinar Contents Best Practices and Statistics
With webinars, content is definitely the most important part of your webinar. This is the backbone and reason why your attendees want to join in.
- 38% of attendees voted that the content was the most important reason they attended.
- 32% of attendees votes that an engaging host and fluent delivery was most attractive.
So, create an enticing topic and delivery it with enthusiasm. If you can do that, you’ve won most of your attendees over already. Hosting an interactive webinar about an interesting topic is the way to go.
The content of the webinar can vary a lot, depending on your webinar goals.
Promoting the Webinar – Best Practices and Statistics
- Marketers are mostly targeting prospects (28%) or existing customers (36%).
The closest and easiest way to promote your webinars it to leverage your email list:
The email list lives in the CRM software or Email marketing system.
- In another study, 65% of entrepreneurs say email outreach is the best way to promote their webinars.
- In yet another study, 56% of webinar registrations come from email. Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to send promotional emails.
- Scheduling and promoting your webinar in a month in advance will boost your registrations by 12%, webinar statistics suggest.
Webinar Registration Statistics
Another reason why professional webinar platforms are a smart investment is because you can better track and convert your visitors into registered webinar attendees. Your webinar landing page is meant for that.
- The webinar registration page sign-up conversion rate is reported with an average of 55.9%. However, to get a more accurate view on this, we have to look at the number of total registrants:
- More than 100 attendees – 35-40% conversion rate is considered decent
- Less than 100 attendees – Around 43% conversion rate is normal
- The registration page conversion rate is heavily influenced by your niche as well:
- 67.05% conversion for Communications category
- 44.79% conversion for Training category
- 39.10% conversion for Marketing category
- 30.79% conversion for Education category
- Some webinar platforms allow you to customize the registration fields to capture more data about your attendees. Studies show that 5-7 fields work best for gathering data without sacrificing in conversion rate.
- Of course, if your goal is to maximize sign-ups, go with fewer fields. Less fields = More registrants.
- Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see an immediate avalanche of registrants. 33% of webinar attendees will sign up on the day of the webinar.
- 46% of attendees sign up during the same week of the event.
- Only 15% of registrants sign up 2 weeks in advance.
- 8AM – 10AM is the time when most registrations take place. A whopping 36% of registrations happen around that time of day. Plan your email blasts accordingly.
Webinar Attendance Statistics
- The amount of attendees in a webinar is mostly below
- Moreover, 78% of webinars have 50 or fewer attendees.
- Some businesses and individuals host webinars that attract a huge number of attendees. That brings up the average to 148 attendees per webinar.
- Around 40-50% of the webinar registrants will actually attend your webinars. But this depends heavily on the category of your webinar, more specifically:
- 65.5% attendance rate for training webinars
- 56.2% attendace rate for internal communications webinars
- 42.1% attendace rate for customer onboarding webinars
- 36.6% attendance rate for marketing webinars
- You can maximize your webinar attendance rate by
- allowing registrants to add the webinar to their calendars
- scheduling reminder emails before the webinar starts. Some studies have found a 20% attendance increase by introducing reminder emails.
- Even if your attendees are not joining live, they still might want to watch it on-demand. 18% of on-demand webinar views take place during the weekends.
- Furthermore, you can still ramp up +47% of webinar views within 10 days after the webinar event
- That’s why 58% of webinar hosts make their live webinar available on-demand.
- Even more, 28% of registrants say that they only register to get the webinar replay later and watch it at their own leisure.
- 54% of B2B professionals watch webinars on a weekly basis
Webinar Statistics about Attendee Engagement
Even though automated webinars allow you to run webinars on autopilot, most marketers still choose to host live webinars.
Live webinars have one distinct advantage – they are more engaging. That’s because of the live factor.
- Engagement is key if you want to keep your attendees to stick around until the end. Only 40% of webinar attendees pay attention from the beginning all the way ‘til the end. The rest drop out somewhere along the way.
- 75% of marketers prefer to host live webinars and the immediate engagement is the main reason
Live webinars allow you to create true live engagement with your audiences.
That being said, you can still make your webinar available for replay after it’s over. You can set up automatic follow-up emails with most webinar platforms.
- 71% of marketers choose to make the webinars available on-demand.
- 54% of marketers choose to involve at 2 hosts in the webinar, which is also the most popular option. This is a low-pressure way to deliver your content. It also gives perfect ground for interview-style webinars.
- Knowledgeable and enthusiastic presenters create most engagement, as reported by 34% of webinar attendees.
- On another study, it was found that 81% of webinar hosts include Q&As into their webinars.
- That’s understandable, because live attendees will definitely have questions at the end. 92% of attendees want to have a Q&A session.
- Polls are less popular, with only 34% of webinar hosts using them.
This is roughly reflected on the engagement tools used in webinars:
- According to Redback webinar statistics, in most cases (51%), the webinar presenters are in-house.
- For better time management and flow, 62% of marketers plan for the interactivity within the webinars.
- Interactivity like Q&A and polls produce interesting data about your leads. 54% of marketers utilize this data with their sales departments.
Arguably, the best type of outcome from a webinar is a paying customer or an outright sale on the spot.
- On average, 2-5% of webinar attendees will purchase the offer at the end of a webinar.
To increase these chances, it’s best to use a webinar platform like WebinarJam that displays the offer in a prominent and attractive way. Of course, your offering and delivery will be the foundation of that.
Webinar Analytics and Success
Top webinar platforms have detailed analytics dashboards to help you learn about your past webinars and improve by gathering insights from that data.
- To measure the success of webinars 52% of marketers measure basic attendance numbers (number of registrants and attendees).
- 25% of marketers mark sales-related data (leads and customers acquired) as their criteria for success
- It’s a good practice to schedule a follow-up email, which sends out the webinar recording and slideshow materials. 69% of attendees prefer to receive these after the webinar.
- Another good practice is to enable 5-10-minute breakout sessions after the webinar. 19% of attendees are interested in those.
Webinar Statistics Summary
Hopefully you’ve gained some insights and can adjust your webinar goals, strategy and methods based on the data you’ve learned from reading the webinar statistics.
Sometimes it’s important to take a step back and evaluate if your results are normal and how do they compare against others in your industry.
Now that you know the data-backed reasons for investing in your webinar marketing strategy, the next step is to choose the best webinar software.
Sources & References
- https://blog.workcast.com/ultimate-webinar-stats-for-2020
- https://www.readytalk.com/resources/webinar-marketing/infographics/post-webinar-best-practices#.X6a4vIj7Q2x
- https://outgrow.co/blog/statistics-on-webinars
- https://optinmonster.com/webinar-marketing-101-how-to-sell-anything-with-webinars/
- https://assets.cdngetgo.com/e7/73/cbeb606b4f9295747b31e0442f24/gotowebinar-2017-big-book-of-webinar-stats.pdf
- https://www.getresponse.com/blog/how-do-webinars-work
- https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2014/10/2015-b2b-content-marketing-research/
- https://medium.com/@BigMarker/12-webinar-statistics-you-need-to-know-b3e28b275abe
- https://www.beaconlive.com/blog/evaluating-your-webinar-analytics
- https://kapara.rdbk.com.au/landers/2007cb.html
- https://makesocialmediasell.com/how-to-sell-using-webinars/
- https://app.hushly.com/runtime/content/lKVbWb3wAS3jzpov
- https://logmeincdn.azureedge.net/gotomeetingmedia/-/media/pdfs/gotowebinar-the-big-book-of-webinar-stats-final.pdf
- https://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-platforms/webcasting/webinar-response-statistics/
- https://findstack.com/webinar-statistics/
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