How to Write a Perfect Webinar Invitation

The invitation is unsurprisingly the first part of the webinar that makes contact with the audience.  It’s immensely important to start off on the right foot.

In this blog post, we'll explain how to write a perfect webinar invitation.

Here’s a brief sketch of what we’ll cover:

Webinar invitation structure 

Common mistakes to avoid in webinar invitations

Tips to use in webinar invitation emails 

Conclusion

Webinar invitation structure 

Paying special care to your webinar is important because webinars are the most effective marketing tool available.

Given that webinars are the best option available for promoters; they can’t work if no one shows up, which is why having a deep and systematic understanding of the invitations is key to meeting your goals.

Webinar invitations have to answer what, where, who, and why. Let’s run through this idea as a framework.

1. What - Webinar on how to write a webinar invitation. (This is probably the webinar subject line of your invite)

2. Where - At [a link to a landing page], at a specific time.

3. Who - This is for people who do online marketing, or are event organisers for businesses, and even for educators.

4. Why - Learn about how to write effective webinar invitations from expert marketers for free, so that you can host webinars to market products, pitch ideas, and share knowledge.

Can you see how that structure organises the information in the webinar invite into deeper reasons to attend?

If someone you are inviting knows they are going to be attending, then they immediately have the information that they need.  “This is the email you were expecting, this is the link to the registration page.”

The best webinar email subject lines cover the “what” portion implicitly, but sometimes the very first header covers the webinar subject lines, too.

The next, “who”, part is to address people who weren’t exactly already expecting the invite. If they read this far, they are supposed to know immediately “Oh, this applies to me!” or if it does not.

The actual body of the invite should be the “why” part of the invitation structure.  This offers a justification for attending and describes the highlights and the scope of the webinar.  The “why” implies a call to action, but should also end with an overt call to action.

Of course, this is just a rough sample event email invitation, but simply following this webinar invitation template will make writing webinar invites easier to compose, and it has a proven track record for invite success. 

1. Including syllabuses in your invitations

Many webinar organisers put a complete syllabus in the “why” portion of their invite.  This is a mistake.  A detailed plan for how the webinar should play out is only needed by the event organisers

No attendee is convinced to attend by a syllabus. The invite-only exists to help them decide whether they will attend or not. If you want to include a syllabus, the proper place to do that is linked to your registration page.

2. Overtly asking people to share the invite… from the invite

While it is very tempting to think “Ah, I’ll write a VIRAL invitation!”  – this is a mistake. Whether or not your message becomes viral is dependent on the content of your actual webinar.

If people who have not seen your webinars are sharing your webinars, that’s spam. Not promotion. 

To be clear, some people will share your invite, and bring friends and associates. They will do this, particularly because of the “who” section. If you say that you’ll have an awesome webinar for online marketers, and someone who knows a lot of online marketers gets the invite, they may bring those associates with them. This is why they have a provided registration link. This way it is their genuine idea to bring their friends.  

IF you are doing viral marketing, then you will have much more success with making convincing recruitment pitch to your audience during your webinar then hoping an invitation alone will make a full conversion for you.

Your invitation to a webinar is not content itself.  It is meta-content. All of the power for viral marketing comes from content- not meta-content.

3. Trying to get everyone to attend

The purpose of the best webinar invitation is to help people decide whether they will attend or not. It is critical to respect that you are in fact asking human beings to attend your webinar.  Each one of them has a unique reason for attending. The webinar is there for them, first. It’s only there for the organisers second.

It may be very tempting to view promotion and recruitment as a seat-filling numbers game. But numbers do not accomplish things.  People do. You will meet your goals with the relationships you are forming with your audience. Not with the raw number of attendees that you have.

Whilst crafting engaging webinar invitations, it's vital not to neglect the security of your email campaigns. Often, marketers become so engrossed in creating the perfect email copy that they forget the fundamental requirement of secure delivery. One of these is adopting policies like DMARC, an email authentication protocol, which bolsters your communication against phishing and spoofing threats. This safeguards your well-considered invites and builds trust with your audience, ensuring your efforts are met with success

It’s helpful to think of your invite as looking for the right people to attend your webinar. 

Tips to use in invitation emails 

• Graphics. A picture is worth 1,000 words. Even if you do not have specific pictures to portray what your webinar is about, you should still use graphical elements to break up and organise your content.
  
  This use of graphics guides the reader on what and where to read, which is important, since most people make a decision on whether or not they will attend your webinar in under 10 seconds when reading invitation emails.
  The use of graphic design is how one crafts a creative meeting invite; the writing pretty much follows a formula.
• Headers and sub-headers. The use of these easy-to-read formatting tools lets readers efficiently navigate which sections of your invite they are interested in.
• Short, sectioned text with white space. An invite is not an essay.  Very few people have time or reasons to read essays. Invites are short and to the point, and each point that they make should be clearly marked out with visual queues into short sections. To keep your invitations brief and straightforward, you can get help from an automatic solution which is an online summarizer. It will make your long-form invitation emails concise without losing their meaning. Ultimately, your invitations will have a better influence on the recipients.
• Provide contact information. Remember that your goals are met by the relationships you have with your audience. Be prepared to listen to your audience in bespoke ways that you did not expect.
  Not providing contact information implies that you’re not fully willing to take the time and consideration of relating to people on their terms. Even if you know that you can’t possibly get to everyone, it’s still a good practice to have that open channel of communication with your audience.

Conclusion

Invitations are the most important part of any successful webinar because you cannot have a successful webinar that nobody attended. 

This is why it is so critically important to choose a webinar platform that integrates invitations, webinar hosting, and follow-up messaging all in one platform.

Digital Samba is the most fully integrated, intuitive, streamlined software available to manage your online video marketing success from start to finish.

Contact us to get started with the most effective webinar platform available.