How to Boost Webinar Attendance Rate: 15 Proven Tactics

When you host a webinar, you want the attendance numbers to match the effort you put into planning and promotion. So when only a fraction of registrants actually show up, it's easy to panic. Low webinar attendance often translates to less engagement, fewer conversions, and lower ROI.

In this guide, I'll walk you through how to boost webinar attendance rates and encourage more people to attend your events in real time. You'll learn what causes people to skip webinars in the first place, which promotional tactics drive attendance, and how to measure whether your efforts are working.

What is a webinar attendance rate?

A webinar attendance rate is the metric that reflects the number of people who actually participate in your live event compared to the number of people who registered for it.

When your attendance rate is high, it usually means your topic is a good fit for your audience, your marketing and promotion efforts are working, and your event offers genuine value for attendees.

How to calculate webinar attendance rate

Calculate this percentage with the following formula:

Webinar Attendance Rate = Number of Attendees / Number of Registrants x 100%

Say you have 500 registrants, and 300 show up for the live event. Your attendance rate would be 60%.

What’s the average webinar attendance rate?

First, let's set realistic expectations. What's the average webinar attendance rate, anyway?

Across industries, the average attendance rate for webinars is 48%, as the Livestorm 2024 Webinar Marketing Report reveals. The results were similar in 2023, when the average attendance rate was 51%.

However, this rate can vary depending on the industry. Overall, the consumer staples and energy industries have the highest attendance rates — at 80% and 73%, respectively.

This rate also varies seasonally. January, September, and November have the highest attendance rates.

Why do webinars have low attendance rates?

Before we explore how to drive webinar attendance, it's important to know why your results don't match your expectations. Do your organization's virtual events tend to drive a lot of webinar registrations but end up with few real-time attendees? The problem usually comes down to a few common factors.

Inconvenient webinar timing

With B2B audiences, timing is everything in a webinar strategy — especially when your prospects or customers are located around the world.

When you schedule a webinar for 12 CET, you're asking your American audience to join during the early morning and your Asian audience to join during the evening. If your webinar doesn't work with their schedule, they might register without planning to attend live.

Irrelevant topics or speakers for the audience

If your business already has an engaged following, your audience might automatically sign up for webinars based on brand recognition alone. That's an enviable situation to be in. But it might not translate to high attendance.

When it comes time to decide whether to show up for the event, your audience may have second thoughts when they realize the speaker isn't that important or the topic isn't that exciting. To convert registrations into attendance, you have to target the right audience with a relevant event.

Inadequate webinar promotion

A single email newsletter to your entire contact list doesn't mean the right people will register for your webinar. When you aren't strategic about your webinar promotion, you often end up with too few registrants or people who aren't the right fit for the event.

Successful webinar marketing typically takes place across channels, creating multiple opportunities to connect with and convert your ideal audience.

Insufficient reminders before the event

If you take webinar promotion seriously, you likely start weeks ahead of time. This often means that people register well in advance — and then completely forget about the event on the day of. Without timely reminders, you can't expect a good webinar attendance rate.

Lack of incentive to join live

For many B2B teams, it's common courtesy to send a webinar recording after the event ends. This is especially important when you need to maximize registrations.

While it's certainly convenient to invite your audience to watch the replay at their convenience, it's not great for your engagement metrics or your webinar performance. Busy audiences often need an incentive to prioritize your event and make the time to join live.

15 Ways to boost webinar attendance rates

Once you've identified what's keeping attendance rates low, you can take steps to improve your results. Here's how to increase webinar attendance:

Tailor the event for your audience

1. Identify topics and angles your audience cares about

The best webinars help your audience solve real problems. Identify their most important concerns by:

• Looking through your team's support tickets and sales calls to find recurring questions and challenges
• Checking to see which blog posts and resources get the most engagement from prospects and customers
• Surveying your audience about what they're working on or concerned about this quarter

The goal is to find topics that relate to immediate, concrete problems. So, a webinar on "how to optimize your ABM strategy to increase pipeline by 5x this quarter" is much more relevant than "ABM strategy 101."

2. Recruit speakers who resonate with your audience

Your speakers' expertise has to align with what your audience is trying to accomplish. Look for speakers whose company size, industry, and role closely matches your audience's situation.

Here's an easy way to start: Identify a few of your top customers or prospects in the audience segment. Then, pay attention to who they talk about and engage with on platforms like LinkedIn.

3. Balance educational and sales content

Webinars typically perform best when they aren't thinly disguised sales pitches. To improve webinar attendance, prioritize delivering value to your audience.

Aim to spend at least 75% of the webinar time on education and information sharing. When you do mention your product or service, make sure to directly connect it to the problems and solutions you've covered.

Promote the event to your target audience

4. Segment your contact list and send email invitations

Inviting your entire contact list might seem like a smart way to get more people to register for your audience. But when webinar attendance is your priority, be more selective about your invitations.

Segment your contact list, focusing on people with an interest in the topic or those who are at a relevant stage in the sales funnel. Then, send a webinar invitation to the segment(s) who are likely to get the most value from your event.

See how Cody Stover, Senior Demand Generation Manager at Customer.io, used email segmentation to win a 6.25x higher conversion rate:

5. Use lead gen forms in LinkedIn and Facebook ads

Look beyond your email list and reach new prospects with LinkedIn or Facebook ads. As Livestorm’s 2024 Webinar Marketing Report shows, 57% of marketers use paid advertising to promote webinars — making this the third most popular channel.

Use LinkedIn or Meta to build interest or role-based audiences. Then, integrate your Facebook or LinkedIn lead gen forms with Livestorm. This way, you can seamlessly register new attendees from social media ads without having to maintain complex automations or zaps.

6. Partner with industry thought leaders or B2B brands

There's no need to rely exclusively on your company's internal experts to lead webinars. Instead, co-host with a complementary brand or an industry thought leader.

This approach has two potentially significant benefits: It gives you access to your co-host's audience and it adds credibility to your event. And according to Livestorm’s 2024 Webinar Marketing Report, partnerships are the top performing channel for webinar marketing.

At Livestorm, we frequently co-host webinars with teams from other B2B SaaS companies. For example, our ABM Meets Events webinar includes guest speakers from Userpilot and Demandbase.

Optimize scheduling and logistics

7. Set up a user-friendly registration page

To increase webinar attendance rates, you need registration landing pages that are easy for your team to set up and easy for your audience to sign up.

With Livestorm, you can easily create landing pages that feature:

• Event time and date so registrants know exactly when the webinar is happening
• Description of the event, including what attendees will learn
• Hosts and speakers, including their companies and roles
• Registration options via email, Google, and Microsoft
• Link to share the event with colleagues

To maximize attendance and engagement, always lead with the webinar's value proposition. What will attendees learn during the event? What will they be able to do afterward?

8. Choose the right day and time for your audience

Plan webinars at the ideal time for your target audience. Review your webinar analytics to find the times that drove the highest attendance during past events.

Alternatively, use our webinar statistics to find the right timing for your audience. This tool uses data from thousands of webinars hosted with Livestorm to identify the best day to host a webinar and the right duration.

Across industries, Thursday is the best day to host webinars. Wednesday takes second place, followed by Tuesday.

9. Use a browser-based webinar platform

Make joining your webinars as easy as possible by minimizing the tech requirements for your audience. Reduce friction by choosing a browser-based webinar software platform.

With Livestorm, attendees can join without having to download an app or sign up for an account before tuning into the event. This means Livestorm events have a 53% higher attendance rate compared to the industry average.

Fix your pre-webinar communication

10. Automate your reminder sequence

Rather than relying on your team to send reminders manually, use email automation. With Livestorm, you can email reminders based on any schedule you choose.

We typically recommend sending:

• Confirmation email after registration
• 24-hour reminder the day before the event
• One-hour reminder right before the event starts

This cadence keeps your event top of mind with your audience and improves webinar attendance rates.

11. Tease the event on social media

Don't rely on email alone. When marketing a webinar, create touchpoints across channels.

At Livestorm, we focus on social media promotion for our webinars. As an example, this LinkedIn post includes a carousel that highlights five things attendees will learn at an upcoming webinar.

Make live attendance worth it

12. Create exclusive incentives for live attendees

Give your audience a clear reason to attend live rather than waiting for the replay. Offer resources that attendees can only get during the live session, such as:

• Templates
• Research reports
• Free software trials

13. Make the event interactive so attendees feel like contributors

Organize webinars that invite your audience to contribute rather than just watch and listen. Use polls throughout the event to gather experiences and opinions. Then, share the results in real time.

Host live Q&A sessions with your speakers. Give attendees a chance to interact directly with thought leaders and get answers to their biggest questions.

Drive additional views after the event

14. Send replay links

Even if your main priority is to improve your webinar attendance during the live event, replays can still help you meet lead generation goals and increase ROI. But instead of sending a generic follow-up with a replay link once the event ends, take a moment to customize your email.

"Time is everything. You want to be saying thank you to registrants immediately after the event," advises Kathryn Hurley, Events and Partner Marketing Manager at ChartMogul. "And not just that generic 'thank you for attending.' You need to tailor it to the content from the session and also have a very clear call to action."

15. Repurpose webinar content across channels

Another way to drive more registrations and views after the event is to repurpose webinar content across your marketing channels. For example, create short clips for social media, upload a longer clip to YouTube, or turn the transcript into a blog post.

With Livestorm's AI features, you can instantly transform webinars into emails, blog posts, and social media posts.

What to track when measuring webinar attendance

As you take steps to increase attendance, pay attention to your webinar metrics so you know what's working — and what still needs work. Here are the metrics my team measures with Livestorm’s analytics dashboard:

• Webinar registrations: The number of people who signed up for your event. A low number suggests an issue with how you promoted your webinar.
• Registration conversion rate: The percentage of people who signed up for your event after visiting your registration landing page. A low percentage indicates an issue with your webinar topic, speakers, or timing.
• Webinar attendees: The number of people who attended your live event. A low number suggests an issue with your webinar timing, incentives, or reminders.
• Attendance rate: The percentage of people who attended your event compared to those who signed up. A low number indicates a problem with your timing, incentives, or reminders.
• Replay viewers: The number of people who watched the webinar recording. If this number is much higher than the number of live attendees, it could be an issue with your timing, incentives, or reminders.

Livestorm for higher webinar attendance

Higher attendance starts with removing friction from the webinar registration and joining process. Livestorm gives you the tools to attract and convert the right audience — and make it easy for them to show up.

Here's how Livestorm helps you boost attendance:

• Customizable landing pages that simplify registration
• Automated email sequences to keep your event top of mind
• Browser-based platform that doesn't require attendees to download an app
• Interactive Q&A sessions, polls, and live chat for better audience engagement
• Flexible replay options so you control how and when you share recordings

Ready to try our webinar platform for yourself? Sign up for a free Livestorm account and set up your first event in just a few minutes.