Webinar Benchmarks Report Covid-19 Special Edition: How Businesses Drive Digital Engagement in a WFH World

Over the past few months, marketers, salespeople, educators, managers and nearly every possible position you can think of has moved online and started working from home. From meetings and classes to company all-hands to — somehow — happy hours, everything is happening virtually.

They’ve also been happening through webinars. During April of 2020, the peak period of Shelter In Place in response to COVID-19, ON24 has seen a drastic jump in the number of webinars hosted on the ON24 platform. For example, marketing-centric webinars in April 2020 have increased by 8%, a noticeable jump. But educational webinars have exploded by comparison; training and continuing education, for example, have leaped by 11% and 22% respectively, highlighting the rise in digital customer engagement for training and educational content.

Want to learn more about how webinars have changed after COVID-19? Check out our Webinar Benchmarks Report now.

An Amazing Webinerd Network

The most impressive development by far, though, has to be how the ON24 network responded to our Covid-19 widget. Over the course of 60 days, we promoted a bespoke CTA widget to help raise funds COVID-19 response. During those 60 days, nearly 100 webinar producers incorporated the widget into more than 350 webinar events. That one widget reached more than 80,000 webinar attendees and drove more than 50,000 clicks — a 63% conversion rate in support of COVID-19 relief.

Let that sink in for a moment: one small button drove more than 60,000 clicks, for an average of 143 clicks per-webinar. And all contributing to a single cause: raising funds for the COVID-19 Solidarity Relief Fund.

What other neat stats did we see? Let’s take a look:

• • Triple-digit increases in the overall number of webinars and the live attendance and engagement within those webinars
  • More registrants convert to attendees than before, with a 53% conversion rate for webinars with more than 100 attendees
  • Ninety percent of webinars in April 2020 made use of the Q&A engagement tool
  • Finally, more webinars than ever are making use of video, with 55% of all live webinars featuring some kind of live video in April 2020

Great Digital Experiences Everywhere

But it’s not just the numbers behind the webinars that excites us. It’s the variety — from dance parties and conference DJs to full-blown multi-day conferences — and how they’ve been set up to make attendees feel like rockstars. Take Drift’s recent RevGrowth Summit for example: not only did they bring together sales and marketing professionals for two days virtually, but it even got a DJ to host its virtual after party:

Another company, Hoosh, managed to put together a whole virtual club:

But it’s not all typical conference fun-and-games. Organizations have rapidly adapted to the digital-first era, moving would-be in-person events online at a breakneck pace. For example, Fitbit completely revamped its event marketing strategy and transformed its trade show booth into a virtual experience complete with resources, direct chat with salespersons and even swag.

DOMO, too, made a major pivot, and translated its major event, Domopalooza, online in less than two weeks.

Community Done Right

More than anything, though, we’re impressed with how webinar practitioners have taken the initiative and adapted to today’s digital world. Time and time and time again we’ve seen the #webinerd community step up and create engaging digital experiences from even the most challenging of environments (our own homes, for example):