Do Polls in Webinars Increase Engagement?

When your audience is engaged, you know your webinar was a success. One of the best ways to boost engagement is to make your webinar interactive with the use of real-time polls. Webinar polls encourage dynamic participation. You can also leverage them to learn more about your audience. Which, in turn, can help you create better webinars.

Let’s take a look at why engagement is critical when hosting webinars. And, at how you can use polls to optimize the experience for everyone.

Engagement Is the ‘Why’ Behind Your Webinar

Whether you’re holding a webinar for employees, prospects, or other stakeholders, the goal is the same. You’re trying to increase engagement.

This engagement can lead to:

Greater brand awareness

When your webinar is engaging, people are tuned in during the experience. This helps to make the event memorable, and by extension, your brand. According to a survey conducted by ON24 involving nearly 23,000 webinars in 2018, 75 percent of hosts use webinars for brand building.

Generating leads

In the same survey, 95 percent of respondents said webinars are key to their lead generation efforts. Also, 76 percent were able to achieve more leads through their webinars.

Converting more customers

A good webinar will educate your participants. It will show them how your product or service can benefit them. As a result, there’s a good chance they’ll go from your webinar to your landing page to sign up for your service or make a purchase. Well-crafted webinars achieve impressive conversion rate averages of 19 percent.

Enhanced customer experience

Webinars can also lead to increased trust and customer loyalty. This is because you’re positioning your brand as a thought leader. You’re also adding value to your customers’ lives.

Through webinar polls, you can easily achieve this high level of engagement.

How Polls Translate to Webinar Engagement

Not all webinars are engaging. In fact, some are boring. Or, they aren’t really worth your participants’ time.

Even if your webinar provides valuable information, without the right level of interactivity, you’re not going to hit a home run. You’re not going to resonate with your audience.

If your webinars aren’t interactive, stimulating, and aligned with your participants’ needs and wants, they aren’t helping you achieve your business goals, either.

Using polls in your webinars, on the other hand, allows you to reach all of your engagement objectives. And, once you engage, you’ll definitely see the brand building, lead generation, sales, and loyalty benefits.

Webinar polls offer:

Interactivity

When webinars fall short of expectations, it’s usually because your participants are in a passive role. So, change the pace. In between blocks of talking and presenting, get them involved with a poll. Then, your audience gets to take an active role.

With real-time polls, participants can share their thoughts or opinions. Then, as the host, you can display poll results graphically during the webinar. This makes the experience even more dynamic because everyone can answer the poll questions anonymously while also learning more about their peers.

Stimulation

Once you conduct a live poll, you’ve trained your audience to pay attention. It signals to them that their thoughts matter and will be a part of the webinar conversation.

So, they’re more likely to continue tuning in so they’re ready for the next poll, Q&A session, or other interactive webinar feature you choose to include.

Alignment

Use webinar polls to learn more about your audience. You can find out invaluable info to help you create future webinars that resonate with your attendees.

• What they know by testing their knowledge: This can reveal what areas they’re already well-versed in and where they have knowledge gaps you can help fill.
• What their pain points are: Whether you’re presenting to employees or customers, the more you know about their concerns and challenges, the better equipped you are to tailor webinar content around their needs.
• What their goals are: What do they want to learn? What are they trying to achieve in their life or in their job? With well-crafted webinar poll questions, you can collect this info. Then, you can ensure your future webinars are helping your audience get closer to their goals.

Webinar Polls Will Help You Create More Engaging Webinars

Use webinar polls to engage. And, use them to learn about your audience so you can create more engaging webinars. With feature-rich webinar software, you can turn your webinars into interactive, enjoyable experiences that add value to your participants’ lives, without having to be an experienced webinar host.

Get more out of your webinars with the right tools. From real-time polls to built-in analytics and live attendee chats, Intermedia AnyMeeting Webinar offers a complete webinar solution, making creating engaging webinars easier than ever. Sign up today and get started.

The Intermedia Team

Intermedia helps businesses of all sizes connect better – through voice, video conferencing, chat, contact center, business email and productivity, file sharing and backup, security, archiving, and more – from wherever, whenever. And, as a partner-first company, Intermedia goes to work for our channel partners to help them grow their revenue and maximize their success.