Boost Webinar Engagement with Survey Questions

Webinars are a now-ubiquitous (and extremely effective) way for tech companies to generate new leads. But it benefits marketers to remember that it’s not all about the end result — getting new leads after the event. Getting the most out of your webinar lead gen efforts means truly engaging your audience while they’re there.

It means thinking beyond just your webinar talking points. How can you get webinar attendees to feel like active participants in your event? When they do, they’re more likely to get value from it, want to engage in the future, and consider you an expert on the topics being covered.

Survey questions are a webinar engagement tool with multiple benefits — they drive the type of interactivity described above while also helping you collect critical data on your potential buyers that you can use to nurture leads and drive new sales.

This guide will be all about how to use them. We’ll cover 5 survey questions you can use in future webinars to get buyers motivated while also boosting the overall ROI on your event.

5 Survey Questions to Get the Most Out of Your Tech Webinars

What additional information do you want/need?

This question helps you determine how you can leverage content in your follow up to continue providing value to attendees. It’s important to give them options—for example, list ebook topics you can provide, or different content types you can share with them.

Given that 84% of B2B buyers now say they want to be treated like a person—not a number— using this question to customize follow-up based on attendee preferences is a great way to build trust and ultimately win them over as new customers.

According to Scott Bekker, ActualTech Media’s Director of Webinar Programs:

“This is a question that can be shared with your sales team to warm up leads. It makes it so you’re directly answering a request from your attendee—like, ‘You requested a whitepaper at our recent webinar, and here it is!’ as well as, ‘Can we help you with anything else?’ It gives you a great opportunity just to contact your attendees and follow up.”

Which vendors do you want to hear from after this webinar?

When you host multi-vendor webinar events (like we do here at ActualTech Media), one of the best things you can do for your attendees and your participating vendors is find out exactly who your leads want to hear from.

Not only does this ensure your attendees get the most relevant follow-up information from your event, it helps your vendors prioritize the larger list of leads you provide them by identifying who is most interested in what they have to offer. When you can, allow your attendees to select multiple vendors if they wish.

How likely are you to recommend this webinar to colleagues/friends?

This question gets you your event’s Net Promoter Score (NPS), a widely used metric for measuring the customer, user, and/or audience experience. You’ll want to ask this question and provide a multiple choice answer option ranging from 1-10.

By standardized NPS scoring standards, those who rate 1-6 are detractors, 7-8 are passives, and 9-10 are promoters.

This question keeps your marketing team accountable and facilitates continual improvement for your events. You can also use it as a way to segment your after-event follow up to ask attendees for more feedback based on their initial rating.

Did you get the value you expected from this webinar?

Along with the previous question, asking your audience if they got value from your webinar, with a simple yes/no multiple choice format, can help you determine if your webinar is worth running again and how you can improve.

For example, when you look at the answers you get to this question across all webinars over time, you can ask—Are there yes/no trends we can see according to:

• Webinar format
• Panelist speaker or host
• Topic
• Date or time of day
• Other factor

Looking at aggregate data in this way enables you to make smarter decisions about webinars you plan to run in the future.

Keep in mind that things like preferred format and the best day or time of week for your webinar can depend heavily on the audience and industry, so collecting first party data from your webinar attendees to help you make decisions is critical.

Are you interested in sponsoring an event?

When you’re running tech webinars, this question helps you as the host find new opportunities for vendor partnerships. What better time to motivate potential new event sponsors than right after they experience the value of your events themselves?

Include a quick yes/no question asking if they’re interested, and be sure to share your contact information so they can connect with you directly about participating.

Best Practices to Remember

Whether you ask the questions we covered in the previous section or others you come up with on your own (we’d love it if you shared them with us!), there are best practices to follow so you get the most from asking them.

Use Multiple Choice Format

On most platforms, webinar survey questions will require a multiple choice format, but either way, you should stick with it. Refrain from asking open-ended survey questions in your webinars and using, for example, the chat feature or a text box to get answers. This makes it harder to analyze and standardize your data.

The open-ended format is better for questions asked to facilitate discussion. In those cases, try asking them verbally (rather than with the survey feature), encouraging use of the chat during those conversations, and reading responses right there in the webinar to keep discussion going.

Be transparent with your attendees

Your tech webinar attendees are going to be savvy—they’ll know that by answering a survey question, they’re likely signing up for some sort of follow up from your company’s sales team. Don’t shy away from telling them why you’re asking the question and how you’ll use it.

When attendees know the purpose behind a question, how it can help you, and what they’ll be getting in return, they’re more likely to actually answer and do so honestly.

As a webinar moderator, my experience is that when you ask survey questions, some attendees will immediately think, ‘I don't want to click on this survey because I'm just going to end up in a sales loop.’ But if you explain the why of it — for example, ‘We’ll all get to see these results together’ or ‘By answering this question, you’ll get access to valuable content to help you save time down the line,’ you make a sales pitch to them that encourages them to answer the question.

Follow up ASAP

Don’t lose momentum by waiting too long after your event to follow up. Download and analyze your webinar survey question data right away, and follow up with attendees within 24-48 hours after it ends.

To help get this done, plan your follow up ahead of time. You know the type of data you’ll be collecting, so you can decide on follow up questions and strategies before the event even starts to streamline the process afterward.

At ActualTech Media, we provide all of our vendor partners with comprehensive Post-Event Action Reports (PEARs) that include hot-lead reporting and analytics, plus prioritized lead follow up recommendations.

Looking to generate more leads with webinars?

ActualTech Media’s multi-vendor webinars can position your company as a leader alongside peers in your field and help you generate 200-1200+ high-quality leads for your pipeline.

You choose the topics and events you want to participate in, and we do the rest—attracting attendees, moderating the event, and providing you with lead data afterward.

Get in touch with our team today to learn more about how we can help you grow your business.