Webinars are indeed a great medium, or we can say it is a goldmine for several businesses and marketers to connect with their audiences, share insights, and build great rapport.

However, when your presentation becomes one-way, it would leave your audience snoozing out. So, what can you do to turn them impactful? Making it interactive.

As interactive webinars help your participants to stay engaged, get real-time feedback, and build a space that allows them to be invested in it as you want. One way is to use the right interactive webinar platform that helps boost retention.

Besides this, there are other tips we will see in the post below.

❇️ Why Is Interactivity Necessary In a Webinar?

If your audiences feel your webinars to be monotonous and just one-sided, then you are at risk of losing engagement. Plus, interactivity helps promote learning and makes sessions memorable and fun-filled.

So, whether you are hosting a live session or an on-demand webinar, by fostering participation, you are turning all those passive listeners into active participants and making them feel like they are a part of the conversation.

❇️ Interactive Webinars - What Best Tips To Use

This is where we enter the fun part of the blog - unveiling some of the tried and tested strategies to add life to your webinars and make them conversational.

✅ Always Ask Questions

It is highly important that you check with your audiences on a timely basis whether your speech was clear, whether they understood the topic, whether they had any hardships, or whether they wished to add anything. Because only when you ask them something will you know that they are glued to you and are learning your message.

So you can always start your conversation by questioning what your users like to learn and what topic interests them the most, and try getting their answers via chat. But remember not to ask too many questions, or it will make your presentation look hazy and bad.

✅ Send Out A Live Survey

This is another way to promote engagement: sending out live surveys or polls on how your live session was so that your audiences can instantly share their thoughts in real-time. Because it is only these surveys that help you to analyze your audiences on whether they are on track with you.

You can keep your questions short and related to your webinar or audience. In case your questions are big, break them into two, and try adding polls throughout your session so that they do not doze off.

✅ Add Quizzes

Much similar to the previous strategy that I mentioned, quizzes also help keep your users engaged. You can add quiz questions based on the webinar topic and note who was active in the quiz and who did not participate.

This data can help you plan your next session and determine what topics to add to make it more interactive. Also, you must tell your audiences that there will be quizzes in the middle, and they will be rewarded for them. In case your users do not wish to take part, do not pressurize them.

✅ Spark A Discussion

Always encourage your audiences to join a conversation with you, be it a quick chat in the middle of the session or a full-time discussion on the topic. As inviting them to this kind of interaction will motivate them and make them feel a part of the journey.

That being said, just ensure that discussions are like a conversation and not a lecture, and try using some of the best interactive webinar platforms that will allow you to share screens, mute and unmute participants, and other elements.

✅ Give Your Audiences Feedback

People love it when they are recognized, as it makes them feel valuable. So acknowledge them publicly when someone answers a question or gives a comment or any saying related to your webinar. It is one of the positive ways to boost engagement, maximize your brand, and motivate others to take part.

However, when you do this, check with the audience to see whether their feedback aligns with your topic.

✅ Set A Challenge

Now, this works if you are hosting a webinar series. In situations like that, you can give homework to your participants and ask them to get it done the next time you do a session. This way, your audiences will be engaged and motivated to revisit you.

Just make sure that the challenge you give is relevant to the topic of discussion and helps provoke their understanding. And to notify them about it, you can send email reminders.

✅ Keep Q&A

By holding a question and answer session, you can give a chance to your panelists to engage with you and get clarity on the topic of discussion. Plus, it will help them boost confidence when they are clear on what you are presenting and would want to visit you back.

Along with this, you can also create a segment where you can encourage your audiences to address each other’s questions. This would promote more excellent interactions.

❇️ How To Measure Engagement Success?

Okay, now is the tricky part on how do you actually measure success after you have done your part in adding all the above-mentioned interactive elements? Simply track the following metrics:

✅ Audience retention rates that show the number of participants who stayed till the end of the webinar.

✅ Polls and quizzes to have a check on how many were engaged.

✅ Q&A sessions to note whether the users interacted with you.

✅ Chat interactions to ensure were there any discussions that happened.

Besides these, several enterprise webinar solutions offer analytics tools for detailed insight to help you refine your future sessions.

The Bottom Line

By now you would agree with me that webinars are an excellent channel for sharing knowledge and staying connected. But its true success lies in its interaction levels. And by adding some of the tips that we discussed above, you can ensure your users stay engaged with your content till the end.

However, remember that interactions within a session do not just mean talking with your audiences but allowing them to actively participate. So, whether you are into on-demand webinar hosting or live ones, an engaging session always turns out to be a game-changer and leaves a lasting impression that gives real results.