As we've gotten to work with more and more people running webinars, it has become very clear that webinars can serve a lot of different goals for the marketing team. However, one shared goal is to have as many relevant people showing up and staying throughout the webinar. 

As a data-driven marketer you might start asking a few questions:

• When should I host the webinar? 
• How long should the webinar last? 
• How many speakers should I have? 
• How often should I host a webinar?

Well, luckily data can tell us some of the answers. Let's start with the first question: On which day of the week should I have my webinar? 

If you turn to the conventional wisdom, webinar marketers already have an answer for you: Middle of the week. Most marketers are following this advice and are hosting their webinars from Tuesday to Thursday with the latter being the most popular day. However, looking at our data there's a huge bias. 

Getting people to sign up

Let's challenge to best practice for a second and ask: What do we want our webinars to accomplish? Most likely, we want people to sign up. We want them to turn up for the webinar. And we want them to stay and engage in the webinar.

Looking at our data, surprisingly, there's no real trend to support conventional wisdom. There's no clear outlier in conversion rates, hence people are just as likely to sign up for a webinar on a Monday as on a Wednesday.

Get people to show up

Do potential attendees think about the weekday when they sign up? The usual theory is that people are busy on Mondays and ready to leave for the weekend on Fridays.

However, Monday and Friday vastly outperform the middle of the week. Looking at the data, it's apparent that you most likely will benefit from hosting your webinar either at the beginning or end of a week.

Keeping your audience to the end

Now, here's the really surprising finding: Not only are people more likely to attend your webinar on a Monday, but they will also stay longer. Compared to the average attendance, people's attention span is just shorter on Tuesdays and Fridays. 

So, I should just have my webinar on a Monday? Well, yes - if your goal is to take your webinars attendees through the whole journey from signup to engaged participants that is. When analyzing how many engagement minutes you'll get from a single visit on a webinar landing page every other day of the week compares poorly to Mondays.

Successful marketing often boils down to one thing: convincing your audience to do a specific thing that leads to a sale. It sounds so simple, but mastering the art of persuasion is no easy feat. That’s where webinars can prove effective because they help companies communicate directly with buyers. One way to make them more effective? Authenticity.

Stay tuned for more webinar statistics and findings or tune in to one of our many upcoming webinars.