Opinion: Best time of day/Best day for webinar?

Webinar times are a tricky subject. I have played around with them for over a year now. In my own experience, I have found that Mondays & Wednesdays are the best days to put on a show. For time slots, I shoot for 10am PT/1pm PT. Try to cap your webinars (or at least advertise) at 30 min. Most people do not want to dedicate 1hr towrds a webinar.

A quick side note: Get the event on your prospects calendar early. The earlier you get them to register, the more likely their calendar slot is open. Also, in your registration confirmation email, post an "add to calendar" button. That way, you have physically blocked a slot on their calendar, which will boost your registration-to-attendee conversion rate.

If you have any more questions, feel free to reach out.

-Dex

We have had the most success with 2:00 PM ET.   Our experience has been that we get the most registrations 1 - 2 weeks in advance. Much more than that and the response rate is very low.

Dex - Thanks for the feedback. I'm curious regarding your 30 min advertised time....what if the webinar really does take 1 hr? Does it make you look like a liar for having misled the audience? I could see the benefit of a shorter webinar but sometimes these are not possible due to subject matter, even if we try our best to cut down on slides and non-essentials.

Elliott I tend to agree....we promote 2 weeks in advance and have seen similar stats on this

We like Wednesday/Thursday 8-10am PT.

I agree that sending invitations 2 weeks in advance is ideal. Too early and people have no idea and don't care; 1 week or less sometimes means they are booked already.

I've had sucess Tues, Wed, Thurs. For US/EMEA webinars we tried to keep it to 10am EST so Europe could attend and not need time from people more than once. Asia is harder so somtimes we'd do US/Asia or EMEA/Asia.

I also found 1p or 2p slots work on T-F.

What we've found is that it seems to work best at 12 or 1 CST. We get the best registration and then attendance for that time slot. We've done webinars every day of the week, but Tues & Thurs work the best for our industry. We send our registrations 2 weeks before, however we have a series that occurs monthly for our clients that we only advertise 1 week before. But this is a different situation where they are used to seeing the email and will register right away for this series. I will say the one thing that we found is that when we send out the recording or slides after the presentation, we have the best opens, clicks and responses on Saturdays. I'm not sure if it is our industry or if it's just because people will take the time on a weekend when they don't have time during the day.

We go with 2 pm EST normally

We usually hold webinars on Thursdays at 11am Pacific. I agree with Dex on the importance of adding an "add to calendar" button. We include "add to google calendar" and "add to outlook calendar" buttons. 

Here is a great tool for creating "add to google calendar buttons or links":
http://support.google.com/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1186917

Thank you all for sharing! This is really informative. I hope others will benefit from this discussion.

The presentations below contain tons of data on webinar trends and best practices. Some of the topics covered include:

• Webinar viewings by time of day
• Webinar viewngs by day of week
• Effective promotion channels for webinar and video content
• Using webinar data to prioritize sales activity
• At what point (time) in a live webinar is attendance at a maximum?
• Live vs. on-demand viewing differences

Presentations:

• 2011 version
• 2012 version
• 2013 version (upcoming: January 31)

All these presentations are based on viewing data from the thousands of webinars hosted on the BrightTALK webinar and video platform, which I highly recommend! For this discussion thread in particular, the 2011 version might be most relevant. But I found the others interesting as well 🙂