Why Student Recruitment Webinars Work: Insights & Best Practices

by Recruit in Canada / Tuesday, 12 August 2025 / Published in Blog

Recruiting students takes a village, and plenty of outreach strategies. Over the last year, we’ve experimented with student recruitment webinars, partnering with international schools and organizations to spread the word and engage students.

Webinars let our clients reach prospective students with specific interests, engage them in real time, and end up with a list of opted-in leads.

After more than a dozen successful webinars, with more coming down the pipe, here’s what we’ve found in terms of registration, attendance, and engagement. In a nutshell, student recruitment webinars work!

Key Findings

Approximately 80% of registrants opt into lead sharing for further contact
Roughly 1/3 of registrants go on to attend the live presentation
Registrants who sign up closer to the event date are more likely to attend
Early evening (5pm ET), mid-week (Wednesday-Thursday) yields the best attendance rates for our student audience

Registration and Attendance: Reality Check

We use Microsoft Teams’ webinar feature to run the webinars, which lets us build custom registration forms for each show. Typically, we ask for the following, but clients are welcome to customize as desired:

Name and email
Program of interest
Phone number
Country of citizenship
Age
Any questions for today’s speaker(s)?
Information sharing opt-in

Webinars attract an average of 150-180 registrants — and approximately 1/3 of registrants actually log in to participate in the webinar.

We’ve found that registrants who sign up closer to the event date have a higher propensity to actually attend, so shorter marketing cycles are more efficient. We use drip marketing campaigns to inform our audience about upcoming events and remind registrants to attend the live webinar. We follow up after the webinar with a link to the recorded video, so there’s less pressure to attend live.

Deciding on the Right Date and Time

Recruitment webinars are sensitive not only to the school year cycle of applications, offers, and enrollment, but also the date and time the webinar occurs. We’ve experimented with different days and times. Here’s what we found:

Wednesdays are the strongest day of the week for attendance, with Thursdays in second place. This suggests that attendees are more willing to make time for an event like this mid-week, when other responsibilities may not be so pressing. Tuesdays, by contrast, haven’t performed particularly well, and we’ve avoided Fridays on principle.

For our largely Canadian audience, a 5pm ET start time performs better than 6pm or 7pm.

Marketing Channels: A Multi-Pronged Approach

We market upcoming webinars in a variety of ways, including:

Targeted drip email campaign of ~4 templates
Social media posts for Instagram
Main page promo placement
Automated reminder emails for registrants
Text message reminders

The biggest driver of registrants who go on to attend the live webinars tends to be email campaigns, due to our ability to more accurately target and remind students.

Sticking Around for the Whole Show

In general, attendees watch more than half of the presentation, with an average watch time of about 65%. So, for a one-hour webinar slot including Q&A, we expect attendees to see roughly 35 minutes of material.

Presenters should do their best to front-load key messages. Because attendees tend to filter into the session a few minutes after launch, we recommend starting with a short introduction to the speaker and school/organization before following up with the most important, engaging information. At roughly the halfway point, transitioning to more interactive elements, like polls and Q&A, can help attendees stay engaged.

Reaching Students After the Webinar

On top of sending the recorded webinar to all registrants after the event, we also send the presenter a list of “leads” generated from the presentation.

On registration, we ask students if they’re okay with us sharing their info with the webinar’s presenter(s). Approximately 80% of all registrants opt into information sharing, suggesting that webinar registrants are qualified leads — which is especially true of the roughly 35% who attend the webinar live.

We encourage presenters to integrate these opt-in leads to their CRMs, or equivalent, to continue nurturing prospects. Email campaigns start at the top of the funnel, while webinars are mid-funnel: a useful tool for nurturing a lead from ‘curious’ to ‘committed.’