How to Capture Email Leads from Your Live Social Video Broadcasts

Live social video has emerged as a major growth channel for businesses. Statistics show that people spend between 10 and 20 times longer watching live video than on-demand video. What’s more, 80% say they’d rather watch a brand’s live video than read a blog post.

The businesses that manage to turn a steady stream of live social video activity into a robust lead capture and nurture program will be in ideal position. If you aren't using social broadcasts to capture leads for your email campaigns, this post is perfect for you.

Continue reading for an overview of its use cases, benefits, and live broadcasting tools and methods to generate email leads. 

1. Benefits of Live Social Video Broadcasts and Email Captures

Live social broadcasts let you visually showcase your brand and offer educational, entertaining information. Whatever your industry, you can use them for virtual group events.

For instance, healthcare clinics can go live for self-care workshops, tourism and leisure businesses can offer previews of group tours with limited occupancy, schools can offer online classes, and more.

With live videos, you attract new viewers, pique their interest, and turn a substantial percentage of your viewers into warm leads. As you do it frequently, live social video broadcasts can grow your business in the short and long run. You can earn boatloads of revenue for zero to low investment costs and eventually grow your clout and brand recognition in your niche.

2. Attracting an Engaged Audience for Your Broadcasts

What you talk about when broadcasting live depends on your objective and what you aim to share with your audience.

Is it a concept you want to teach, promote, share, discuss, and branch out into more ideas? You can also hold your live streams in various engaging social media content formats, such as Q&As, exclusive interviews, multi-presenter online summits or happening-now trade shows.

Whatever and however your live stream will go, make sure to provide value to keep your audiences tuning in for the rest of your broadcast and future videos. Social platforms with live streaming features provide various options to promote your broadcasts.

For instance, on Facebook, you can create a Facebook event with a link to your scheduled live video inserted in the event’s text body. You can promote your event through Facebook Event ads, sharing it on your page’s timeline, displaying your calendar of activities, and others.

You can also use this strategy to create powerful custom audiences for later retargeting.

On Instagram, you can post about your live video (or a topic related to your video stream) and inform your followers of your upcoming broadcast schedule.

Promoting your live video within social platforms is helpful, but this limits your broadcast reach and notifications to your social audiences. This leaves out your email subscribers, who may not be as active on social media as they are on email and, therefore, miss out on alerts for your social live event. 

Plus, on social platforms, actions and settings for your preparation, viewer registration, and other virtual event organization needs may not be that comprehensive.

To seamlessly reach your mailing list recipients and organize your lead generation, email marketing, and event scheduling duties, leverage third-party tools enabling you to do all that.

3. Tools for Capturing Email Leads from Your Live Events

In this section, I’ll introduce four tools to generate email leads from your live social video broadcasts.

The first one, vcita, is what I highly recommend and will therefore cover more thoroughly, since it’s comprehensive and ideal for any industry type – whether it’s wellness, fitness, real estate, design or any of the ones I previously mentioned.

The three remaining tools are great alternatives for a specific, albeit limited, niche or business aspect.

A. vcita

vcita is a hyper-efficient, powerful tool for managing your clients, service events, appointments, and payments. The platform has tons of nifty features, such as a 24/7 scheduling calendar, client relationship management tools, a client portal, marketing and even payment handling solutions.

vcita also has new functionalities streamlining your virtual events. It has the Events feature, which includes its native Zoom integration, to let you organize online activities and client meet-ups. 

Access these functionalities by logging into your vcita account and heading to Settings > My Services > New Service > Group Event. A panel then shows up like this:

This feature eases setting up your event as it lets you add all relevant details, such as the maximum number of attendees, meeting channel, duration, and even any applicable pricing details.

Filling in those details lets vcita take care of the administrative preparations for your virtual (or in-person) meet-ups.

If you opt for a Zoom live event, click that option under Online. What if you’re hosting a Facebook, YouTube, or another live social event? Once you’ve created your upcoming live social event, copy the URL and insert it in your vcita event.

Again, under Online, select Other, and a field appears for you to paste the link there:

Hit Advanced to customize more settings, such as client notifications, payment options, etc. 

When you’re done creating your event, it appears like this:

From there, you can manually register clients to the event, add the vcita-generated invitation link to your emails (which people can click to sign up), and promote your broadcast:

Suppose you’re a freelancer or small business owner looking to use events only as a marketing channel rather than the main product offer. In that case, you’ll find vcita more practical than full-scale event management platforms.

Although webinar platforms offer many functions similar to vcita’s, they’re not closely integrated with your email and SMS marketing or CRM tools. Using those engines makes it harder for you to promote your live social video broadcast to your mailing list and generate warm email leads.

With vcita, you can use live events, capture email registrants, and integrate them with your business activities in a single simple-to-use platform.

Leverage its Events feature to create online lead-generating appointments, upsell, entitle valued clients to become your ambassadors, and several more.

B. Kajabi

Kajabi is a straightforward platform with several handy features primarily for holding online courses. When hosting and promoting live social video broadcasts related to your online course, you can use Kajabi’s conversion-friendly email templates and sequences:

As well as landing pages:

Maximize Kajabi’s email autoresponder connected to your landing pages and other integrated email marketing features to promote your live social event and generate email leads.

Like vcita, Kajabi is comprehensive but typically more suitable for virtual educational activities such as online courses, classes, and workshops.

C. ShortStack

ShortStack is a customizable marketing solution best fit for hosting social contests, giveaways, Q&As, and other lead-generating promotional activities.

It has various event templates you can use to excite your viewers, ensure they watch your stream, and give a sneak peek of your upcoming live social broadcast.

These templates are great for creative live event activities we mentioned earlier, such as Q&As and interviews. ShortStack also has landing pages and email creation functionalities (among other useful features) to gather relevant data from your audiences and promote your live event.

In particular, ShortStack has an Event template complete with a countdown, form, share widget, and header image. This is perfect to use for your live social video broadcast.

Here’s what some of ShortStack’s practical widgets can do to help you capture truckloads more of email leads:

• The Form widget specifically enables you to collect valuable details from your viewers, e.g., email address, name, company, social handles, and a lot more.

• The Countdown widget informs your followers and potential viewers how long it will be before you go live.

• Share encourages your viewers to spread the word about your live social video broadcast, and;

• The Rich Text widget for sharing what you will discuss on your live event;

These features are indeed awesome to leverage for your broadcast, but the disadvantage lies in needing to add them to your template -- which can be inconvenient, unlike vcita’s native features.

D. Later

Later is a marketing platform primarily for Instagram. It lets you post, schedule, and analyze posts and stories automatically, among others.

For live Instagram events, Later provides specially designed, visually appealing templates (through the Storyluxe app) that let you engage your viewers and stay on-brand.

Use these templates as well to attract your potential leads and invite them to download a free resource, get freebies and discounts, subscribe to your mailing list, and more.

Here’s a stunning sample template presented by Later:

Image source: Later.

In your chosen template, you can insert your link, CTA button, or any other catchy clickable element to lead viewers to the right landing page and instantly provide their email addresses.

A primary disadvantage with Later, though, is its limited email capturing functions for Instagram live. An alternative direction for that is harnessing its and Instagram’s features for stories during your broadcast for similarly promotional and lead-capturing tactics.

Over to You

Capturing email leads for your live social video broadcasts entails strategic concept and promotional campaign planning plus suitable marketing and event scheduling tools.

With this overview of tips and recommended tools, think about how your live social video stream will go and the functionalities you’ll need most for a productive lead generation yield. Cheers!