Webinar no-shows: why people sign up and don't turn up, and how to prevent it

Your webinar is ready. The title pulls. The sign-ups pour in. Tuesday evening, ten past eight, you click “go live”. And then you see it: a handful of tiles with faces, and a lot of names that were on your list, but not in your room.

That is not bad luck. That is a leak. And it is not where most people look.

At OMB we distinguish two leaks. Leak 02 is the room that is full but doesn’t buy. Leak 01 comes earlier: the room isn’t full. Too few sign-ups, or people who sign up and don’t turn up. This article is about that second part. Why no-shows happen, and how you prevent them.

A full list, an empty room

An example, made up but recognisable.

You are a consultant. You give an online masterclass about your field. Three weeks ahead you put it online, you share it on LinkedIn, you send an email to your list. It works. Sign-up after sign-up.

Everyone gets a confirmation. After that, nobody hears from you again. You are busy with your slides. Your attendees are busy with their lives.

Three weeks later, your masterclass is for them a line in an inbox they never open again. There is a client meeting on the same evening. Or the kids have football. Or they simply no longer remember why they ever pressed that button.

You have a hundred sign-ups. They have an evening with something else.

And no, that doesn’t just happen to you. According to the Livestorm Webinar Benchmark Report 2026, in 2025 an average of 47.7 percent of registrants actually turned up. Measured across almost 34,000 webinar sessions on their platform.

So on average, more than half of your list isn’t there. That is not a law of nature. It is an average. And you can do something about an average.

Why people don’t turn up

The easy conclusion is that your attendees are unreliable. That is too easy. You don’t have a no-show problem. You have a warm-up problem.

Signing up is not the same as showing up. Between the two there is time, and in that time interest cools. These are the places where it goes wrong:

That last point is not an oven problem, but a dough problem. That is why in the Sold-Out Recipe we start with a crystal-clear offer and only then with the hook and the title. A catchy title above an event without a clear goal fills the sign-up list. Not the room.

The oven: warming up between sign-up and show-up

Our Sold-Out Recipe has four steps. Dough is your offer. Rise is filling the room, through ads, LinkedIn, outreach and email. Counter is making the offer and following up. And in between sits step 03: the oven.

The oven does one thing: making sure people actually come. We warm up your attendees via email, WhatsApp and reminders.

Why a separate step? Because most experts do nothing here. They put all their energy into filling the list, and then they wait. That is a waste. It is exactly between sign-up and event that you decide whether someone walks in keen or in doubt. Or not at all.

And it goes beyond a full screen. Only whoever is in your room can buy at your counter. A sign-up that doesn’t come is not a missed viewer. It is a missed buyer.

How to raise your webinar show-up rate

You don’t prevent no-shows with one reminder on the day itself. You prevent them with a fixed sequence, in which every message adds something. This is how we build it:

How close to the event should that sequence sit? Closer than you think. In the same Livestorm report, almost half of sign-ups (49.6 percent) only come in during the final week. So your sequence must also work for whoever signed up yesterday, not just for whoever said yes three weeks ago.

And the teams that get above 60 percent show-up? According to Livestorm, they send personal reminders three days ahead, one day ahead and on the day itself. Each with its own reason why that particular person should come. No copy of the previous message.

And a rule that always applies with us: every email we send has an unsubscribe option. Warming up is helping someone to come. Not backing them into a corner.

For WhatsApp that applies even more strongly. A message lands next to messages from your mum and your colleagues. So use it only with people who said yes to it themselves when signing up, with a separate tick box that isn’t pre-ticked for them. And put in your first message how someone can stop it. Whoever walks into someone’s WhatsApp uninvited warms nobody up. They get blocked.

The difference is often in what you send. This is what that looks like:

Measure who actually came

A simple question: how many people who sign up for your webinar actually come? If you don’t know that, you also don’t know whether a new approach works. What you don’t measure, you can’t improve.

Per event, keep track of at least:

• Sign-ups. How many people said yes.
• Turned up. How many were actually in the room.
• Conversations and clients. What happened at the counter.

Because that is where the emphasis belongs. A full room is the start, not the finish. Your show-up rate is a halfway score. The final figure is on the receipt: conversations and revenue.

Put your own show-up next to the market average above, but above all next to that of your previous event. The average tells you where the market stands. Your own previous event tells you whether your oven is getting warmer.

And those who didn’t come?

This is where most experts drop the ball. The webinar is over, the recording is somewhere, and the no-shows quietly disappear from the list.

Don’t. Whoever signed up was interested in your topic. Not coming is not a no. It is a yes that cooled down on the way. Not yet a yes is not a no, and without follow-up you leave next month’s clients on the table.

Send them a short, personal next step. Quickly, while it is still fresh. Interest is like bread straight out of the oven: delicious today, in five days nobody wants it any more. I see it with LinkedIn leads, and it works no differently here. Read more in why you follow up LinkedIn leads within an hour.

Which step? Not three at once. Send the recording, pick out the one moment that mattered most to them, and end with the same counter as in the room: a conversation, or a place at the next event. Whoever watches the recording and gets offered nothing afterwards has still had a free training.

One thing I won’t promise you: that everyone comes. Nobody can promise that. What you do control is whether your attendees stay warm between signing up and showing up. That is the difference between a list of names and a room full of buyers.

How the whole recipe works, from dough to counter, is in how we work. But start with yourself. Where is your room leaking: at warming up, at who walks in, or only at the counter? Take the free leak test. Thirteen questions, three minutes, and you know.

A sign-up is not yet a guest. Switch on your oven.

RK

Rubin Koot · Hoofdbakker

Rubin is the founder of Online Marketing Bakery in Roermond. You take the stage, we fill the room. And we make sure it buys.

[email protected] · More about the bakers

Further reading: How to organise a webinar: the step-by-step plan · Event marketing · Take the free leak test · The Sold-Out Recipe: how we work · The Sold-Out Session · Marketing for training providers · LinkedIn leads: respond within an hour

How we work: first the offer, then the room. Want to get going with a brief like this? We do that in the Sold-Out Session: your offer and your event structure in one half-day.