I missed a coming attraction in my January e-commerce prognostications: webinars as direct-to-consumer marketing tool.  Traditionally the webinar (or “web seminar”) has been utilized by research houses as another distribution point.  More recently they’ve seen traction in the B2B (business to business) space as a way to conduct an informational sales pitch to numerous enterprise leads at once.  And I’ll bet we increasingly see webinars directed at the consumer.  It’s not a tactic for everyone but here’s where I think it makes the most sense:

1. Your product (online or off!) requires some degree of specialized education. Thanks to search engines, discovery tools, and the like, educated customers are bound to come to you.  And many niche e-commerce providers rely on only these customers and the word of mouth marketing and education that they generate in conjunction with limited claims and materials on their site.  There’s a much broader market to be found, though, in the masses that don’t realize what benefits your product or service offers but have interest and require hand-holding.

2. Your price point requires a mental hurdle.  Sales 101 - the longer you’ve got your lead’s attention, the more likely you are to close.  Offline retailers would love to clone their best salespeople and put them in front of every customer.  Enter webinar: it’s possible.

3. You’ve got an evangelist or “face” of the business who catalyzes engagement and with whom the existing customer base wants to interact.  Webinars allow your evangelist/”face” to scalably reengage your existing customers and drive repeat sales.  Don’t forget that even online transactions are driven by qualitative factors and relationships.

I toyed with adding (4) your typical customer offers a high “lifetime value,” but junked it because I don’t think it’s as natural a condition as those above and ultimately gets at ROI which should be as much a function of volume as unit value.

Here’s a couple leads for help with webinars:

• Bulldog Solutions- outsourced lead generation provider that specializes in webinars
• Oddcast- conversion building tools via automated avatars (truly scalable webinar enablement)