Straight answer: most businesses should run one webinar every four to six weeks to the same list, not weekly and not monthly by default. The right number depends on your list size, your sales cycle, and how fast your audience refills, and I’ll show you the exact maths I use to work it out for a client in an afternoon.
The number I run in my own business
I run one live webinar roughly every six weeks. Not because a guru told me to, but because I tested weekly for three months in 2021 while rebuilding my business after five brutal years, and it nearly killed my list.
Here’s what happened. Week one, I promoted a webinar to my full list and got a 42% show-up rate on registrants, which is good. By week ten of weekly webinars, that show-up rate had dropped to 19%, my registration rate had halved, and unsubscribes had tripled. I wasn’t reaching new people each week, I was reaching the same tired 4,000 people over and over, and they were switching off.
I stopped. I went back to one every six weeks with proper promotion behind each one, and within two months my show-up rate climbed back to 38%. Same list, same offer, completely different result, just because I stopped exhausting people.
Why frequency depends on list size more than anything else
The single biggest mistake I see when I coach clients through webinar strategy is picking a frequency before checking how many people they have to invite. A list of 500 cannot support monthly webinars without burning out. A list of 50,000 probably should be running more than one a month, split across segments.
Rough rule I use with clients: you need at least 2,000 engaged subscribers per monthly webinar slot to keep registration numbers healthy without repeating the same faces every time. If your list is smaller than that, you need to be building it faster than you’re mailing it. That’s the whole reason I wrote a separate guide on how to generate 1,000 email subscribers in a month, because webinar frequency and list growth are the same problem wearing different clothes.
The maths nobody bothers to do before booking the date
Before you decide how many webinars to run this month, do this five-minute calculation. It’s the same one I run for every client before we set a webinar calendar.
- Count your engaged subscribers, meaning people who haven’t seen a webinar invite from you in the last 60 days.
- Apply a realistic registration rate: 2 to 5% for a cold-ish list, up to 8% for a warm, highly engaged one.
- Apply a show-up rate: 35 to 45% is normal for a live webinar with a reminder sequence.
- Apply your close rate for the offer you’re pitching: 5 to 12% for a mid-ticket offer under £1,000, lower for anything higher priced.
So on a list of 5,000 engaged people: 3% register (150 people), 40% show up (60 attendees), 8% buy a £500 offer (4.8 sales, call it £2,400). Production time including promotion, tech setup, the live session and follow-up usually runs 10 to 12 hours. If you’re not sure how to build the actual delivery mechanics, my step-by-step guide to hosting a webinar on Zoom covers the setup end to end.
Now run that same webinar weekly against the same 5,000 people and watch registration collapse toward 1% within a month, because you’ve hit everyone who was ever going to say yes and you’re now mailing fatigue. The revenue per webinar drops while the effort stays the same. That’s the trap.
The uncomfortable part most webinar advice skips
Here’s the bit that doesn’t get said much: the webinar itself is rarely where the money gets made. It’s the follow-up sequence in the days after that does the heavy lifting, and most people running monthly webinars have a follow-up sequence that’s two emails and a shrug. If you’re going to run four webinars a month but only send one follow-up email after each, you’d make more money running one excellent webinar and spending three weeks on a proper nurture sequence for the people who didn’t buy live.
I’ve watched businesses run monthly webinars for a year, pat themselves on the back for “consistency,” and never notice that 90% of their revenue came from live-session buyers while the other 4,940 attendees across twelve sessions bought nothing because nobody followed up with them. More webinars isn’t a strategy. More follow-up on fewer webinars usually is.
What too many webinars costs you
Beyond list fatigue, there’s an opportunity cost that doesn’t show up on a spreadsheet until it’s too late.
- Content quality drops. A weekly webinar means you’re writing new slides and fresh hooks every seven days, and by week four you’re recycling the same three stories.
- Your team burns out on tech setup, promotion, and hosting, even if it’s just you.
- Your list starts associating your name with “another webinar invite” rather than genuine value, and open rates on everything else you send start sliding too.
- Paid promotion costs rise because you’re bidding against your own previous campaigns for the same audience’s attention.
None of that is fatal on its own, but stacked together it explains why so many businesses quietly stop running webinars after six months and never work out why the numbers went sour.
What too few webinars costs you
The opposite problem is just as common, especially with businesses I meet who ran one webinar eighteen months ago, it did fine, and they never repeated it. A single webinar tests a hypothesis. It doesn’t build a channel.
Webinars are one of the few formats where you can watch, live, exactly where people drop off, what questions they ask, and what objections keep coming up in the chat. If you’re only running one a quarter, you’re not gathering that intelligence often enough to improve your offer or your pitch. I’d rather see a business run one modest webinar a month for six months and iterate each time than one polished webinar a year that never gets refined.
A simple framework by business stage
This is roughly what I recommend depending on where a business is:
- Under 2,000 subscribers, pre-revenue or early stage: one webinar every six to eight weeks, focused as much on list growth from the registration page as on the pitch itself.
- 2,000 to 10,000 subscribers, established offer: one webinar a month, same time slot, same day of the week, so your audience builds a habit around it.
- 10,000 to 50,000 subscribers, multiple offers or segments: two a month, split by segment or by product, so nobody gets the same invite twice.
- 50,000-plus, multiple products, sales team: weekly is defensible here, but only with segmentation so each subscriber sees a webinar invite roughly once a month, not once a week.
Notice the pattern: frequency scales with audience size, not with ambition. Wanting more revenue doesn’t create more people to invite.
The sales cycle matters as much as list size
If you’re selling something with a long consideration window, like a £5,000 consultancy retainer, running webinars monthly to the same cold list makes no sense. Most of the room isn’t ready to buy this month regardless of how good the pitch is. You’re better off running quarterly webinars with a proper six to eight week nurture sequence in between, similar to how a good speaker builds an audience over months rather than one event. That’s part of why I keep telling clients it’s worth watching other speakers regularly rather than just copying a webinar template, because the pacing of how someone builds trust before the pitch matters more than the slide deck itself.
If you’re selling something fast and low-friction, a £47 to £200 digital product, monthly or even twice-monthly webinars work well because the decision doesn’t need six weeks of thinking time. This is the same logic behind building recurring income streams that I cover in my piece on making your first £10k month, where frequency of touchpoints matters more than the size of any single pitch.
How I decide each month
I don’t run webinars on a fixed calendar anymore. I check three things at the start of each month:
- Has my engaged list grown by at least 15% since the last webinar? If not, I skip a cycle and focus on list building instead.
- Do I have a new angle, not just a reskinned version of last time’s pitch? If the answer is no, I don’t run one.
- Is there capacity for proper follow-up for a full week after, not just an automated thank-you email? If not, I push the date.
That discipline is uncomfortable because it means some months I run zero webinars, and that feels like I’m doing less. But the months I skip almost always produce better results the following month, because the list has had time to breathe and I’ve got something fresh to say. I talked through some of this thinking in more detail on the UNmiss Podcast episode on the future of marketing and sales, where the same pattern kept coming up across other guests: consistency beats frequency, every time.
A quick checklist before you book next month’s webinar
- Has your engaged list grown since the last one, or are you inviting the same tired people again?
- Do you have a follow-up sequence longer than two emails ready to go?
- Is your offer different this time, or a reskin?
- Does the maths above support the time it will take to produce?
- Could the same hour be better spent on one piece of content that compounds, like a blog post or a lead magnet, instead?
If you can’t answer yes to at least three of those, skip the month. Nobody ever regretted skipping a mediocre webinar. Plenty of people have regretted running one anyway just because it was “webinar week” on the calendar.
Frequently asked questions
Is it bad to run more than one webinar a month?
Not if your list is large enough to support it without repeat fatigue, roughly 2,000 or more engaged subscribers per monthly slot, and each webinar is going to a different segment or offer rather than the exact same people twice.
What’s a good show-up rate for a webinar?
Between 35% and 45% of registrants attending live is a healthy benchmark. If yours is dropping below 25%, that’s usually a sign of list fatigue from running webinars too often, not a problem with the topic itself.
Should beginners run weekly webinars to grow fast?
No. With a small list, weekly webinars burn through your audience within a month and leave you with nobody left to invite. Start with one every six to eight weeks and put the rest of your effort into growing the list between sessions.
How do I know if I’m running webinars too often?
Watch three numbers over a few months: registration rate, show-up rate, and unsubscribe rate around each send. If registration and show-up are sliding while unsubscribes climb after every invite, that’s your list telling you to slow down before it tells you by leaving.
