How a pharma medical team got 81% of registered HCPs to attend a webinar series
Situation
The medical affairs team at the German affiliate of a European specialty pharma company runs a non-promotional education series for physicians in specialist training. The format is demanding: four live webinars, one month apart, with the same audience expected to come back each time.
The team had run the same concept the year before on another webinar platform. Roughly 600 healthcare professionals (HCPs) joined, and the data collected told the team very little about who attended, what they watched, or whether the series was building a loyal audience or just cycling through new names. For the 2026 edition, the affiliate moved the series to Onomi. It was their first project on the platform.
Challenge
- Rebuild reach from zero. No participant list was carried over. Registration had to be built from a single public page, promoted only through email to the affiliate’s own contact list. No paid media, no UTM-tagged campaigns, no agency.
- Prove engagement, not headcounts. The previous series produced attendance totals and little else. The team wanted per-person evidence: who came back, how long they watched, and what they asked.
- Keep the compliance footprint small. The series was medical and non-promotional. The team deliberately avoided recording the sessions, which kept the content outside a formal pre-approval cycle on their side.
- Hold one audience across four months. A monthly cadence gives every registrant three chances to drift away.
Solution
The design choices mattered as much as the platform. Each one had a reason behind it.
- One registration for the whole series. A single public page showed all four dates from day one, and every registrant was enrolled in all four webinars. That gave the series one cohort, one denominator, and one communication list, instead of four disconnected sign-up funnels.
- Registration never closed. The affiliate kept promoting the page between sessions, and 286 people registered after webinar 1 had already taken place. Late joiners still received every subsequent communication automatically.
- A reminder ladder from the platform. Onomi sent the registration confirmation plus reminders one week, one day, and one hour before each of the four webinars. The affiliate’s own emails carried the editorial communication in between.
- Live-only, by design. No recording was offered. Combined with a second rule, that the answers to all audience questions were emailed only to those who attended, and both rules being stated openly in the registration emails, missing a session meant genuinely missing something. Scarcity did the retention work that a replay library never does.
- Interactivity run from Onomi Studio. Each session carried 9 to 13 polls, including votes on images, live Q&A with peer upvoting, and a post-session survey. An Onomi project manager briefed the speakers on the interactivity options directly; no agency sat in between, and the affiliate’s team attended the sessions without intervening.
Implementation
The entire series ran from one Onomi workspace. Four speakers covered the series between them, rotating between the presenter and moderator roles from session to session, and not all four were present every time. The Onomi project manager worked with them directly on how to use polls and Q&A inside their sessions.
Results
| Webinar | Attendees | Attendance rate | Avg. watch time | Poll votes | Poll participation | Questions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 592 | 48.8% | 82.6 min | 4,512 | 67.9% | 22 |
| 2 | 680 | 56.0% | 77.7 min | 3,407 | 61.5% | 29 |
| 3 | 618 | 50.9% | 102.9 min | 3,511 | 64.2% | 57 |
| 4 | 453 | 37.3% | 76.5 min | 2,479 | 50.3% | 20 |
| Series | 980 unique | 80.7% | 85.4 min | 13,909 | 60.4% | 128 |
All four webinars share the same denominator of 1,214 registrants, since registration was for the series.
Reach. 1,214 HCPs registered and 980 unique people attended at least one session live: 81% of the registered base, against roughly 600 attendees for the comparable series on the previous provider. Same audience type, same promotion channel, about 63% more reach.
Loyalty was the standout result. 708 of the 980 attendees (72%) joined two or more sessions, and 207 (21%) attended all four. Attendance averaged 586 per session across the series.
Viewing was deep, not sampled. Attendees watched 85.4 minutes on average, roughly 78% of each session’s runtime. Webinar 3 drew the longest engagement: 102.9 minutes on average against a 131-minute session.
Interaction was the strongest signal. 13,909 votes were cast across 45 polls, averaging 60.4% of the live room per question. Participants submitted 128 questions and 261 Q&A messages in total, adding 170 upvotes on each other’s questions. Webinar 3 alone generated 57 questions.
The honest numbers too. The final session was the weakest, at 453 attendees (37.3%), the usual fatigue at the end of a long series. And webinar 1’s 48.8% rate understates its real pull: measured against only the people who had registered by that date, it reached 63.8%.
How the numbers were counted
Part of what the team wanted from the move was data they could defend, so the counting rules are worth stating.
- Attendees are unique people in the platform log with recorded live viewing time; join and leave timestamps back every figure. The log’s 980 uniques cross-check against 974 “attended” flags in the CRM; the 6-person gap is people the platform saw joining whose CRM status never updated.
- The 1,214 registrants exclude 25 staff accounts from Onomi and the customer.
- Poll participation is voters divided by people in the room, averaged over the 43 multiple-choice polls. One open-text poll (18.6%) and one poll that recorded no votes are excluded from that average but counted in the poll total.
- Questions are participant Q&A entries containing a question mark; the 261 Q&A messages count every participant entry, including comments.
- No on-demand viewing exists in these figures, because no recording was offered.
Conclusion
A four-part series with a single registration cohort, a disciplined reminder ladder, live-only content, and heavy in-session interactivity turned one email list and one public page into 980 engaged HCPs, most of whom came back at least once. The affiliate’s medical team ended the series with something the previous edition never produced: a per-person engagement record for every attendee, validated against its CRM.
Deployment: Onomi webinars, run from a single workspace: public registration page, series-level enrollment, automated confirmation and reminder emails, and live interactivity through Onomi Studio (polls including image voting, Q&A with upvoting, post-session surveys).