Technology for Marketing: The Quest for the Ideal Webinar Platform

Let me start by making a confession. The admission of the following fact is inevitable as a result of writing this blog post:
R2i offers webinars. We do so in order to educate potential customers and capture leads. Fear not; we will not harass you. We strictly adhere to marketing best practices and instantly honor all unsubscribe requests. However, if you register for one of our webcasts, we may contact you later to see if we may be of service to you. As you’ll see, this fact becomes very relevant as I elaborate on my search for the perfect webinar platform.

Webinar Platform Buying Guide
If you need to offer webcasts that will allow you to capture registrant (aka “lead”) information, in addition to recording your webcast for future use, then this guide is for you. Hopefully, you all may learn from my stumbles; it hasn’t been an easy journey. The following guide includes questions to ask of webinar platform vendors followed by additional information regarding what to look for, pros and cons of various options, benefits of various features, and more.

Lead Capture and Reporting

• How does webinar registration function?
• Can I tailor the registration form?

Generally the longer the form, the greater the risk registrants will drop-off. However, longer forms provide the opportunity to gather vital information. Your webinar platform should provide the capability for you to easily decide what best fits your organization and to customize the form accordingly.

• Does the platform enable me to capture lead info on my own site?

This is helpful if you’d like registrants to be entered automatically into your CRM system for follow up. Additionally, it is nice to drive the traffic to your own site to strengthen the association with your brand, encourage visits to other pages, and assist your search engine optimization efforts.
Alternatively, you may benefit from a service that manages this for you. In either case, it’s an important decision criterion.

• Even if the registration form can appear on my site, do registrants need to register with, and accept the terms and conditions of another organization?

Some services provide embed code you can include on your site to enable registration with the webinar platform to occur transparently.

• Does the platform offer attendance reports?

While it’s important to gather the information of all those who registered for your webinar, it’s equally vital to know who subsequently showed up. Additionally, the length of attendance at a given webinar is important & should be recorded and readily available

• Does the service consolidate registrants and attendants?

You do not want to have to manually de-dupe this info yourself, trust me! Receiving one .csv file with registrants and another with attendees is not fun.

Webcasting Functionality

• Does the platform offer audio through phone, computer (VoIP) or both?

I was using a platform that offered only phone audio and received a few complaints. One would-be attendant emailed me that it was “very ‘90s technology.” I must admit, I see his point.
According to On24, they’ve held more than 32,000 webinars in 2009 and although they often offer both options, approximately 93 percent of attendees selected VoIP audio. As a webinar attendee, it happens to be my personal preference as well, so as a webinar platform purchaser, I consider availability of VoIP more important than phone.

• What is the chat functionality like?

Flexible chat features enable you to offer better customer service to your webinar attendees. I consider it crucial to have the ability for numerous people to reply to chats, as well as the ability to reply via chat to one individual attendee. Attendees typing, “I can’t hear the audio/ see the slides,” is inevitable. You will encounter this complaint – and you don’t want your presenter disturbed with this sort of house-keeping. Nor do you want to interrupt the flow of the presentation, for example, to explain again that the slides will be e-mailed out tomorrow.

• What’s the actual presentation platform like?
• Can I offer polls to attendees and record responses?
• Are there limits to the number of polls I can present and the number of options per poll?
• Can I share a file that I must upload first or show my entire desktop?

The latter is helpful for certain types of presentations, such as walking attendees through navigation of a software product or website.
Consider the look and feel of the actual webcast windows. This is where I’ve seen the least variation amongst vendors. Personally, R2i doesn’t consider the ability to dynamically highlight items on the screen very important. But, hey, it’s nice, so it warrants a bullet.

• Does the platform have multiple presenter capability?
• Can numerous people in numerous locations present?
• If so, what is the maximum number of presenters?
• How does this work and is it clear who is ‘driving’ things by pushing slides?

Recording and Subsequent Promotion

• Am I able to easily, seamlessly record the complete webcast (slides along with audio)?
• Am I able to obtain a file with the recorded webinar for use in other locations, such as YouTube?
• Does the webinar platform provide a promotional venue? Can new leads find my content by exploring webcasts within an existing community?

While this may not be a primary goal of purchasing webcasting services, it is a nice advantage when available.

• Do you offer automated sending of e-mails to remind registrants of upcoming webcast sessions, and e-mail the recording after the session?
• If so, do those e-mails contain an Outlook calendar file?

Pricing, etc.

• Is there predictability in pricing?

I’ve seen extra fees charged for items such as per-minute, per-user phone access, extra webcast attendees, extra webcasting minutes, video files of webcast recordings – or extra fees for particular formats and more.

• Customer Service

I submitted an online info request form twice now for a Platform-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named: once in October, once in April. I have not yet received one return phone call or e-mail! This company is no longer in the running here at R2i.
Technical questions seem to be inevitable. Responsive and helpful contact people are an important buying criterion. I’ve also granted bonus points for those who offer me best practices tips. Likewise, I’ve deducted points for charging “training fees” upon set up for what should be a user-friendly technology.