I’ve decided to go back to hosting webinars as part of my marketing tool box and have been researching various companies. I found one -- Zoom -- that seems to fit my needs for about $55 a month which is about ½ of what I paid for Go To Webinar.
However, I’ve spoken to the folks at join.me a couple of times and would like to work with them because of price and just because they are so nice. My problem is that, as you know, they don’t offer registration.
I offer both free and paid webinars using Join.me. I analyzed a lot of different webinar platforms because I'm pretty picky. I wanted something easy for attendees to use (without requiring a download) and no Javascript. Join.me has affordable pricing and good technical support. I like that attendees can use a variety of platforms (desktop/laptop, tablets or phones) to access the calls. I also like that recordings take just one click and they can be directly uploaded to YouTube.
Downsides:
- There is no built-in registration. I use a third-party registration option to handle that (EventBrite is a great option).
- No built-in toll-free number options (most attendees don't care about this, but if you did want a toll-free call-in option, you can use a third-party service)
- It doesn't track who attended versus who didn't, so you can't do follow-up marketing based on who actually was on the call or not.
So how do you let people know about your webinars? I use EventBrite -- here's my affiliate link:
http://www.eventbrite.com/r/rwdigest2
I like EventBrite because it's free if you don't charge for your webinar. If you're using your webinar for marketing, you're probably not charging for it, and EventBrite is great for this.
EventBrite gives you a landing page to provide all your event information, full-service registration (including automated reminder emails) and event promotion (you can integrate your EventBrite event with your Facebook page and EventBrite will also promote the event on their "master list" of events). For paid programs, EventBrite also has a built-in affiliate program so you can reward referrals. (It also allows you to do special discount codes for referral source tracking too.)
If you offer a paid program, EventBrite is still a great, affordable option. You can use EventBrite's built-in payment processor or your own PayPal or Authorize.net payment processing. The EventBrite cost for paid events is 2.5% of the ticket cost plus $.99 (up to $19.95/ticket) if you use your own payment processing.
Add 3% if you use EventBrite's payment processing. I find it's about 5-10% effectively. (That is, if you sell a webinar for $59, your takehome would be between $54.76 (EventBrite: 2.5% is $1.48 plus $.99 = $2.47 plus 3% EventBrite fee = $1.77 = $4.24) and $56.63 (EventBrite: 2.5% is $1.48 plus $.99 = $2.47, plus separate PayPal or Authorize.net fees). With the example given, that's between 4-7% net.
