Webinar Hosting
We like to provide webinars for our customers and leads. It is a great opportunity for us to engage directly them and field their questions.
I’m writing this post to solicit feedback from you about your favorite webinar hosting tool. We’ve been using Webex, but we don’t like it very much. It’s expensive (we averaged $115/mo in Webex fees last year) and cumbersome to use.
We’ve also used the free join.me for small client demos, but it is missing some critical features. Here are the features we need that are available in Webex but not available in join.me:
- Ability to pre-register for scheduled webinars by providing name, email, and company information; this is the biggest feature missing from join.me
- Ability to record the webinar so that we can leverage our effort on the content and provide it to others (in beta form at join.me)
Here are other requirements that are available in both Webex and join.me:
- Ability for clients to join from Windows, Mac, or Linux operating systems
- Ability for dial-in by phone or dial-in by computer headset
- Ability to mute all phones
- Ability to receive Q/A over chat and respond to inbound questions as a seamless part of the presentation
Webex is expensive, heavy to use, but provides all the features. Join.me is much cheaper ($149+tax/presenter/year) but lacks features.
Perhaps we can jump to join.me if we can develop our own webinar registration form on our website and manually invite registrants to the meeting in the join.me system. We can also use the beta recording features of join.me and see how that goes. The big downside is the manpower cost of instrumenting our own registration system.
What webinar hosting tools have you used? What do you like?