What is best? WebinarJam or GoToWebinar?

In this article I’m going to give you pros and cons when using GoToWebinar and WebinarJam. See result at the end of this article.

The story of my webinar journey

Before I do this I need to tell you about what is important for me when doing webinars.

Before the webinar

• Be able to modify landing page where the visitors register for the webinar. I want to be able to have the registration form on my own website in order to measure traffic and identify where my registrants are coming from and use this to make even more visitors to register for my webinar.
• When a visitor register for a webinar I want e-mail possibility with confirmation and reminders and also doing this in local language (Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish and English).

During the webinar

• When it’s finally time to do the webinar I want it to be easy for myself and for my attendees to enter the webinar. The best way is doing this right in the browser and not download anything which sometimes can screw up things if a attendee is using Mac or Windows. Everyone should be able to join.
• I also want to engage my attendees so I know that they are listening the entire session. It’s also usefull to always have a next step with the webinar. The questions I always asking myself is “Why am I doing this? What do I want my attendee to do?” For me it’s simple. I want to do a good webinar and by doing that I also want the attendee to register for my next webinar. And the best way of doing this is to encourage them to register right in webinar session. For sure I can make a e-mail sendout after the live webinar but the rates are higher to make the attendee to register for next webinar within the live webinar instead of afterwards.
• How do you know if your webinar is good enough? Well you don’t, if you don’t ask the audience of course. I want to be able to ask the question “How would you rate this webinar? Very satisfied, satisfied, neutral, unsatisfied, very unsatisfied”. And this also needs to be done directly after the webinar. When getting answer to this question I know how I can do the webinar even better for the next time. This is really important for me.

After the webinar

• I need to record the webinar and upload it to YouTube and send it to those who attended and most importantly to those who did not attend. I only do webinars to our customers and it’s important for them to get a recording of the webinar afterwards so they can share it with colleagues or if they missed the webinar be able to watch it later.
• After the webinar I need to make a sendout to those who attended, not attended and for those who left early and doing this automatically with e-mail templates. For me I want to option to make it personal with local language and who’s it’s from. And in these e-mails send the recording and once again a link to my next webinar.

Measurement is the key

If I can’t measure the whole funnel from when a visitor entered my landing page to if they attended the webinar or not I don’t know if this is worth the time. If I know that a lot of people register to my webinars through in-app messaging before e-mails I know that I would put more time doing in-app messages in our products instead of sending e-mail. If I see I got a lot of traffic to the landing page but a few people register – well yeah, than I need to A/B test the page to see if I can get more visitors to register. If I can’t get valuable data from the question about their feelings for the webinar they attended to – I don’t know if it’s helping them in their customer journey.

WebinarJam vs GoToWebinar

I have used both WebinarJam and GoToWebinar for a while now and I am going to give you my thoughts of how well they both are performing for me needs.

WebinarJam

WebinarJam (click for image overview) are using YouTube live streaming and are soon rolling out a new version where they instead are hosting the webinars by themselves. This is a good tool for those who want live steaming and not make registrants to download a webinar client. I can see that a lot more people are register for my WebinarJam webinars than with GoToWebinar just because of the live streaming. Sometimes my registrants have trouble with GoToWebinar when download the client because they are using Mac. Many webinar hosts has complained that WebinarJam have a delay for like 7 seconds during the webinar, but this is nothing I have experienced yet. But this can be explained by that they are using YouTube live streaming as the source. The new release for WebinarJam which are coming soon is said to be hosted by WebinarJam themselves.

You can choose to either use WebinarJam’s landing pages or use your website’s landing page with a WebinarJam form. The hard part in WebinarJam is to measure exactly where my traffic is coming from. They have the possibility to integrate with Google Analytics but it doesnt measure if the registrants came from an e-mail, another website or in-app for example. This is something they can do better. But I have some solutions for my self in order to track registrants and it’s a bit tricky.

WebinarJam also have the possibility to use Sendgrid for sending e-mails for confirmation, reminders and an e-mail after the webinar. All these e-mails are free to modify and this is gold for me when doing everything in Swedish. You can also decide when these are e-mails are going to fire and you can even send e-mails to those who attended the webinar but left after x minutes.

You also have the possibility to engage your attendees by sending Q and A’s, questions, “buy now” offer and much more. WebinarJam is great for those who are doing webinars in order to get people to buy products or just a lead generator. For me, as working only with customers this is nothing I use. But it’s great when doing the question “How would you rate this webinar?” because I can fire it inside the webinar session and I’ll get a lot of answers straight away instead of sending the question afterwards. I really like the chat in WebinarJam. It’s making my attendees to interact with each other during the webinar than with any other tool I have tested before.

Automation. After the webinar I can send e-mails to those who attended, not attended and left after x minutes. The e-mail templates are free to modify and are sending 1 hour after the webinar with the recording from the webinar. I don’t need to convert the recording or upload it to YouTube. This is done automatically without letting me doing anything! My registrants get an e-mail with the replay of the webinar and also have the possibility to ask questions inside the webinar replay. These questions are sent to my e-mail inbox.

Measurement is the key, as I said before. Well, WebinarJam can do better with the analytics from my funnel. It’s hard to get notifications when someone register for my webinars and it’s even hard to get an overview in where the traffic is coming from. Are my registrants entering from in-app messages, organic searches, e-mails, or what? I hope they will improve this to their next release in a month (July 2017)

 

GoToWebinar

GoToWebinar (click for image overview) uses their own solution for hosting webinars. You need to download a client in order to host and attended the webinar. This can screw things up a bit when using Mac and I have had registrants who couldn’t attend due to this. The whole session with attendees can be a little bit messy if you aren’t used to GoToWebinar.

The console is a big nightmare and you can easily fail with screen sharing or accidentally mute yourself. And you also need to start a recording for the webinar, which you also need to convert to a mp4 file right after the webinar. There are a lot of things you need to keep in mind when doing GoToWebinar. Also, it’s hard to make the attendees to interact in the “chat”. The chat also known as “question”. It’s a question box who you most certainly will miss if you attend the first times.

I used GoToWebinars landing pages (click for image) because it was hard to get it on my website (you need to embed it and even tough it looks crappy). You can’t really modify the landing page except for some colors and two images. Also the language. When I can’t modify the landing page and the only language I can choose is english it makes everything look crappy. I mixed Swedish and English for my pages, and even in the live webinar everything was in English and Swedish. Why don’t only use English, you ask. Because I am a swede and I only work with Swedish users. I need it to be in my language.

For the notification settings such as confirmation and reminder e-mails you of course have this solution in GoToWebinar. But it’s as the same as above, all in english. You can add a personal message but it looks like shit. By the way, everything with GoToWebinar looks unmodern if you haven’t read between the lines. But it works, you can send confirmation and reminder and even e-mails after the webinar. But than you need to convert the video to mp4 (and make the webinar in just one take without editing it), upload to YouTube and then copy the link for the e-mail template. I did not use this when I used GoToWebinar. Instead I sent an e-mail from MailChimp och APSIS Pro which made it look better. But in GoToWebinar you can’t send e-mails as in WebinarJam when a user exits the live session x minutes.

Alright, there are still some positive things about GoToWebinar. The measurement are much better than WebinarJam. You can add a source to the registration URL and get the result from the insight report in GoToWebinar. As in WebinarJam you can get deep insight in when a attendee joine the webinar, left and even who asked a specific question. I can also get notification to my e-mail about new registrants or use Zapier to send messages to a Slack channel when a new person register. Another thing which is good is the question I need to ask every attendee after the webinar “How would you rate this webinar?”. The solution in GoToWebinar is that directly after the webinar the attendees will automatically be redirected to a GTW landing page with the question. But WebinarJam got this solution inside the webinar instead of after it.

Conclusion

If you are just looking for a webinar tool, you can use both WebinarJam and GoToWebinar – they both work perfectly for just webinars. But if you want yourself and your business to have the impression of what you are doing are strictly professional, use WebinarJam. Because you can modify almost everything and get a lot more registrants to your webinar when it’s so easy to register, join and followup afterwards. With WebinarJam and everything I talked about in the article, will save you a lot of time. You don’t need to convert videos, modify each e-mail you send and you don’t have to worry about if your registrant can attend or not due to a client issue.

I’m hopeful about the new WebinarJam version which are rolling out very soon. With that release I hope they change the notification setting so I more easily can check who registered and from where.