Every industry makes use of webinars, albeit implementing them in many different ways. To accommodate this wide-ranging demand, webinar platforms have evolved over time to be versatile and offer a huge array of features.
Frankly, the number of options on the market is a little staggering. That’s why, when looking for a webinar platform, you need to fine-tune your search to suit your specific use case. Thinking about what your business needs and what it can do without, ensures that you get the most out of your webinar hosting platform.
While use case scenarios vary, a few standard features are essential if you hope to provide a seamless webinar. Without these, you’re limiting the potential of webinars to boost the growth of your business.
To make your search for a quality platform that much easier, we’ve compiled a list of six must-have features for webinar platforms.
1) Free trial
Webinar platforms are an investment of time and money. As such, choosing a platform and paying for it upfront, only to find out later that the fit is less than ideal, is risky, especially if you’re a smaller organization.
In these circumstances, having the opportunity to test drive the platform beforehand, via a free trial, can be extremely useful. You can explore all that a webinar platform has to offer, before making that final decision.
2) Interactive tools
Interactivity, interactivity, interactivity – we cannot emphasize how essential it is to create an interactive experience in your webinars. The success of your webinar hinges on it. To do this, you’ll need access to interactive tools.
Polls, quizzes, support for media, and other elements will help reel in your audience and keep them engaged. It goes without saying, interactive tools are an essential feature in impressive webinar platforms.
3) Ability to record and replay
Not everyone can make it to a live webinar, so it’s important to provide an archive. Why? A webinar benchmarks report, from a group of lead generation experts, reveals that 70% of the registrants who fail to show up for a live webinar, watch the replay.
Look for webinar platforms that offer the option to record and store all your live webinars in one convenient location. Storing all your webinars will help extend the reach of your webinars beyond your immediate audience.
4) Integrations
Integrations with lead generation and email marketing tools can go a long way in driving pipeline growth. You can use them to maintain segments, lists, and tags. Integrations also make email automation and post-webinar follow-up a breeze.
5) Analytics
The best webinar platforms have in-depth analytics. Details such as how many registrants and attendees you had, the length of stay, and how they engaged with polls, Q&As, and downloadable assets are vital. These metrics offer you a clear idea of areas you need to improve, so you can adjust your strategy accordingly.
6) Customer support
Customer support in many different forms – be it live support, tutorials or help articles – should be available to your webinar attendees. While you’re at it, all of these should be easily visible on the webinar platform, for quick and easy access.
Key features
Bells and whistles aside, these are the features that all serious webinar platforms should provide. When choosing a platform, keep an eye out for these to get the best results.
