I have a confession: For a long time, webinars were something I avoided doing. Why? I was daunted by the available technology. You see, most webinar software has traditionally not been very user-friendly. Things have gotten a lot better on this front even in the past few years, and there are now more than a dozen options out there for webinar platforms—which creates a whole new dilemma:
How do you know which one to choose?
Choosing Webinar Software: To Zoom or Not to Zoom?
It goes without saying that the software platform you choose for your webinars is really important. It can mean the difference between people showing up and having a great experience, or showing up to a failed webinar that leaves a bad taste in their mouth—or not showing up at all!
I've used and recommended my fair share of webinar software solutions over the years, and a lot of them out there are great. When this guide was first written in mid-2020, one tool had become especially popular with the rise of video conferencing during the coronavirus pandemic: Zoom.
It’s not my preferred webinar solution, though.
Don’t get me wrong: Zoom has a lot to offer, and it can work well for some webinars, especially ones where you’re mainly trying to teach rather than collect email addresses or market a product. But if you’re planning on hosting a webinar so you can build your email list, promote a course or other paid product, collect data that will help you optimize future webinars, and provide the best experience to your audience, there’s one tool I recommend above all the others.
It’s called Demio. Let me tell you why I love it.
Why Demio Is the Best Webinar Software Out There
Demio is a software platform that helps you automate and manage your webinars. It also runs in almost any web browser, which makes things easy for your audience. Demio makes it easy for you too, with a super-intuitive interface, lightning-fast support response time (under five minutes), and features like auto-recording for all of your webinars.
I first encountered Demio at a conference hosted by Leadpages in 2017 called Converted. Demio came highly recommended by the people at ConvertKit and Leadpages who I talked to at the conference, and I was excited to check it out. So I did—and it quickly became my go-to choice for hosting webinars.
After loads of trial and error with other webinar platforms, it became clear pretty quickly that Demio was what we’d been looking for. We’d finally found a platform that provides great streaming video quality, is really stable, makes adding guest presenters a snap, and delivers excellent user experiences like public and private chat channels.
I also love Demio for its seamless integration with third-party platforms, and it's beautiful, easy-to-use interface for both webinar hosts and attendees. Have I mentioned ease of use enough times yet? This benefit is a major calling card for Demio, whether it’s a lack of friction in the user registration process, straightforward webinar setup, easy third-party integration, or the ability to create and direct attendees to a replay video of the webinar.
Demio Is the Webinar Solution for Marketers
As you can probably tell, I really like Demio.
Among all the great benefits and features of Demio I’ve mentioned so far, though, maybe the thing I appreciate the most about this webinar platform is its awesome marketing capabilities. It’s built specifically for people who are marketing and building an audience. Demio is great for anyone who wants to use webinars to promote their products, especially if they’re trying to drive more interaction and participation in those webinars.
These capabilities come through in the form of features that aid audience engagement during the webinar, integration with third-party tools like your email service provider, and analytics to help you optimize the webinar experience.
Audience Experience and Engagement
Demio provides a great chat experience that helps spark audience engagement during your webinar. You can also create polls, and even offer downloadable handouts right in the chat box. You can pop up buttons during the webinar to drive people to a link of your choosing—for example, when you mention your offer and want to send people to a landing page. Demio will even track the click and conversion rates for these buttons. You can set up all these interactive options ahead of time or on the fly to spark engagement.
You can also set up an auto-redirect that takes people to a destination of your choice, like a sales page or a thank-you page, as soon as the webinar is over. Plus, Demio automatically records the webinar and allows you to create an on-demand page right after the webinar where people can access the replay video.
As a marketer, I appreciate all of these features immensely.
Third-Party Integration
Let’s talk a little more about third-party integration, because this is where Demio really shines when it comes to enabling your marketing strategy.
Demio offers extensive integration possibilities with third-party apps, including several popular email service providers and CRM software platforms. Demio’s integration with ConvertKit, our email platform of choice at SPI, makes it nearly worth the cost of admission alone.
Webinars are an important piece of your online marketing toolkit—especially your email marketing. Quite simply, they’re a fantastic tool for building your list. But Demio helps you take advantage of the power of your email list in other ways, too. Demio lets you automate certain email-based actions based on attendee actions during your webinars by creating handy rules, such as If a person watches X percent of the webinar, then send Y email or perform Z action. Or, If a person registers but doesn’t attend, do this instead.
The sophisticated email integration doesn’t stop there. You can also set up one-click registration for Demio webinars by embedding a custom link in an email; that way, the person won't have to go to a landing page and enter any information. They simply click a link and they're automatically registered because we already have their email address.
Although I love how Demio integrates with tools like ConvertKit, it has onboard email capabilities too. I typically use ConvertKit to communicate with attendees both before and after each webinar, but you can also handle these communications directly in Demio if you like. It’s versatile!
Analytics
Finally, I also love Demio’s analytics. It gives you lots of data about attendee behavior during the webinar, like when people enter and leave. This can be useful knowledge to help tweak future webinars to maximize the value people get and the amount of time they spend with you.
The data and analytics we get from Demio provide some really great insight for us into things like…
Webinar registration trends:
How well we're retaining people’s attention during the webinar:
Individual insights on who attended and when they joined:
And even how people gravitated toward the resources we shared during the webinar:
Getting data about resources we share on the webinar is an especially cool feature of Demio that many other platforms don't have. In the screenshot above, the first resource is a handout and the second is a link to a landing page for the product we’re promoting. We can compare this data to similar data for promotions in other webinars to see how they stack up and make informed decisions about what’s working or not.
(All of the screenshots are from a webinar we did in mid-2020 for my email marketing course, Email Marketing Magic.)
If you want to dig into all that Demio has to offer, check out the Features page on their website.
Downsides of Demio
No platform is perfect, and Demio is no exception. The main area where Demio falls short in my mind (as do many other webinar platforms) is recording quality. That’s why if you want to record your webinar, I recommend you use another application, like ScreenFlow or QuickTime for Mac, or Camtasia for Windows (assuming your computer is powerful enough to handle it). These software options offer higher-resolution recordings than Demio does.
Demio Pricing
In terms of pricing, Demio is competitive with other platforms. It’s not necessarily cheap, especially if you regularly host webinars with hundreds of attendees. But the pricing depends on how many attendees you'd like to have. And if you’re just getting started with webinars, then you probably don’t have that many people showing up yet, and Demio’s “Starter” price point, which gives you up to fifty attendees for $34 per month, is pretty darn affordable.
On the other end of things, Demio’s pricing for the highest plan, which allows up to 1,000 attendees on each webinar, is $369 per month. Here’s how that plan compares to similar plans from a few other webinar platforms:
- Demio: 1,000 attendees for $369
- GoToWebinar: 3,000 attendees for $399 (or 500 for $199; no option for 1,000 attendees)
- WebinarNinja: 1,000 attendees (max) for $199
- Livestorm: 500 attendees (max) for $319
- Zoom: 1,000 attendees for $340 (options up to 10,000 attendees for $6,490)
What if you need a webinar solution that allows more than 1,000 attendees at a time? Well, first, congratulations, because you’re doing something right! And second, there are several other webinar platforms out there that will work for you.
Thankfully, I’ve been happy with Demio—even when more than 1,000 people show up to one of my webinars. It's rare (even at my level, with 250,000 email subscribers) to get close to the 1,000-person threshold. We’ve had a few times where we’ve hit the limit, and in those cases people had to either wait or weren't able to join the webinar. This does add a little scarcity and encourages people to stick around and watch all the way through if they managed to make it in.
Become a Webinar Rockstar
(Note: If you visit the Demio website, you may not see the 1,000-attendee plan listed in the options. You’ll have to talk to the Demio customer support team to sign up for this plan. They did this so people don’t accidentally sign up for the most expensive plan!)
No More Webinar Fear
With Demio, I’ve overcome my fear of webinar tech, and I’m hosting a lot of successful webinars now, including Podcasting the Smart Way and my Affiliate Marketing Masterclass.
By the way, in addition to all the benefits and features of the webinar software itself, the Demio team is great. Their customer support is amazing—I already told you about their five-minute response time! And they’re continually working on improving the platform so hosts and attendees have a great experience.
If you’ve been looking into creating webinars, whether it’s to superpower your sales funnel or just connect with your audience, you’re going to want to check out Demio. To learn more about the benefits and features of Demio and try it for yourself, go to smartpassiveincome.com/demio.
Don’t Forget These Additional Webinar Software Options
A webinar platform like Demio is the most crucial piece of software you’ll need to host a successful webinar. But there are a few other software options to keep in mind if you want to maximize the success of your webinar. Here are a few more apps to consider:
EcammLive for Screen Sharing
A piece of software I love to integrate into my webinars is something called Ecamm Live. This is a Mac app that lets you do some really cool things while you're broadcasting. With a click of a button, you can add graphics and sound effects and other touches to spice things up. And you can do all this without leaving your webinar software. To see Ecamm Live in action, check out this video:
EMBED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0ddCZOmgCM
Email Service Provider
This is more of a web solution than a standalone app, but integrating your email service provider (ESP) with your webinar platform is an important way to connect with your webinar registrants and attendees both before and after the show. You can use your email list to reach out and remind people beforehand, and follow up with them with links to the webinar replay and your sales offer. Don’t forget that you can also use your webinar to directly build your email list, and integrating your webinar software with your ESP makes that even easier to do.
Slide Sharing/Presentation Software
Finally, if you’re planning on sharing slides, you’ll need a slide-creation app like Keynote or PowerPoint.
Software is the first crucial piece when it comes to the nuts and bolts of a successful webinar experience. The second piece is hardware, so let’s talk about the equipment you’ll need to make sure you deliver a high-quality, high-fidelity webinar every time.
