I recently ran my first webinar using Demio, and it was so much better than the other tools I’ve tried. Here’s my review of using Demio for webinars as a wellness entrepreneur. Previously I’ve used MeetingBurner, GoToMeeting, WebEx and WebinarJam. Demio was my favorite for usability and attendee experience by far (I’ve also attended a Demio webinar, prior to running one, to see that experience.)
Demio is an all-in-one webinar platform, with nothing to download to host or attend a meeting via your web browser. It integrates with all major email marketing platforms, AND provides registration pages – so this means you just use Demio and you’re done! You don’t have to link together lots of pieces of tech on your own. I really appreciated this and was able to setup my very first webinar within a few minutes. (Of course, making the slides took me a LOT longer!)
You can also run automated webinars, to setup an evergreen sales funnel, but I haven’t tried this feature yet.
I’ll share my personal experience with using Demio for this first webinar, plus the pros and cons of the platform.
Setting Up Your First Webinar with Demio
Creating your first webinar is extremely easy and intuitive. When you first join Demio, they send you a link to a training video which walks you through the entire process. It only takes a few minutes.
First you select if you’d like to create an automated or live event (I chose live event.) Then you name your event and set the time it will occur (based on your local timezone.) With just those few options, your event is created, and you can immediately send people to the default registration page.
Of course, you’ll probably want to customize your registration page like I did.
Before doing that, I linked Demio to my ConvertKit (email marketing) account. This does two things:
- In ConvertKit, you can tag people who register for the webinar, if they attend live or if they’re a no-show. This is really useful to target specific follow-up emails after the webinar.
- There is a cool One-Click Registration feature where if you email your ConvertKit list, you have a special link which people can click and be instantly registered (without having to retype their name and email like a normal visitor to the registration page.)
Connecting ConvertKit and Demio again was easy, it just required getting the API key from ConvertKit and pasting it into Demio. Then you ‘activate’ the integration from within Demio by flipping it to “on”, and simply select the ConvertKit tags you want to use for webinar registrations. This whole process took around 5 minutes.
Back to customizing the registration page. You can change the colors, add your logo, and even add a custom background image. I chose one featured image for my event which I used to promote the event (on social media), so I used that same image as the background of my registration page for consistency.
You can add additional content to the page: headline, sub-headline, description, presenter bio or a video.
Now your registration page is ready to go and you can start promoting the link.
The remaining steps are to create your presentation (which I do as PDF slides using Canva.com) and then upload it into Demio in advance. It does take a few minutes to process the slides before they’re ready to be viewed.
You can also setup ‘interactive’ elements like polls, special links and handouts/downloads, which I’ll talk about later.
Finally, you can choose which email reminders you’d like to send to registered people. There are pre-configured immediate, 24 hour, 1 hour and 15 minute reminders for the webinar. You can use them as-is, or add your own text. I used all of these.
Preparing to Go Live
When you first log into Demio, they’ve created a test event for you. I didn’t click this right away, and I should have, because it’s so useful! You can test out the entire experience of going live and running a webinar, including your audio, web cam, interactive questions, slides and more. I definitely recommend doing this test event as soon as you can, so you get familiar with the process.
On the morning of the event (my event was at 5pm), I “Joined the Room” of my event to test my presentation slides and make sure I was comfortable with where everything was. This is also the time to test your audio and video settings.
The first time I uploaded my presentation slides as PDF, and then viewed them in the room, they were in the wrong order! I was concerned and contacted Demio support, who responded within an hour by email. However, in the meantime I re-uploaded the slides again, and all worked correctly. So I’m not sure if it was an issue with my slides or with Demio, but it was a non-issue. Always good to click through your slides with any tool before going live to make sure it’s what you expect.
I also setup “Extras” for the webinar that morning. It’s possible to add “Resources” to your meeting room, like a Poll, a Handout or a Featured Action.
A Poll is a live, interactive poll which your audience can respond to during the event. You can choose to share the poll results with them or not.
A Handout is a downloadable document which you make available to webinar attendees. I had a worksheet to go with my webinar, and I made this available at the start of the event.
A Featured Action is a link they can click. I setup a link to the sales page for my special offer, and shared this with attendees at the end of the webinar.
You can also add other team members to your event, so they can moderate the chat or co-present, but I didn’t need to do that because I ran this event alone.
Going Live: The Live Webinar Experience on Demio
Starting your live webinar on Demio is very easy, but there are a couple stages.
First, you join the meeting room, while the attendees are in a waiting area. This is good so you can double-check your slides, or chat with other admins, before the attendees arrive.
When you’re ready to start the event, you click “Go Live”, which invites attendees into the room.
But then (and this is the part I messed up), you have to turn ON your microphone (there is a big button at the top of the screen – it’s really obvious), so they can hear you talking. I spent about 45 seconds welcoming everyone and wondering why they weren’t chatting, before I realized that I was on mute. Well, the first time couldn’t be totally perfect, right?
There is a chat area on the right side of the screen which can be a public or private chat. I left it public so the attendees could read each other’s comments and interact. It makes it more of a fun group experience. I love that Demio provides ‘gestures’ like “Love this!” which attendees can share, so as the presenter you get a pulse on how they’re liking the content.
The events are automatically recorded, which is great, so no risk of forgetting to start recording!
Everything else happened exactly as planned. The slides worked, they got the handout, poll and the special link to the sales page, and there was lots of chatting and engagement in the chat area. LOVE this part of Demio, it’s such a great user experience. So much better than those days when you had to download clunky GoToWebinar software before you could join. Ugh. This webinar on Demio really felt natural, like just hanging out with my audience, in a very professional tool.
After Your Demio Webinar
Once you end the webinar, the recording is automatically processed. It took about 30 minutes for the replay to be ready.
You can copy a link for the replay, which you can send out from within Demio or your own email tool. I took the link and sent it out to all attendees from ConvertKit.
There are also detailed statistics on how many people attended as well as the attendance over time.
Pros
- Excellent support. One time I was able to use live-chat, but my other 3 requests were via email (this may have to do with timezones). Either way they were responsive and helpful.
- Professional, intuitive user interface.
- Love that I can upload my slides into the tool, rather than having to share my screen. (You CAN share your screen if you want, but it’s not required)
- Love that there’s nothing to download to run or attend a webinar.
- Love the chat feature with gestures. Really great engagement.
Cons
I’ve got two cons.
- The first is the minor one I mentioned before: that my first upload of slides were out of order. I’m still not sure why that happened, but it was fixed when I reuploaded them, without actually having the Demio team troubleshoot it.
- The second is slightly bigger and I’ve filed a feature request with them.
Once you’ve run your webinar, the registration page says “This event is closed.”
This was an issue for me, because I emailed my entire email list that morning asking people to “Join my webinar today!” with the one-click registration link.
Of course, some people don’t see that email until after the webinar already happened. In an ideal world, I’d like to be able to add a message to that registration page, or even better redirect them somewhere else. (For example, to a place where they could opt-in to get the replay).
I did a manual workaround within ConvertKit, but it’s clunky and a manual effort. Demio said they’ve added this to their feature requests.
What you could do, is create a redirection link on your website, which redirects to the Demio registration page before the webinar, and then redirects to a page of your choice afterwards. That would absolutely work. You just can’t use the one-click registration in that case.
Verdict
I’m Demio’s new biggest fan. Absolutely loved the tool. It was so easy to use and provided a professional, engaging experience for my audience. Highly recommend them to run webinars for your wellness business.