Turnkey Webinars

A webinar is a web seminar. More and more companies are using webinars to reach out to customers, prospects and employees. An effective online presentation is just one requirement for a successful webinar. You need additional infrastructure to promote the event, register attendees, conduct the webinar and follow-up with the attendees. We provide the tools and services to help you every step of the way.

There are 5 steps to successful webinar:

1. Planning and Setup - getting ready
2. Marketing and Promotion - inviting your audience
3. Registration and Confirmation - who is coming
4. Webinar Preparation and Execution- the main event
5. Follow-up and Closure - who attended; who didn't

Whether this is your first webinar or you are a seasoned pro, we ensure that your event is a success, the first time and every time.

Planning and Setup

As part of your webinar planning, you determine your target audience and message, the date and time of the session(s), your speakers, and the basic marketing plan to invite your guests. You may also decide to limit the size of the session, charge a fee, or screen the registrants before they are allowed to join. We can help you decide these options.

Setting up a session is easy. You can use our turnkey webinar tool or we can set it up for you.

• An easy-to-use form lets you customize a 'Landing Page' to promote your webinar.
• Simple menus let you specify the information to be gathered from individuals who register for your session.
• You can even specify a registration fee for your event. We collect the fee from your registrants via our secure connection with VeriSign (MeetingBridge charges a handling fee for this service.).
• Visitors to your Landing Page can easily click through to a Registration Page where we prompt them for the information that you specified and record their responses in a registration database.
• On-line access to the registration database lets you keep track of who has registered for your event. You can view the registration data in a convenient 'Excel import' format.
• Confirmation and reminder emails are automatically sent to your registrants to give them clear instructions for attending your event.
• With a little knowledge of HTML, you can apply your own logo and trade dress to the landing and registration pages and the emails. If your organization does not have such expertise, we can help you with your initial set-up.

The turnkey webinar feature set is included with your MeetingBridge account. We prepared a sample landing page for a fictional company, ABC Industries to explain our webinar model. To view our model and experience the webinar registration process, please click the sample link below:

Go to Top

Marketing and Promotion

Now that your webinar is set up, you need to gather your audience. An email is the most effective method to invite your guests to your webinar. You can use in-house lists of customers, prospects, colleagues or members. You can also purchase a targeted list of likely parties interested in your webinar topic. We can help you manage this process. We have a great email template that includes all of the key features of a successful webinar invitation which include:

• A personalized salutation
• A summary of the webinar content and reasons to attend
• Links to the Registration and Landing pages
• Speaker information
• A personalized closing
• Opt out links
• The ability to forward the webinar invitation to a friend or colleague

You can send the email from your server or we can manage your email list for you. The tool we use keeps track of bounces, opens, click throughs, forwards and opt outs. Plus, your email list is updated for any opt outs.

Be sure to include a link on the your web site to the webinar Landing Page. Other traditional forms of marketing generally direct prospects to your web site or provide a toll free number. We provide the tools to allow you to easily register callers while on the phone or we can answer your reservation number for you.

Registration and Confirmation

As people register for your event, their information will be automatically added to your webinar database. You can review the status of the registrants by reviewing online reports. You also have an option to receive an e-mail every time someone registers. Based on the initial results, you can adjust your marketing campaign as needed.

If you wish to pre-screen participants, you may select to manually approve each registrant before they receive the webinar joining instructions.

We automatically send a Reminder email to registrants the day before the event on your behalf. You specify who the email comes from. Registrants can also add the webinar appointment to their calendar by clicking on a link in the confirmation. They will then be reminded to attend the webinar according to their calendar settings - generally set to 15 minutes prior to start time.

Go to Top

Webinar Preparation and Execution

In preparing for your webinar, you decide how you want to interact your audience. You have audio, text messaging and polling options at your disposal. For the audio options, you can have your attendee raise their hand with a question and call on them. You also have an option to allow our operators manage the Q&A session.

We are happy to provide training to help your speakers become familiar with the webinar conferencing tools. Since our webinar tools are easy to use, speaker training is often combined with a dress rehearsal day or two before the webinar. We provide an event specialist to help you with your preparations, training and webinar execution.

On the day of webinar, our event specialist joins you in a private sub conference about 20 minutes before the start time to answer any last-minute questions and complete the final preparations for the webinar. You watch the roster grow as people signed in. Your audience is listening to music until the start time. When ready, our operator introduces your first speaker and our event specialist remains available to monitor the call in case you need any additional assistance.

Go to Top

Follow-up and Closure

Shortly after the webinar, you receive an e-mail with a listing of the attendees so you can follow up as you see fit.

If you recorded the session, you may want to send the attendees a link to the playback so they can review points they may have missed during the live webinar. You may want to send them a link to a survey or other information regarding the webinar.

You may also want to send the link to the recording to those who did not attend. We also track registrants for the recording with our webinar tools.

If you have any questions or need any assistance, please do not hesitate to call our Event Assistance hotline - 888.723.1200 Option 4.

For more information, click here to see the Webinar User Guide.

back