Demio Review

Demio bills itself as "a webinar platform built for marketing". That sounds like exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for!

What are the marketing features on offer here and does this product compare favorably to other webinar software like GoToWebinar or Webinar Ninja? That's what we're going to find out in this Demio review.

What You'll Discover in This Review

As with all my webinar software reviews, I did a full test of Demio, including a live webinar with 100+ attendees, to learn what it's really like to use this thing.

Instead of doing an exhaustive tour of every feature and every aspect of Demio, I'll give you a tour of the highlights. I'll show you what the user experience and the webinar experience are like. I'll highlight the aspects that are most notable, both positive and negative.

Below, we'll first look at the webinar creation and hosting process, then at the marketing features. Finally, I'll cover some aspects I didn't like in this tool and give you a breakdown of the pros & cons.

Creating a Demio Webinar

When you sign in to your Demio dashboard, you're greeted with a clean, minimal UI. Create a new event and you're greeted with an initial choice between Live or Auto webinars:

I like that there's also the option to copy a previous event. This means you can create an event with your preferred settings once and then copy it for future events as a handy shortcut.

After naming an event, there's an overview page which leads to options for scheduling, customization and sharing or embedding options:

The scheduling options cover every possible use you could think of: you can create a single event, a limited series of events, regularly recurring events and even have special rules such as a webinar that takes place every day, except on weekends and on specific holidays or days off that you define.

Webinar Funnel Pages

Landing pages are an important marketing factor for webinars: if you have a slick funnel of highly optimized landing pages, you'll get more signups and attendees. Let's look at what Demio offers in this regard.

In Demio, you can choose between 3 landing page styles, all of which are minimal and rather similar to each other:

The templates are cosmetically, but not functionally different from each other. You can add your own logo and choose an accent color to match your brand.

You can also add a few optional segments to the registration page, such as a video, a description and one or more presenter bios. Here's an example of what a fully decked out registration page can look like:

The result is decent and customization is fast and easy. But I would have liked to see a few more templates, to cover more possible use cases or brand styles.

After registering, a visitor sees a confirmation page like this:

I like that there's a convenient event link and "join room" button, as well as a prominent call to action that invites the visitor to add the event to a calendar.

What I don't love is that the event date and time is shown in the timezone of the host, not in the timezone of the visitor. In my webinars, I always have attendees from all around the globe, so no matter what time zone I schedule the event in, most of my visitors will have to take an extra step of converting what they see to their local time and date.

If you want to use your own landing pages instead of the ones Demio provides, there's a convenient option to do so: you can embed the registration form (as HTML) or add a signup button to your pages, which opens a popover embed form.

The Demio Webinar Experience

Let's take a look at what the Demio webinar room looks like, both from the host and attendee sides.

Here's an overview of what you will see as a webinar host:

A few notes about this, from my test:

• Overall, the interface is well put together and doesn't take long to get used to.
• As a host, you can change the size of the webcam feed, show or hide the chat area and hide polls and CTAs after you shared them. However, it's important to remember that those changes only affect your own view, not that of attendee. Each attendee can separately resize and show/hide elements they see on screen.
• There are no display options for multiple hosts or webcam + screen/presentation sharing. If you want to emphasize your screen, you do so by turning off your webcam entirely. If you want to emphasize the webcam feed, you stop screen sharing. It's not as convenient as some other solutions I've tested.

Attendees to your webinar see a similar view to yours, just with fewer options:

The Demio webinar takes place entirely in the browser, so neither you not your attendees have to download and run any installers, to join. Overall, the experience is good and the video quality was solid, in my test event.

Marketing & Engagement Features

In Demio, there are the following features available, to add a level of engagement and marketing to an event:

• Live chat
• Polls
• Handouts (downloadable files)
• "Featured actions" a.k.a. CTAs or offers

When setting up a webinar, you can prepare resources for sharing in advance:

You can also add new ones directly during a live event. When you click the plus icon next to the chat input, you can either choose to share existing resources or create new ones on the fly:

Polls, handouts and CTAs you share appear on top of the chat area. This makes them very attention grabbing, which is especially important for your CTAs. Here's an example of what that looks like for the attendees:

You can customize the title, image, button text and link. It's also worth noting that if an attendee has hidden the chat sidebar, it will automatically open up for them again, to reveal the offer you shared.

It's worth noting that once you share something, attendees can choose to hide it and can re-open it at any time again. Any polls, handouts and CTAs you've shared are represented as icons at the top of the chat area. Personally, I'd prefer to have full control over revealing and hiding these resources for everyone. If you use many resources, it can get messy for attendees. And for conversions, it would probably be more effective to keep the offer permanently visible for everyone.

Where Demio Failed to Impress

So far, everything we looked at in Demio has left a mostly positive impression. Unfortunately, I also encountered a few issues and annoyances while I was using it.

Questions & Answers

Demio gives you a choice between public chat (everyone can see everyone else's messages) and private chat (hosts see all messages, attendees only see their own). Having the option to make chat private is good to reduce some of the distraction factor, but there's no good way to manage questions and answers.

In my experience, any webinar with more than 50 attendees will result in more questions and messages than a single host can keep up with. In Demio, the only thing you can do to try and manage Q&A is "star" messages and then filter the view to only see the starred ones. However, if you're presenting solo, you don't have time to simultaneously monitor chat and star messages. And when you're doing the Q&A, trying to scroll through a long (and growing) list of chat messages is just not a good way to pick out important questions to answer and give your attendees the most value possible. Other tools like Crowdcast have far better features for this.

Replay

Demio automatically records your webinar and makes a replay available. BUT... that replay is simply a video, shown on a minimal landing page:

Because all the marketing action takes place in the chat sidebar in the live event, the replay lacks all of it. Polls, handouts and CTAs you share during a live event simply don't appear in this replay. There's also no "simulated live" chat replay. You can add a static call to action that shows below the video, but that's it.

There is a workaround for this, which is to create an automated webinar based on the recording of your live event. In an auto-webinar, you can create polls, handouts and CTAs and make them appear at specific times. However, even this has to be done manually. You can't just select a past event and turn it into an auto webinar with all the same resources and timings. You have to re-create the resources and time them manually.

To me, this is disappointing, because it's no better than just embedding a replay video on your own website.

The Sneaky Post-Event Redirect

Finally, I want to point something out that isn't a serious issue, but that's easily missed. After an event ends, Demio redirects all of your attendees to a default landing page...

...and on this landing page, they advertise Demio and try to win new customers:

You can (and should) change the post-event redirect to your own custom URL, which is done in the room settings:

It shouldn't be necessary for users to do this. We're talking about a paid tool here, after all. Demio is trying to grab traffic from its paying customers. They choose to use a default post-event page that serves their own interests instead of serving their customer's interests.

And to get around it, their paying customers have to create their own landing page and redirect to it? That's not what a good solution looks like.

A good solution would be a default post-event landing page that has the customer's branding, thanks attendees for participating and has easy options for users to add things like post-event surveys, calls to action and links to their website or social media profiles.

Demio Pricing

Here's what the monthly pricing options for Demio look like:

I was surprised to see that Demio leans towards small events, with the mid-tier plan only offering 150 seats and the highest listed tier capped at 500 seats.

$49/month is a decent entry level price, although a 50 seat room fills up real quick. It's also a pity to see that at this price plan, branding options are still limited.

Overall, I have no strong feelings about the pricing options, though. It's not a steal, it's also not daylight robbery. It's basically unremarkable pricing.

That concludes my Demio review. Since first publishing this post, I reviewed many other webinar tools and I published a big comparison among all them, right here.