WebinarJam Review: Webinar Software for Marketers?

WebinarJam is a webinar hosting platform that seems to have been conceived as a marketing tool, first and foremost.

In this WebinarJam review, we'll have a look at what it's like to both run and attend webinars on this platform and we'll examine whether it lives up to its promises.

Is this the best webinar solution for marketing & sales? Or even the best overall? Let's find out!

What You'll Discover in This Review

As with all of my webinar software reviews, I tested WebinarJam by running a real, live event with over 100 attendees. I tested and used this tool extensively and one of my goals is to find the best webinar solution for myself.

My focus is primarily on:

• A good user experience for the webinar host.
• A good, seamless experience for webinar attendees.
• Marketing/sales tools.
• Engagement features, so I can interact with my audience.

Let's see how WebinarJam fares in these aspects!

Creating WebinarJam Events

When you first create an event in WebinarJam, you're greeted with a choice between "Express Configuration" and "Full Configuration":

The express configuration is convenient if you want to set up a quick, simple webinar. Looking at the full configuration, it quickly becomes clear that there's an issue with options overwhelm in Webinar Jam:

The setup wizards walks you through 9 stages, each of which contains multiple panels that expand to reveal further options.

I appreciate that WebinarJam is as configurable as it is. Highly flexible webinar scheduling, detailed timing and content of webinar reminder emails, integrations with marketing tools and fine tuning of the webinar event and replay - you name it, WebinarJam has an option for it.

Unfortunately, the creators struggle to present all these options in a user friendly manner. The user interface can feel overwhelming and the addition of obnoxious (but thankfully option) tool-tips doesn't make it better.

The worst thing about the user experience is that the options panels expand downwards, then have to be confirmed back at the top of the panel, to continue the process below, in the next panel. Instead of going through the options left to right, top to bottom, you're constantly moving up, down, up, down, up...

Notification Emails = Spam?

There's one technical issue I discovered in my testing: by default, all the notification emails sent by WebinarJam (e.g. webinar confirmation and reminder emails) went to my spam folder.

The solution to this problem is to integrate WebinarJam with an email delivery service such as Postmark or MailGun.

These services cost very little, but it's still a major issue because A) if I had not caught this problem in testing, perhaps none of my registrants would have received the emails and B) setting up and integrating an email delivery service is technical and inconvenient.

Powerful Marketing, Part 1

But I don't want to just complain about the settings, here. Like I mentioned, there are many options here and that's a good thing.

One of the most powerful and unique features in WebinarJam relates to the email marketing integrations. At the time of this review, the following integrations are supported:

That's a good number of connections, especially thanks to the addition of Zapier. WebinarJam goes above and beyond when it comes to what you can do with these integrations:

With most webinar tools, all you can do is add registrants to your mailing list. That's it.

With WebinarJam, you can add conditional logic and pass tags through to your email marketing service, based on how an attendee interacts with the webinar. You can apply or remove tags based on whether they attended the live webinar or watched the replay, based on how long they kept watching and even whether they joined the live event in time or not.

If you're doing sales webinars and want to create automated, targeted follow-up emails, this feature is a money maker.

Webinar Funnel Pages

WebinarJam comes with everything you need to create and customize the landing pages needed for a webinar funnel. It includes 17 templates to choose from. Some of the designs look a bit antiquated, but overall, there's probably something that matches your needs, to be found here.

The templates show an average conversion rate number and they can be sorted by conversion rate, which is... well, dumb.

Here's an example of what a registration page template can look like:

As is typical for webinar platforms, you can select and edit individual components in the templates, but you can't add your own or rearrange the order of elements. For that, you'll still fare better with a separate landing page building tool, which can be integrated with WebinarJam.

The Webinar Experience

Let's have a look at what the webinar experience is like, both from the host's and an attendee's viewpoint.

Here's an overview of what the webinar room for the host looks like:

WebinarJam offers a dashboard for the host. You can see a representation of what your audience sees in the main view, where your screen/slides and webcam are being shared. On the right hand side, you have your main control panel, which shows the chat messages and gives you access to your polls, offers, slides, handouts and anything else you've prepared for the webinar.

Audience members see an almost identical view, except that the sidebar only shows the chat interface and none of the additional options.

One thing I wish was done better in WebinarJam is Q&A management. Attendees can choose to submit a message as a chat message or as a question. The option to switch between the two is easily missed, though. And while questions are marked in the chat window, as a host, it's not easy to manage them and you can't display the text of a question on screen, either.

Powerful Marketing, Part 2

A standout feature in WebinarJam is the range of engagement and marketing tools at your disposal. For any webinar, you can prepare the following:

• Interactive polls
• Presentation slides
• Videos
• Downloadables/handouts
• Offers

Each of these can be timed during the webinar. In other words, you decide when a poll or an offer starts and stops showing to your audience.

The timing you choose during a live webinar will also be reflected in the replay. This is excellent and WebinarJam does better in this regard than most other webinar tools I've tried.

Out of all these presentation tools, offers stand out. You can create one or several offers to show during a webinar. Here's an example of what an offer can look like:

The offer appears in the sidebar, above the chat interface. An offer can consist of just a button and a title, but you can also add a description and an image.

But that's not all. You can further boost the effectiveness of an offer by adding:

• A live countdown timer.
• An indicator of a limited quantity, which automatically counts down as people purchase the product (requires adding a tracking script to your post-purchase page).
• Live indicators that show up whenever someone has made a purchase.

If you add all of these at once, you're firmly in the territory of the hard sell. Personally, I wouldn't be as pushy as this, but there's no denying that sales tactics like these work.

More importantly, WebinarJam is the only tool that offers such a range of marketing features and it's up to you which ones you want to use, under which circumstances. I appreciate that so much though was put into making this a useful tool for sales webinars.

The Control Center

Speaking of thoughtful touches, I want to mention the "control center" in WebinarJam. If you run webinars with one or several assistants, you can choose to have them join the control center instead of the webinar room. The control center looks like this:

There's only one downside to these pricing options: they're only available as an annually recurring plan, so you have to pay a lump sum upfront.

Compared to other webinar solutions, these prices are a steal, though. The basic plan is equivalent to $40/month for a 500 seat room. In most webinar tools, 500 seats will run you something around $200/month...

But keep in mind: this doesn't include automation features. If you want those, you can get EverWebinar for an additional $297/year: