Webinars have become used in a wide variety of fields from educational lectures to workplace negotiations. The great thing about automated webinars is that they can be used over and over again to achieve the same benefit. For instance, if you are trying to train new employees on the operations of your web management system, they'll be able to watch the same training material as everyone else in the office without requiring you to invest the time and energy of pulling someone else from their job to teach the new guy.
There are a number of automated webinars platforms available that you can use for internal training materials or even for customer sales or information purposes. To give you an idea of the main contenders, here are two of the most popular services and some of the features that they offer to make your business run more efficiently.
Stealth Seminar
Stealth Seminar is an industry leader in automated webinar technology. Stealth Seminar allows you offer both prerecorded and live webinars using the same service, making it difficult for viewers to determine if what they are watching is an actual person or just a video.
The reason that this is important is because sometimes you'd like to use a webinar to make a sales pitch to new customers, or engage current subscribers with new information. You'd want to provide them useful information, but it can be frustrating giving the same lecture over and over again. When you prerecord the lecture, you can jump on the system as it's coming to an end so that you can answer any questions they might have without any-one being the wiser.
Stealth Seminar also allows viewers to watch the webinar services from tablets and mobile devices so that your content is accessible on the go. You can also use this webinar as a call to action by putting up shopping carts or buy links anywhere in the presentation that people can click on.
You can expect to pay around $925 a year for this service, so it is a pretty significant investment. It just depends on how often you plan on using it.
Evergreen Business System
Evergreen Business Systems is an automated service used by some big name companies like MailChimp. The cost for the product is significantly cheaper at only $497 for a one-time charge, and you still get access to show webinars on viewers' mobile phones and tablets.
Using Evergreen, you can set your automated webinars on a schedule including times and certain days of the week. This service can also be integrated into your WordPress site and translated into over 20 languages, making it a good option for bloggers or small businesses; however, the translation services do use Google translate so it's likely the translation won't be perfect due to those limitations.
One of the best features of Evergreen is that they allow you to accept payments for your webinars. If you are charging individuals to listen into the webinar, you can collect payments through Evergreen and send that money into your accounts. You can also run split tests to determine which automated webinar is the most effective, or which link is bringing in the most number of customers.
Using automated webinars is a great way to provide information to your community and at the same time, it can become an additional stream of revenue if you choose to charge for your presentations.
Pamela Wigglesworth, CSP, is an entrepreneurship and marketing consultant, international speaker and the author of three business books. A resident of Asia for over 20 years, she is the CEO of Experiential Hands-on Learning. She works with organizations across multiple industries to help them increase brand awareness, increase leads and ultimately increase sales.
To learn more about Pamela, visit the Experiential website at www.experiential.sg or email her at courses@experiential.sg