My favorite part about a trip to the ice cream store is the free samples. I can taste to my heart’s content until I find the flavor that delivers soul-quenching satisfaction.
Unfortunately, buying technology isn’t as easy.
But at GoToWebinar we want your free trial experience to be a little more delicious. If you’ve started a free trial of GoToWebinar, or are thinking about it, we want you to get the most out of your experience so you find the solution that’s right for you. And we promise it takes just a few minutes a day.
Here’s how to take full advantage of your trial in just seven days:
Day 0: Define Success
Before you start your trial, make sure you know what you’re looking for and why. Take a few minutes and think about what you want to achieve with webinars and what you want to learn from your free trial. Are you looking for a webinar solution to help you:
- Generate leads and increase brand awareness?
- Train and onboard new customers or clients?
- Host corporate meetings?
Depending on your goals, you can decide what is really important to you regarding features, reliability, and affordability. Then jot down your requirements and list your must-haves and nice-to-haves. Your requirements will include some or all of the following:
Easy Planning Tools
There’s no doubt webinars take time to plan and execute so finding a solution that makes it as easy (and automated!) as possible is critical. You might look for:
- Simple webinar set up
- Branding options
- Automated email notifications
- Flexible webinar modes (Live stream, pre-recorded, etc.)
- Webinar templates so you can copy settings from webinar to webinar
- Integrations with your systems including CRM and Marketing Automation
Interactive Features
Depending on the kind of webinars you plan on hosting, you want some options for interacting with your audience. This may include:
- Q&A
- Polls
- Surveys
- Drawing tools
- Webcam sharing
- Ability to unmute attendees
Recording, Repurposing and Embedding
If you will be recording your webinars for later use, you need a solution that allows for easy recording, storage, and repurposing. You might want:
- Simple webinar editing
- Unlimited video storage
- Branded video library for easy sharing
- Video embedding
Analytics
What information do you want to capture about your webinar performance and attendees?
- Customizable registration data
- Attendee attentiveness and engagement
- Survey and poll responses
- Attendance rate
- Source tracking so you can see what drove registrations
Support and Reliability
When putting on live events, reliability is huge! During your free trial you’ll want to check that everything works as it should and that you have options to directly contact customer support.
Day 1: Get to Know the Product
Set aside a few minutes to get acquainted with the product. First, watch this five-minute quick-start video:
We recommend clicking around the product and following along with the quick-start video to get the basic lay of the land.
Day 2: Create a Test Webinar
Now you’re ready to create a test webinar. Put 15 minutes on your calendar to go through the entire process outlined here:
- Choose a webinar mode
- Enter a webinar title
- Schedule your webinar’s date and time
- Add a description
- Invite additional organizers or panelists
- Update your branding and colors
- Customize your confirmation and reminder emails
- Share your event – since this is a test webinar, just view your registration page and email yourself the webinar invitation. You can also forward the invitation to a colleague so they can register for your test webinar.
- Set up your interactive features – create a test poll, upload a PDF as a handout, and add a video (in MP4 format) that you can play during the webinar.
Day 3: Practice Running Your Event
Now that you’ve set up a webinar, practice running an actual webinar.
Navigate to your webinar dashboard, where you’ll see your test webinar. Then click practice.
Here are a few things to test out in practice mode:
- Share your screen
- View your in-session dashboard which displays the number of attendees, if they are attentive, questions asked and more.
- Share your webcam
- Launch your poll
- Undock modules for easy management
- Use Drawing Tools
If you invited a colleague to help you test as an organizer, practice handing over presenter controls and chatting directly with your other Organizer.
Day 4: Ask Questions and Review Product Materials
At this point in your trial, you’re familiar with the product and you may have some in-depth questions. We are here to answer.
Call us at 877-582-7011 or submit this form to talk to a sales representative.
Feel free to ask questions you have about the product, upcoming features, pricing, or anything else. Remember, there are no dumb questions.
If you’re ready to dive deeper into best practices we’ve outlined a list of helpful materials below:
- Live Training
- GoToWebinar support site
- The Essential Webinar Cheat Sheet [Infographic]
- How to Run the Perfect Live Webinar [blog post]
Day 5: Look at Customer Reviews
When evaluating any product, it’s important to hear from the customers. What kind of success or problems have they had and what is their overall experience. Look at review sites like Capterra or TrustRadius. You can also see what our customers are saying below:
Day 6: Present your Findings to Key Stakeholders
Now it’s time to get into the decision-making process. Share what you’ve found with your team members and key stakeholders. At this point you should be able to answer the following questions:
- Will GoToWebinar help you achieve your goals?
- Does it fulfill your feature requirements?
- Is the technology easy to use?
- Is there a package that fits your needs and budget – we’re sure there is 😉
Day 7: Pull the Trigger
Once you’ve successfully completed our 7seven-day action plan, you are ready to make a well-informed decision.
If you’re ready to purchase, you can purchase online right from your free trial or you can contact a sales representative here.
