Pros
- Live, evergreen & automated webinars
- Powerful automation workflow builder
- Attendees can upvote each other's questions
- Live offer has urgency timer & image
- Webcam video filters & backgrounds
- Scheduled interactions on webinar replays
Cons
- Mobile experience could be improved a bit
- Short trial limited to 10 attendees
- A bit expensive
Best or unique feature
- Most flexible automated webinar event builder
Webinar Types & Setup
Audience Interactions
Presentation Tools
Pricing & Trial
Webinar Funnel Pages
Video Engine & Support
Webinar Replay
Email Reminders
Mobile Devices
Analytics & Exports
In this BigMarker review, we’ll tackle 3 important questions in great detail:
- Which are the key features that make BigMarker such a popular choice among webinar marketers?
- What are the most important pros and cons of BigMarker that you should know about?
- Who is this webinar software really for? In which cases is the price justified?
BigMarker is an increasingly popular webinar marketing software. And understandably – it’s packed with useful marketing features, handy presentation tools and insightful webinar analytics.
Different Webinar Types & Ease of Setup
You can literally host any type of webinar on BigMarker. When you’re about to create a new webinar, you’re greeted with this choice:
It can be a bit overwhelming to choose, so let’s look at each webinar type separately:
- Live Webinar – The traditional webinar event where the host is presenting and interacting with the audience live.
- Summit or Series – Live webinar series where the attendees register for a series of webinars. For example, a series of coaching sessions.
- Automated Webinar – Also scheduled to happen at a specific time, so it feels like a live webinar. But the host doesn’t have to be present.
- Evergreen Webinar – Also automated webinar, but doesn’t happen at a specific time. It’s always and instantly available. Evergreen event can run on a recurring basis, like daily or weekly.
- On-demand Webinar – Instantly available video, where attendees need to register to watch.
- 24-7 Webinar – Always-on conference room that you can jump into at any time. It’s like a virtual meeting room.
- Live Stream – Happens at a specific time, but the live video is streamed straight to Facebook or YouTube.
For live and automated webinars, you’ll also have an option to host it as a webinar or a webcast. In this case, both allow interacting with the audience, launching polls, chatting and taking questions.
The only difference is that on webcasts, the attendees can’t join with webcam + mic. The video quality is better, but the attendees experience a slight 10-15 second delay.
Automated Webinar Timeline Builder
There’s a very visual timeline builder for automated webinars.
You can schedule all the interactive events which trigger at a specific time relative to the webinar starting time:
After you add all the event triggers, your automated webinar timeline would look something like this:
Once you’re done with it, you can “Play Test” to launch it and see how the attendee would experience it.
Webinar Funnel Pages & Landing Page Editor
There’s a surprisingly wide selection of different landing page templates available on BigMarker.
The important thing to notice here is that there’s also very different layouts.
- Some have an image in the most prominent spot, some have the webinar introduction, some put emphasis on the presenter
- Some include countdown timers, some include videos
- Some have registration forms immediately visible, on others they’re opened with a pop-up
In this way, you can actually design the registration page that best communicates the value of your webinar and attracts sign-ups.
The Webinar Landing Page Editor
On the left-hand side, there’s a ‘what you see is what you get’ type of page editor. It enables you to customize the main aspects of the landing page – banner image, presenters, all the texts, colors and add your logo. This way you can customize the landing page to closely match your brand.
The agenda is a unique feature I noticed during this BigMarker review. You can set up a sequence of topics for your webinar.
In addition to that, there are some technical aspects you can add and customize on the landing page:
- Custom CSS
- Custom JavaScript to add custom tracking
- SEO title and meta
Another useful feature is that you can add custom questions to the registration page. This helps you gather some useful data about your attendees before the webinar.
The Registration Confirmation Page
Also known as the Thank-You Page.
You can customize the elements you want to display on this page. For example, you can add:
- “Add to calendar” links
- “Save this link” as a direct webinar join link
- Social sharing options
- Custom video (from YouTube or file)
- Tracking code for Facebook retargeting
- Cancel registration button
- Double opt-in (to confirm their email address)
Here’s how the registration confirmation page editor looks like:
Overall BigMarker review rating for the webinar funnel pages is massively positive.
They have abundant customization tools and elegant design options.
The navigation can take some time to get used to, because there’s just so many options.
Email Tools are Flexible & Well-Designed
The email tools are also very powerful and one of the most flexible features of the BigMarker review.
There are different email types you can set up:
- Invitation email – Send to an email list to invite them to join your webinar. This supports integrations with Salesforce, MailChimp and other email apps.
- Registration confirmation email – Includes the registration confirmation message, the webinar details, steps how to join the webinar and the “Add to calendar” button.
- Webinar reminder emails – These are emails to remind the registrant that your webinar is about to happen soon. They can be sent x hours/minutes before the webinar.
- Webinar replay emails – Includes the webinar replay recording video and a call-to-action to watch the webinar recording.
- Webinar feedback survey – Includes a call-to-action to give a written review about the webinar or just a 1-5 ratings.
There are further segmentation options on these emails. You can choose to send each of those emails to:
- Invitees (everyone who received the webinar invite email)
- Registrants (everyone who signed up for the webinar)
- Attendees (everyone who attended the webinar)
- Presenters (everyone who were in the presenter role during the webinar)
This means you can create a different email to each of these groups, if you want. Or you can send the same email to everyone.
The email tools go so far that you can customize the sender’s name and email address (reply-to) as well as all the texts, buttons and colors on the emails.
So, the email customization options are very flexible in terms of scheduling and design. An absolute delight.
Here’s how a customized confirmation email would look like for the attendee:
Elegant, clean and straight-forward. The prominent “Add to calendar” will surely increase the attendance rate.
BigMarker Webinar Audience Interaction Tools
When you’re setting up the webinar, you can pre-configure the audience interaction tools like:
- Pop-up offers – Attractive sales offers with a call-to-action
- Videos – From an uploaded video file or from YouTube
- Handouts – Files you want to distribute to the attendees
- Polls – Create a single- or multiple-choice questions
Once they’re pre-configured you can launch them at any time during your live webinar.
Chat and Q&A
In the BigMarker live webinar room, there’s a public chat (everyone will see) and the private chat (only the host will see).
The host can also pin a message on top of the chat messages, so it’s always visible to all the attendees.
In addition, the host has a strong control over the attendees. Meaning they can kick/ban hecklers or pin attendee message, like a testimonial, for example.
BigMarker has nailed the Q&A here. All the attendees can ask questions and they’d become visible to the host.
Then the host can choose which Q&A questions he wants to publish.
After publishing each Q&A question, they become visible to the attendees.
Then the attendees can upvote which questions they want answered.
The host (or the moderator) can also provide a written answer to any Q&A questions that the host couldn’t give a detailed answer to on the video.
Polls and voting
The host can create polls before or during the webinar. Once the host launches the poll, it will display as a pop-up for the attendee. It’s impossible to miss.
This full screen polling maximizes the poll participation rate.
After the attendee answers the poll, the results will immediately become visible to them.
Pop-Over Offers and Call-to-Actions
The offers are a critical part of interacting with the audience. This is where you make the offer and where you gradually start winning them over.
The host can launch the offer as full-screen or as slide-out.
Since the attendees want to keep watching the webinar, I suggest you use the slide-out offer.
The offer is very attention grabbing. You can add an image and customize the call-to-action button.
You can also add a timer to the offer to create urgency.
As the host launches the offer, it will launch for the host as well, so he can see exactly how it appears to the attendees.
Even if the attendee closes the offer, it will still remain pinned on top of the right-hand toolbar.
This is because webinar purchase decisions take some thought, consideration and persuasion. It’s gradual as you’re answering people’s questions and giving them some encouragement.
Webcam Video Engine & Tech Support
As you’re entering the webinar room as the host, you can actually choose your webcam video quality.
So, you can go all the way up to 1080p if your webcam can take it.
However, if you set the webcam quality to 1080p, the video feed becomes slightly laggy for the attendee if you set the video quality that high.
A couple more unique features are the filters and backgrounds.
There are 6 video filters you can choose from. In my opinion, they’re a great feature to give a more of a quality feel to your webinar.
There’s also the “Host control panel” inside the webinar room for the host, but I’ve found that if I change anything, it doesn’t really make any changes.
You have to leave the webinar room and join again to change the webcam quality settings.
What about troubleshooting during the live webinar?
If any attendee is having some troubles during the live webinar, you diagnose the problem by running a speed test for them. Or you can refresh your attendee’s browser.
These are unique features I’ve only discovered while doing this BigMarker review.
There’s also a rich Help Center on BigMarker.
Live Webinar Presentation Tools
The live webinar room interface looks the same for the host and for the attendee. Of course, the host has more controls, but overall, it’s a good thing to have the same interface. This way the host can have more control over how the attendees experience the webinar.
Moreover, you can change the live webinar room colors to closely match your brand colors.
Another thing I like is that you can switch between the slideshow and the full screen webcam view really easily.
This way you can switch to full screen webcam video to really emphasize some point. Once you click on the “Slides” again, the slides will just resume from where you left off.
Play Videos
You (as the host) can pre-upload video or just launch them from YouTube.
The great thing here is that you can play/pause and seek the video. This gives you a lot more control. For example, you might have a 20-minute YouTube video, but you only want to show a 20-second clip right in the middle of the video. On BigMarker, you can do that easily.
To be fair, there is a tiny synchronization lag with pausing the video. The pause moment is 0.5 seconds early for the attendee.
Whiteboard Tool
The whiteboard is for expressing your thoughts and ideas visually. You can draw:
- Circles
- Rectangles
- Arrows
- Write on the slides
- Or just use the pen
Choose any color and make the brush thicker. That’s useful for emphasizing something on the slides or just drawing out a concept.
Make Any Attendee a Temporary Presenter
You can temporarily give a webcam spotlight to any attendee in the webinar room. Once they’re made presenter, they can share their webcam + mic or their screen. This is a great way to have an attendee share a video testimonial to encourage other attendees to make the purchase.
I did encounter a small bug during this BigMarker review – After I removed the attendee from the presenter role, they still have to switch off the webcam on their part.
Webinar Experience on Mobile Devices & Different Browsers
To be honest, the mobile experience is the most underwhelming part of this BigMarker review. Attendees can join on their mobile phone browsers and all the engagement features will be available to them, but the layout could be improved.
If it’s just the webcam video, it’s fine. But once you start sharing slides, the webcam slightly overlaps with the slideshow.
Of course, this depends on the attendee device, too.
On your side, you could move the webcam video below the slideshow, but again – it doesn’t change for the attendee.
Another design choice that seems kind of lazy to me is the blue “Engagements button” that just floats around in the middle of the screen.
Once tapped, the chat, Q&A, the polls and handouts can be accessed from there.
Joining on browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari worked fine too.
Webinar Follow-up & Recording Video (Replay)
Webinar follow-up is an important part of your webinar and it shouldn’t be forgotten.
On BigMarker you can send a follow-up e-mail to attendees or no-shows. This way you can re-engage the attendees and dissolve any remaining hesitations and close the sale.
The webinar follow-up email includes the webinar replay. On BigMarker you have to Publish it before.
Before you send out the webinar follow-up email, you can configure the webinar replay video:
- Trim the webinar video to edit out some bad parts
- Create a replay video thumbnail
- Customize the replay player colors to match your brand
- Allow replay viewers to see the live webinar chat
- Add file handout triggers to a specific time during the replay
- Add polls to the replay video, so replay attendees can answer
- Add featured offers to the replay video at a specific time
- Enable/Disable the Q&A (enabled by default)
Here’s how the webinar replay would look like for the attendee:
What I especially love about BigMarker is the engagement features during the webinar replay. You can set up polls, Q&A, chat and offers.
So, when replay attendees have a question, they can ask it right away.
And you can set up offers, so that they will trigger at a specific time. Here’s how the attendee will see the offers:
You can also download the replay video or upload a different video to use as the replay.
Webinar Analytics Dashboard & Data Exports
The webinar analytics dashboard on BigMarker gives you the primary conversion data:
- Number of unique landing page visitors
- Number of people registered for the webinar
- Number of people attended the webinar
- Number of attendees who were engaged
Since you can schedule an email campaign right from BigMarker, you can see the email campaign conversion data as well. Also, you can track the Social Media referrals. Basically, you’ll have all the acquisition data for your webinar attendance.
You can download an even more detailed Webinar Report PDF, which gives you data like:
- Attendees’ devices & browsers
- Attendance & engagement by minute
- Total engagements for each attendee
Let’s summarize the analytics dashboard aspect of this BigMarker review.
The webinar analytics dashboard and the report are very robust and insightful. The acquisition and engagement data are the most valuable here.
BigMarker Pricing Packages & Free Trial
The price for even the Starter package is quite high on BigMarker.
But given all the excellent features we’ve covered in this BigMarker review, it’s understandable.
However, as you can see, all the packages include most of the different webinar types. So BigMarker is meant for webinar marketers who use different types of webinars.
BigMarker Review Conclusion
If you’re frequently hosting live webinars, you have an automated webinar funnel and you’re also doing recurring coaching sessions, then BigMarker would be a wise choice for you.
This way all your contacts would be in one place and you wouldn’t have to use different software for different purposes. And you wouldn’t have to pay for multiple tools.
BigMarker is the best solution if you host different types of webinars.
There’s also a 7-day trial, so you can try out these features.
However, you couldn’t run a full webinar, since the trial is only limited to 10 attendees, but you could try out the marketing tools and live & automated webinar features.
BigMarker Pros and Cons
Let’s summarize the BigMarker review with the most important pros and cons:
