MyOwnConference Review:
Hidden Gem of Webinar Platforms
MyOwnConference is a webinar platform built for live webinars at a low cost. If you’re looking for a webinar software that has built-in recording, audience interaction tools and emails with flexible pricing, it might be right for you. Beware of the live webinar room design, though.
In this MyOwnConference review, you’ll learn:
- How does the webinar sign up flow look like for the attendee?
- How can the host interact with the audience during the webinar?
- Can you customize the webinar follow-up email and add the webinar recording?
- Is the free plan any good for actual webinars? How flexible is the pricing?
The Live Webinar & The Always-On Webinar
With MyOwnConference you can only host live webinars. These live events can be scheduled webinars or always-on webinars. The whole interface looks a bit outdated, but at least it’s functional – your previous and upcoming webinars will be listed chronologically, so it gives a great overview.
On the very top, there’s the “Always-on” webinar room. That means you and your attendees can jump in at any time.
The basic webinar setup can be done in less than a minute. However, there are many additional settings that you can configure under the “Additional settings” tab, which can be a bit hard to notice.
You can customize the webinar interface colors, add your banner/logo and basically customize the live webinar room’s visual interface.
You can also set moderators and see which webinars each moderators covers. That’s a useful feature if you have multiple moderators and multiple webinars going on simultaneously.
Customizing the Webinar Registration Page
The webinar registration page allows for some customization options, for example you can:
- Change the background image
- Enable the countdown timer
- Enable registration with social media
- Add more registration fields
Having the option to register to the webinar with social media is a really useful feature for easy sign-ups. It definitely makes it easier to register. However, the Facebook and Google accounts are often associated with personal emails. So, you probably wouldn’t be getting their company emails in that way.
The registration page customization options allow to make quite decent looking webinar registration pages. Here’s an example how the webinar registration page would look like for the attendee:
Webinar Reminder Emails & Personal Message
There are 4 webinar emails that are automatically set up in MyOwnConference:
- Confirmation email right after registering
- Reminder email 1 day before the webinar
- Reminder email 1 hour before the webinar
- Reminder email when the webinar has started
- Follow-up email 1 hour after the webinar has finished
It’s strange that before any attendees register, you can’t customize the emails. MyOwnConference tells you that at least 1 person has to register before you can customize the text on these emails.
However, after at least 1 person registers, the email options become available. After the attendee registers for the webinar, they’ll receive this message:
You can actually add a personal message to the confirmation email and reminder emails. There’s a special editor for that.
Here’s a quick video tutorial for adding a personal message to the reminder emails in MyOwnConference.
Audience Interaction Tools
Setting up the interaction tools and presentation materials happens in the live webinar room. As a host, you can enter the room early and set everything up. As you enter the room, you’ll be greeted with this prompt:
You can set up single-choice polls, like in any other webinar platform. The polls (and all the other interactions and presentation materials) can be shared between different webinar sessions.
Tests and Surveys
There are also tests, which are a bit similar to polls, but it has some additional features. For example, you can:
- Give points for each correct answer
- Set a time limit to the test
- Randomize the order of questions
- Add single-choice or multiple-choice questions
- Add images to each question
These tests are perfect for educational webinars. Here’s how the test would look like for the attendee:
The attendees will see their test results after they’ve finished. Also, the host will see all the attendees test results right after they’ve submitted their test.
The Call-to-Action Pop-Up
At any moment during the webinar, you can launch a call-to-action to all the attendees. Before launching it, you can customize the title, description and the button text. The call-to-action would appear as a pop-up to all the attendees:
The problem with this call-to-action is that it’s a pop-up. If the attendee is not ready to buy it yet, they might just close the pop-up to continue watching the webinar or to ask a question. Once the attendee closes the call-to-action pop-up, they can’t bring it up again.
However, if any attendee clicks the call-to-action button, the host will see it right away.
Chat and Q&A
As you’d expect, there’s a chat option. The host can pin any message on top of the chat. That could be a good workaround for having the call-to-action always visible.
The pinned message will actually be separated from the chat and will appear under the webcam.
If the attendees want to ask questions, they have 2 options:
- “Ask question” by sending a private message
- “Ask to speak” and request temporary webcam/mic sharing
The written Q&A feature has a significant downside in MyOwnConference – the questions are all private. That means once the host answers them in a written format, they’d only answer the question for that one attendee. So, it’s recommended to actually answer the questions using your webcam and mic.
Once an attendee requests to speak, the host will see it like this:
Even if the attendee hasn’t requested to speak, the host can invite them “on stage”. If the attendee accepts, they’d be given temporary permissions to share their webcam and microphone.
Video Engine & Tech Support
The video quality on MyOwnConference is surprisingly decent. I’m not even on Full HD, but I am using a 1080p webcam. This is how the attendee would see the webcam feed quality with these settings:
But keep in mind that the free plan offers only 720p and the paid plan 1080p or 4K.
At any point when you’re running into technical difficulties, you can launch the “System test”. That’s actually a very comprehensive check on your devices and internet connection. It will check:
- Internet speed
- Webcam connectivity
- Microphone test
- Speaker sound check
In the webinar room settings, there’s a “Technical support” button, but it just keeps loading. Not sure what that does. On the webinar dashboard, under “Help”, there’s also a “Support” button, but that does nothing as well.
There is a customer support chat available on the homepage, though. They answer within 1-2 hours, even during the weekends.
To be completely fair, there are links to different guides that would help you when you’re struggling with something. Some of the more important knowledge center guides are:
Webinar Presentation Tools on MyOwnConference
Something that I found annoying during this MyOwnConference review is that the presentation tools (slideshow, webcam) and the interaction tools (chat, pinned messages) look kind of loose. They don’t appear to be consistently put together from the UX and design perspective. Rather, it kind of looks like they were stitched together.
However, one great presentation feature on MyOwnConference is that you can pre-upload you PDF slideshow and launch it directly from the platform. This ensures the higherst slide quality, since you don’t have to screen share your slides.
During this MyOwnConference review, I’ve noticed that uploading a PPT slideshow messes up the text on the slides. So, I’d recommend only using PDF slideshows.
Another benefit is that you can preview or jump to the next slide directly from the platform.
Another smart presentation feature is that you can easily bring the webcam on the main screen by double clicking on it. And vice versa. That’s useful for directing the attendee focus when you’re saying something that they should pay attention to.
There’s also a whiteboard tool with quite rich toolbox. You can easily draw on your slides to emphasize or point out important parts in your slideshow.
However, one downside I’ve noticed during this MyOwnConference review is that the webcam can randomly just stop working and I actually had to leave the room and enter again. This happened multiple times. When it stops working, the attendees wouldn’t see the webcam feed either.
Another downside that annoyed me during this MyOwnConference review is that I had to download and install an extra plugin to use the screen sharing feature.
One useful feature is that you can show a video during your webinar. You can do that by just pasting a YouTube link and launching it. I especially like it that you can seek to a specific point and pause to explain something. A clever way to use videos is to play video testimonials of satisfied customers.
At any point during your webinar, something unexpected might happen. Maybe someone’s at the door, or your dog peed on the carpet. Or maybe your kids start asking for cookies. For these unexpected cases, you can “Take a break” for x minutes. Your attendees will see it like this:
Attending the Webinar on a Mobile Device
The attendees who would join the webinar using their mobile devices would be able to experience all the aspects of the event. They can see the slideshow and webcam just like the attendees on desktop.
Chat and pinned messages would be seen as well. It’s a good thing that MyOwnConference is mobile responsive.
When the host launches a poll or a call-to-action, it would appear in full screen mode for the attendee.
Mobile attendees can choose to switch their browser to full screen, so the address bar wouldn’t be seen. This gives even more screen area to the webinar and eliminates unnecessary distractions for the attendee.
Webinar Follow-up & Replay Recording
During your live webinar, you’d have to push the “Record” button if and when you want to record the webinar, it doesn’t start recording automatically.
If you’re on a free plan, you can only record up to 20 minutes. On paid plans, the recording time is 6+ hours.
During the webinar setup, you can choose if you want to record:
- Only webcam
- Webcam + slides
- Webcam + slides + interactions
Probably some of your registrants couldn’t make it, but would still want to watch the webinar replay. On MyOwnConference you can set up the webinar follow-up emails to include the webinar recording.
The webinar replay recording would launch on a separate page and the replay attendees can ask questions by commenting.
As a host, you can also edit the webinar recording and trim the beginning and the end. That’s useful for cutting out the messy parts.
There’s also an option to download the webinar recording. Recording link can be valid up to 14 days.
Webinar Analytics & Data Exports
MyOwnConference has an analytics dashboard for each past webinar session. The statistics block gives you basic demographic information, like:
- Countries where the attendees joined from
- When were the attendance peak times
- How many attendees were invited (registered) and how many actually showed up
There’s also the chat history view, which gives you a timeline overview of the chat. I’ve found it quite useful to go through the chat logs to analyze which questions came up and what were the main concerns for the attendees.
The private questions that the attendees asked are included here too. But just by looking at the chat timeline, you can’t tell which ones were private questions from the attendees.
You can also download these chat logs.
There are also details of which attendees clicked the call-to-action button. This is useful, so you can know who were more interested in the offer. If you cross-reference it with your sales data, you can figure out who clicked the offer, but didn’t make the purchase. You know they were thinking about it. Follow up with them.
To track your webinar funnel pages even more, you can insert the Google Analytics ID.
MyOwnConference Pricing Plans
The pricing plans on MyOwnConference are quite generous. There’s a free plan that allows to invite up to 20 attendees to a webinar. It could be enough to host a closed-group webinar.
However, if you’re hosting a public webinar where anyone can sign up, you should probably have at least 100 seats in your webinar room.
A 150-seat webinar room on MyOwnConference costs $60 per month. It’s also possible to pay by the day, but the same sized room would cost $24 per day. After the 2nd day, you’d end up paying more already. So, I’d recommend going for the monthly plan.
Most of the features are the same on the free plan and the paid plan. However, the paid plan has several bonuses. Here’s a table to compare the features: