You want to host your first webinar. You don’t know how many people will show up. You are about to start promoting your webinar, and now it’s time to create a link for the event.
Should you pay for the Zoom Webinar addon? Or is a standard Zoom meeting enough to get started?
In this post I will cover the differences between the Zoom Webinar addon and the standard Zoom meeting. I will also share my thoughts on when to purchase the Webinar addon.
How many people can I invite with a standard Zoom meeting?
With the basic Zoom paid plan, “Pro”, you can host up to 100 participants. If you upgrade to the and the “Business” plan, you can host up to 300 participants.
Zoom refers to participants as the number of people that actually attend the meeting. According to Zoom, the limit on the number of people that register to your meeting, regardless of the plan, is 4999 registrants.
From our experience, only 20%-40% of the people that register to the webinar will attend the webinar. This means that the “Business” plan is enough to cover almost a 1000 registrations to your webinar. In most cases, this should be more than enough to get you started.
Can I create a registration page for a standard Zoom meeting?
Sure you can! Anyone with a paid plan can create a Zoom registration page and customize it with a cover image, logo, and title. View our guide on how to customize your Zoom webinar registration page for more information.
Can I stream my webinar with a standard Zoom meeting?
Absolutely, with any paid plan, you can stream your Zoom meeting to YouTube Live, Facebook Live, or any custom streaming service.
Can I control who is speaking with a standard Zoom meeting?
The ability to control who is speaking during the webinar is one of the most important features in running webinars. If one of your participants attends the webinar from a noisy location, it can ruin the webinar for everyone else.
Luckily, the option to control who is speaking and mute participants when necessary is also available with the standard Zoom meeting as long as you are the host or the co-host for the meeting.
What are the differences between Zoom Webinar addon and Zoom meeting?
The Zoom Webinar addon has a few additional features that are not available with the standard Zoom meetings.
1. Webinar Q&A
The Q&A feature allows participants to ask questions in a structured way. This is very similar to the chat option, but a little more structured, with the additional options of upvoting questions.
Q&A sessions are often a core part of the webinar, and are a huge contributor to building trust with your audience.
The Q&A feature starts becoming important once you cross a certain number of participants, for example 40. Below that, the chat feature should be enough to capture your participants' questions.
2. Zoom webinar practice session
Performing a practice session is critical for running a successful webinar.
The Zoom Webinar addon has a nice feature that lets you perform a practice session with the same link as the webinar link. The practice session will also include all the additional webinar features, such as the Q&A feature. If you never run a webinar with the Zoom Webinar addon before, I would highly recommend a practice session.
Having said that, a normal Zoom meeting should be enough for a practice session.
For more info on practice sessions, check out how to run a Zoom Webinar practice session.
3. Additional branding to your registration form
The Zoom Webinar addon allows additional branding of your registration page, such as matching the colors of the page to your brand colors, or adding speaker information.
The ability to design and brand your registration page on Zoom is rather limited, so many people choose other platforms to create better looking branded registrations pages.
4. Post webinar survey or page
A powerful feature of the Zoom Webinar Addon is the ability to redirect users to a survey or a webpage after the webinar.
Post webinar surveys can give you a great indication of what your audience thinks about the webinar content. Catching your audience immediately after they leave the webinar will significantly improve the chances that they fill the survey.
The alternative of sending a followup with a survey is likely to result in significantly less survey responses.
Using this feature you can forward participants to a link of your choice, which will open immediately after they exit the webinar call.
5. Source tracking
Zoom provides a convenient way to track how your audience arrives at the registration page. Using source tracking, you can setup multiple URLs, one for each source, for example Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Keep in mind that this is only relevant if you use the built-in registration pages by Zoom. If you choose other platforms to create branded registration pages, this feature will not be relevant.
6. Selling webinar tickets
If you want to charge your audience for viewing the webinar, the Zoom Webinar addon has built-in integration with PayPal.
What is the cost of the Zoom Webinar addon?
At the time of writing (May 2022), the cost for Zoom Webinar addon is 79$ per month.
When does it make sense to purchase the Zoom Webinar addon?
Depending on your price sensitivity, you can decide if you want to purchase the Zoom Webinar addon right from the start.
If you are just starting out with a fairly limited budget, I wouldn’t recommend rushing into purchasing the Zoom Webinar addon.
Most of the webinar addon features are only useful if you are using Zoom built-in registration pages. Even with the add-on they are fairly limited in terms of branding. If you choose another platform for your webinar registration, most of these features become irrelevant.
If you have a larger marketing budget for your webinar, purchasing the add-on makes sense. Once you know you are serious about webinars and you manage to attract a fair amount of participants to your webinar (e.g. 40+), I would recommend purchasing the Zoom Webinar add-on to enjoy the Q&A and the Post webinar survey features.
How can I create fully branded registration page for my webinar?
Zoom made it extremely easy to create a simple registration page for your webinar.
However, you may have noticed that Zoom does not provide a lot of functionality to brand your webinar registration page and emails, even if you are using the Zoom webinar addon.
Creating your own branded registration page and email reminders can be time consuming.
Platforms like Glow to help you create fully branded registration pages and email reminders for your webinar using templates like this one.
