With a Vimeo Premium or Enterprise account, you can utilize our livestreaming, audience interaction, event registration, and viewer analytics tools to host webinars. This event type includes automated reminder and follow-up emails to your event attendees and the ability to sync your attendee information with numerous marketing tools. This article will walk you through creating and customizing a webinar.
Note that Premium users are limited to 100 registrants and will not have access to attendee-specific analytics. More than 100 registrants will require an Enterprise account. If you are an Enterprise user and do not see the ability to create webinars, or need more registrants than your account allows, please contact your account manager for next steps.
Team account owners and admins can create webinars and link email providers; team contributors cannot create webinars but can manage and produce a webinar if it’s in a folder to which they have access.
In this article:
- Create a webinar
- Choose your webinar's privacy
- Configure the registration form and link your email provider
- Customize your webinar's player appearance
Create a webinar
To create a webinar, go to your video manager and click the New video dropdown, then select Create a webinar.
Your webinar will be created and you will be brought to the webinar management page. This includes a preview player, with fields for title, description, and a scheduling tool to the left, and additional settings to the right.
Click into the Untitled event field to give your webinar a title. Press the Tab key or click out of it to save the title.
You can then click into the Click to add a description field to add a description of your webinar (up to 500 characters), such as an agenda or a quick summary of the topic.
Click on Schedule to open the scheduling tool, where you can choose the date and time of your event. The time zone displayed will be in your local time zone. Once you’ve scheduled the webinar, click Save.
In the upper right corner of the page next to your avatar, you will see three components: your privacy setting (more on that below), the link button, and the embed menu.
- Click the link the button to see your webinar’s URL, which you can copy to your clipboard and paste anywhere, such as marketing content and email campaigns to help promote it. You can also use it to preview what your webinar’s landing page will look like to your viewers.
- Click the Embed menu to see two options: Event embed and Chat embed. This allows you to embed the webinar player and the webinar chat window respectively if you prefer that your viewers attend your event on your own website.
Choose your webinar's privacy
By default, your webinar will be set to the Private privacy setting. This allows you to configure all of your event’s settings before making it visible to others. Click the Privacy option on the right side to open the Privacy settings panel.
Webinars currently only have two privacy options: Private and Public. “Private” is best if you want the webinar to be visible only to team members on your Vimeo account. However, if you are looking to get more eyes on your product and generate leads, you should set your webinar to Public (when you’re ready to share your event).
⚠️Note: We plan to add more privacy and audience control options in a future release.
Select your desired privacy setting, and it will save automatically. Click the X in the upper right corner to close the panel.
Configure the registration form and link your marketing platform
You can customize your webinar’s registration form and link your email marketing provider to help stay in touch with your webinar’s attendees.
On the webinar management page, click the Registration button to the right of the preview player.
At the top of the panel is where you will find Email providers, where you can sync the data entered into your event’s registration form with your existing email marketing tool. All users can currently integrate with MailChimp, HubSpot, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, and Keap. Additionally, Enterprise users can integrate with Marketo; note that Marketo currently only integrates with Webinars and not other video contact forms on Vimeo.
Click the Connect button to set up the integration; this will redirect you to your account settings, where you can connect your Vimeo account to the desired email provider. You will need to agree to terms regarding how you will use the emails collected before continuing. Once connected, refresh the webinar management page and you can choose your email list directly within your webinar’s settings.
Note: If you are using Marketo, you need to ensure the following are configured in your Marketo Programs:
- Only Programs that are the Types `Event` or `EventWithWebinar ` will be available in the list dropdown menu.
- The Programs listed must be set to the `Registered` status in order to receive submissions from Vimeo. This is a case-sensitive setting; “registered” will not work.
Below is the rest of the contact form configuration, starting with your contact form’s fields. The email address field will always be required. You can add other fields, such as a first name and last name, and make them required by checking the box that corresponds to those fields.
You can arrange the order of your form’s fields by dragging and dropping the left side of each field. You can add up to 20 custom fields, and your registrants can include answers up to 50 characters in length per field.
If you’re connected to an email provider, the registration fields will be pushed to the selected list(s) in your marketing tool’s account.
Additionally, if you are using Marketo, you can directly map your registration form fields to the custom fields within your Marketo account. To do this:
- Click the Tag icon in any field.
- Select the desired field from Marketo in the list the appears. You can use the arrows at the bottom of the panel to navigate between pages.
- Repeat this step for each form field.
Below the contact form fields, you can provide a link to your organization’s privacy policy that will be accessible to viewers directly from the preview player, below the contact form.
Below the privacy policy, you’ll find the Message field, which is custom text you can have display on the preview player above the form (e.g. “Register to watch live”). This message can be up to 100 characters.
Finally, if you would like to display your custom logo on the contact form, toggle on Display custom logo and choose or upload your logo. It will appear centered on the preview player, above the scheduled date.
⚠️Note: When completing the registration form, your viewers will also need to opt into Vimeo’s privacy policy.
When you've finished configuring your registration setting, click the checkmark in the upper right corner to save your settings.
Customize your webinar's player appearance
Webinars use Vimeo’s customizable player, which you can configure from the webinar management page.
To the right of the preview player, click Appearance to enter customization mode.
This is nearly identical to customizing the player for any of your videos on Vimeo. When you first enter this mode, a handful of toggle switches for elements of the lower portion of the player will appear, which include:
- Playbar: Show or hide the entire playbar at the bottom of the player. Toggling this off will also hide the volume controls and Vimeo logo.
- Volume: Audio controls for your viewer. Toggling this off means your viewers won’t be able to adjust the player volume (although they could still control their system volume).
- Fullscreen: Enabling this option will allow viewers to click it and watch in fullscreen mode.
- Show Vimeo logo: Displays the Vimeo logo in the lower right corner of the player. Toggling it off will hide it. Note that the logo will also link to the webinar page on Vimeo.
- Custom logo: Toggling this on will allow you to separately display a custom logo. Once toggled on, click on the blank space that appears in the lower right corner to choose or upload a logo to display in the player. We recommend using transparent 200×200 PNG files for best results.
Above the player, you can click on Thumbnail to upload a thumbnail to fill in the player while you are not live, such as a slate with your panel’s names and photos or an agenda of the event.
Next to the thumbnail is a blue dot; click on this to open a color selector. This will be the accent color on your webinar’s player, such as the playbar and volume controls. Choose your color or enter the HEX code, then click out of the color selector to apply it.
Be sure to click Save in the upper right corner to save your webinar’s appearance settings.