Create and configure a webinar

This feature requires a Vimeo Advanced, Business, Premium, or Enterprise account with the Events feature added.

With Vimeo, 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 Advanced and 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 the 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
  
• Upload a CSV of webinar attendees
• Import attendees from CRM or MAP
• 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:

1. Go to your Library and click the New video dropdown, then select Create event. From the next screen, choose Webinar and then Next.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. You can then click into the Click to add a description field to add a description of your webinars (up to 500 characters), such as an agenda or a quick summary of the topic.
5. 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.
6. Choose the end time for the webinar to allow the event to end at the selected time.
   
   
7. Once you’ve scheduled the webinar, click Save.
   Note: You can also schedule this to happen automatically as described in the How to schedule and automatically start a simulated live event article.
8. 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.
9. Click the link 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.
10. 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.
    

⚠️Note: Vimeo will auto-completing all webinars that are no longer streaming for more than 6 hours past their end. This means that upon auto-completion, you will get viewer-level analytics and event analytics.

After the live webinar has ended, the webinar page/player is still available to watch on demand. Viewers can continue to register (which you can capture) and watch the archive. You can get the recording via a contact form but this form does not contain viewer-level analytics.

Upload a CSV of webinar attendees

You can upload a CSV of registrants for your webinar by following these steps:

1. Select Attendees in the right panel.
   
   
2.  Click Upload CSV in the top right corner.
   
   
   
3. Next, select the file you want to upload.
   

   ⚠️Note: We only support CSVs with up to 1000 rows. If your CSV is larger you will need to break it up into multiple files and upload them separately.

4. Check the box at the bottom of the screen to confirm that all contacts listed have registered for your event or are expecting to receive related communications, then click Next.
   
   
   
   
5. On the next screen, match the columns in your CSV to the columns in the Vimeo attendee table by clicking on the dropdowns under the CSV column header and selecting the corresponding column. When you are done, click Submit. 

Please note the following about your CSV upload: 

• Emails that are uploaded will not be cleansed or checked for spam so users should ensure that things email domains like X@test.com are stripped before uploading as Vimeo will not sanitize these.
• Registration does not support non-English characters at the moment. Please strip all non-English characters like ñ or ø before uploading.

Import attendees from CRM or MAP

You may import contacts from your CRM or MAP list to register them as attendees of your webinar. Vimeo will receive your registrant information and send back viewer-level analytics to the CRM or marketing platform. 

1. To access your list, first select Attendees in the right panel.
   
2. From the Attendees page, select Import from list. You will be prompted to connect to your provider if you have not already done so.
   
3. Once you have connected and selected your CRM or MAP, you can choose your list in the dropdown menu.
   
4. Select Next to continue and then Done once it has finished uploading. 
5. Your list will populate on the Attendees page.
   ⚠️Note: Duplicate information in your list will override the Vimeo attendee table (i.e. if any of your attendees have already registered). 
6. To remove an uploaded list, go to the three-dot menu (⋯) and choose Disconnect list.
   
   
   💡Tip: Attendees that you register via the list will automatically receive a registration confirmation email. 
   

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.

1. Click the Privacy option on the right side to open the Privacy settings panel.

Webinars currently have three privacy options: Private, Public, and Password. 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). While Password will allow people only with a password to access your webinars.

⚠️Note: We plan to add more privacy and audience control options in a future release. 

2. 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 connect Vimeo to your CRM tool and sync the data entered into your event’s registration form with your existing email marketing tool. If you use Mailchimp, Hubspot, or Marketo, we will also pass your registrant’s engagement metrics over to that CRM provider once you complete your event. 

Premium and Enterprise accounts can currently integrate with Mailchimp, HubSpot, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, and Keap.

Additionally, Enterprise users can integrate with Marketo.

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 up to 20 custom fields, such as a first name and last name, and make them required by selecting the corresponding menu (⋯) and toggling on Require.

Text input fields allow your registrants to include answers up to 50 characters in length per field. 

If you would like your registrants to choose from a list or answer a question, select Dropdown to add options for them to select. 

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 a supported marketing tool, the information in the registration fields will be pushed to the selected list(s) in your marketing tool’s account.

Below the contact form fields and dropdown options, 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 the custom text you can have displayed 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 centred 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.

1. 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.
  

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. Choose your color or enter the HEX code, then click out of the color selector to apply it. 

5. Be sure to click Save in the upper right corner to save your webinar’s appearance settings.