"eWebinar has allowed us to meet our customers where they’re at and level up their experience with us."

Why Inside Real Estate thinks running hundreds of webinars every week is key to leveling up customer experience and strengthening relationships

Real estate is highly competitive, so agents are always looking for ways to offer the most value to their clients and generate new business. A great way to do that is by taking advantage of innovative tools and resources that can set them apart from the crowd – and Inside Real Estate offers those opportunities. 

Kelly Bojarski of Inside Real Estate spoke to us about how eWebinar has transformed the way her company delivers trainings and other valuable information to its customers (and why she’ll never go back to running recurring live webinars)!

Hi, Kelly! Can you start by telling me a little bit about yourself and your company?

Sure! I’m the director of training systems with Inside Real Estate, an independent technology partner that brings some of the most innovative technology solutions to real estate brokers and agents all over the United States and Canada. 

What problems were you and your team struggling with before discovering eWebinar? 

Running a webinar often comes with a lot of juggling; you’re hosting, you’re answering questions, and you’re trying to create engagement. The problem we were having wasn’t to do with the content – we have fantastic content – but it was running recurring webinars over and over again. It just wasn't scalable, it wasn’t efficient. We also didn’t have the same engagement and analytic access that we really wanted to have. 

“Running a (live) webinar comes with a lot of juggling – you’re hosting, answering questions, and trying to create engagement.”  

We also found that there were limited resources available with some of the delivery tools we were using; in fact, we weren’t even getting reporting benefits after our webinars. We’re a technology company, so we thrive on all the metrics that matter, and engagement metrics are really important. 

“As a tech company, we thrive on metrics that matter. We love that eWebinar gives us access to comprehensive analytics for planning purposes.”

We love that eWebinar provides us with access to immediate, comprehensive analytics for planning purposes. 

Can you elaborate a little more on how eWebinar has helped you overcome challenges? 

Well, we work with people from across the globe, and trying to accommodate everyone’s scheduling needs was really difficult. For example, not everybody could show up to a 9am live session Pacific Standard Time. But with eWebinar’s on-demand functionality, we’re now able to come across as a live webinar, with real-time moderation. That’s really helped us to create the environment that we wanted, which was being able to meet our folks where they are, meet their scheduling needs, and provide that high-value content.

“We were able to take sessions that we were just running once a week and run them daily with eWebinar.”

We’ve been able to take sessions that we were just running once a week at one fixed time and run them throughout our regular business hours because we can still moderate them as questions come in (thank you, universal dashboard)! That’s really made it a lot easier and more efficient for the team to manage everything. 

“We’re running hundreds of webinars throughout the week, but it doesn’t seem that way to our team because we have such an efficient workflow.”

We’re running hundreds of webinars throughout the week, but it doesn’t seem that way to our team because we have such an efficient workflow process due to the universal dashboard. 

Most of your target audience are independent contractors with their own schedules, right? So the on-demand functionality must be particularly beneficial for them.

Yes. Real estate agents wear a lot of hats themselves, and they’re busier than we are! In fact, I read somewhere that for any live webinar for real estate agents, you’ll get about a 40% attendance rate from your registrations – at best! That's not meeting people where they’re at. That’s not even meeting the majority of people. So it was important for us to allow them the flexibility to watch our webinars as they wanted to, on their own time. 

“It’s really about meeting your customers where they’re at, and I feel like eWebinar has allowed us to really level up that experience for them.”

So again, it’s really about meeting our customers where they're at, and I feel that eWebinar has really allowed us to ‘level up’ that experience for them. 

People sometimes question whether their audience will appreciate pre-recorded webinars as much as they appreciate live content. Did you guys have that thought before you signed up for eWebinar? And if so, how did you overcome that?

That’s a great question. We did have that thought, and occasionally we do have people asking if the webinar is a recording. We’re very transparent and we will tell people that although the webinar itself is recorded, we are answering their questions live and in real-time. That’s the same experience they’d be getting if they were on a Zoom meeting, because the live interaction is in the chat (unless you’re doing a one-to-one type training, which is a different scenario). In fact, using eWebinar to do these scalable recurring webinars has freed up our time to do more one-on-one trainings, so that we can give that elevated service to folks that need additional hand-holding or individual training. Before eWebinar, we didn’t have the time or capacity to offer that kind of individualized service.

“Using eWebinar to do scalable, recurring webinars has freed up time to do more one-on-one trainings, providing elevated service to those who need it.” 

The other thing that I love is that once you’ve got the content, swapping out recordings is really easy. You don’t have to set up an entire webinar if you have an update. You just go in and swap out the recording. Want to change the interactions? Just go swap them out. You don’t have to reinvent or redo an entire session. 

You can also multi-task as you’re moderating questions, because there’s never a constant stream of questions coming through!

Yes! If you’ve ever moderated webinars, you tend to see the same types of questions come up. What I love about eWebinar is that I don’t have to re-record the entire webinar to answer those questions. I can just pop in an interaction maybe two minutes before I expect that question to come in. 

“I don’t have to re-record the entire webinar if I get the same question over and over. I can just pop in an interaction two minutes before I expect that question to come in. You can’t do that in a live experience.”

The interactions – which you can add downloadable content to, or pro tips, or links out to other resource articles – have been really helpful for us. You can't really add that value in a live experience. If you do, you end up packing ten pounds of stuff in a five pound bag and oversharing during the webinar! 

How do you use eWebinar at your company today? What are the different use cases?

Well, we typically use it when we've got any type of fundamental training that we believe is beneficial for new users. So we’ll do new content training, we’ll use it for product releases. We use it to showcase current marketplace offerings. Sometimes we even use it to create exclusive branded content for some of our larger customers who want a more tailored experience. And we're able to do all of that because we can afford to do so with eWebinar.

What are some of the business benefits that you've seen using eWebinar? 

We’ve probably saved thousands of labor hours from these recurring webinars, and we're delivering to more people with less staffing capacity issues. We’re doing so much more with less. 

“The biggest benefit of eWebinar has been the amount of time we’ve saved on content creation and delivery. We’ve saved thousands of labor hours from delivering these recurring sessions.” 

At the end of the day, no matter how many reminders go out, no matter how much you promote a webinar, it’s ultimately in the hands of the attendees to show up. So it’s great that we’re now able to offer attendees so many different ways to participate and attend. Replay links are automatically sent out, so we aren’t getting thousands of emails asking us to send out a link to the recording. Now, not only do they have a link to the recording, but they have their own unique link, so it picks up their chat where they left off. It’s a much more personalized experience for them. That was an unexpected benefit that we didn’t even plan for! 

“You don’t have to be super tech savvy or an engineer to use eWebinar – anyone can set it up right out of the gate.” 

I also just love the library of templates, even interaction templates, to get people started. This means you don’t have to be a software genius or an engineer to use eWebinar. Anybody can set it up right out of the gate, and that's why it's been so highly adopted for our entire company. Everyone loves that it doesn’t disrupt their day, and they can incorporate questions naturally through Slack. I also don’t have to spend time training people in other departments to use it because I know they’re going to be able to use it easily, right out of the box.  

We also get great support. Whenever I have a question and reach out, I get my answer very quickly.

How many team members at Inside Real Estate are using eWebinar now?

Well, it's funny, when word got out that we were delivering our content this way, cross departmental use of the platform increased. 

“When word got out that we were using eWebinar to automate content delivery, it increased cross departmental use of the platform. Everybody in our company is using it!” 

It's no longer just a training team secret; everybody in our company is using it! Marketplace teams are using it. Our leadership team uses it. So it's been really great, and we've been able to utilize it not just for content training, but for all of our business needs.

What do you love most about eWebinar and its features?

In addition to loving the interactions, as a director I’m always analyzing things. So the analytics have been great. They aren’t just attendance reports; they’re a whole lot more than that. We can dive in really deep and see where people are logging in from and determine what really is the best time frame to run a particular session. We get so much more out of the analytics than we would from standard attendance reports. 

“As a director, I’m always analyzing things. eWebinar’s robust analytics and reporting allow us to dive in really deep.” 

How do you use the universal dashboard?

Since the universal dashboard came out, I’m able to have one trainer assigned to all of the webinars that we run between certain time frames because it’s manageable to do so. I used to have three or four trainers assigned to achieve the same thing. 

“The universal dashboard makes managing outreach and responsiveness to inbound chats so much easier because we no longer have to switch between webinars.” 

Everything is in one place now, so the trainer doesn’t have to switch from webinar to webinar, or have all of the webinars and their chats open at the same time like we did in the past. That was pretty painful! Everything is all in one place now. 

What kind of feedback did you get from your customers when you decided to switch from 100% live content to eWebinar’s hybrid format?

To be very candid, not many people noticed a big difference because you still have the flexibility to create a personalized landing page for registration – that didn’t change. And now they’re getting the replays sent out to them through eWebinar, so that has streamlined the process even more. 

“Switching from live webinars to eWebinar’s hybrid format was a very seamless transition.” 

So to be honest, we didn’t see a lot of feedback and that’s a great thing. It was a very seamless transition. 

Who would you recommend eWebinar to?

I’d recommend it to anyone who is managing any type of learning management system. eWebinar will really ‘next level’ your users’ experiences. It can be used by just about anybody who’s delivering content. Having this as part of your toolkit is just going to expand and explode what you’re already doing. I think the better question is, who wouldn’t benefit from eWebinar?!

Thank you for your time, Kelly! We’re so happy to hear that eWebinar has made a difference for everyone at Inside Real Estate!

Are you a real estate professional who wants to take your business to the next level? Be sure to check out all of the amazing things that Inside Real Estate can offer you! 

…And if you’re a business leader looking to offer presentations, training, and onboarding around the clock – all while offering a personalized interactive experience – click here to get started with eWebinar!