Why Litmus Hosted a 4-Day Live Event Using Wistia

Litmus is an all-in-one email marketing platform that helps businesses optimize their email performance. To host their event Litmus Live, they trusted Wistia’s webinar software to help them put on a successful event from start to finish and beyond. Learn more about Litmus Live and how Wistia and pre-recorded content helped them host better webinars.

What is Litmus Live?

Litmus Live is Litmus’s annual event for email-loving marketers. Litmus has been hosting Litmus Live for 11 years, and it’s the go-to event for email marketers and lifecycle marketing pros to learn from email experts, swap stories, and connect with other email enthusiasts. In 2024, over 6,000 people registered to watch 36 sessions over four days.

In the past, Litmus Live was an in-person event. In 2020, they shifted to hosting a fully virtual event, and the 2024 Litmus Live is the first time they incorporated pre-recorded content with live sessions during the event.

How pre-recorded content helped Litmus host better webinars

Incorporating pre-recorded content into their event strategy helped Litmus delivere more engaging presentations, reduced logistical headaches, and improved the turnaround time of delivering follow-up content after their sessions ended.

They gathered 20 pre-recorded videos before the live event and had up to 10 live feeds during the event. Anything presented with a slide deck was pre-recorded and the live feeds were used for conversations and panel discussions.

Helped create more polished presentations

Pre-recorded content helped speakers put their best foot forward. One thing about live webinars is you can never expect everything to go as planned. People may clam up when it’s their turn to speak live. Pre-recorded presentations helped take some pressure off their presenters because if they stumbled over a line they could do as many takes as they liked.

Even without a team of video editors, Litmus’s team could quickly cut out bad takes in videos using the transcript editor in Wistia. Whenever you upload a video to Wistia, a transcript is generated automatically, and you can easily make edits if needed.

To quickly get through all the sessions, Litmus’s marketing team divided pre-recorded content between their team members to watch on Wistia and edit the transcripts. Having one folder in Wistia with all the videos made the content easy to access for the live webinar and on-demand content.

Gave hosts bandwidth to participate in the chat

During the average live webinar, hosts don’t normally have time to be on camera and engage with their audience in the chat. Connecting directly with your audience is one of the benefits of doing a webinar, but this can be difficult as the number of attendees gets larger. With pre-recorded content, hosts and speakers could actively participate in the audience chat.

“We used the chat a lot. We had so much fun. I love that you can also emoji react to other people’s chats.”

Taylor Anthony
Marketing Specialist, Litmus

Sent folks back to the event agenda page with video CTAs

As a live virtual event attendee, it can be hard to keep track of the event agenda — especially if you have to sift through your tabs to find the right one. To create a more seamless experience for their attendees, Litmus added video CTAs to all of their videos.

“We used the CTA feature on every single video, and it was such a stellar option because it allowed folks to immediately click on the video and go right back to the agenda page that we had up where all the links to the next videos were as well.”

Taylor Anthony
Marketing Specialist, Litmus

Litmus had their team put CTAs at about five minutes from each video’s end. Adding CTAs to their regular webinars is something they plan to do as well.

Worried less about logistics and kept things on track

There are many moving parts to hosting a multi-session event such as managing the slide deck when someone presents and ensuring your speakers know when they’re going live. These are a couple of things Litmus didn’t have to worry about with pre-recorded content. With pre-recorded content, no one had to worry about jumping to the next slide during a speaker’s presentation, and it helped Litmus stick to their fixed schedule because speakers did not have to be live on the day of their presentation.

In Wistia, Litmus was able to set up their sessions ahead of time. They went into each live event the weekend before to set up a pre-session image (to give the video lag some time to catch up) and a post-session image (directing folks to their Slack channel). Session hosts could simply log on without needing to search their files. Plus, they even set up buttons to direct people to agendas at the end of sessions. Here’s what Taylor Anthony, Marketing Specialist at Litmus, said about Wistia’s event management capabilities:

“If something happened during a session that I wasn’t hosting and someone needed help, I could click a link and jump into their sessions without needing to worry about permissions or inviting people. For the few live sessions that we did, it was so easy to just send one link that we included in the meeting invite to all of the panelists. I was able to do the same for the other team members hosting sessions, which made it so convenient for them.”

Taylor Anthony
Marketing Specialist, Litmus

Provided a more stable internet connection

Before using pre-recorded content in live webinars, Litmus had to rely on the stability of more than one internet connection. If they had a large number of speakers, that meant they were relying on their guests’ internet connections. Using pre-recorded content, Litmus significantly alleviated the risk they took on their guests’ connections because the presentation was delivered from their end as the host using Wistia’s browser-based platform.

With Wistia’s browser-based webinar software, there’s no need to download another app like Zoom to host your webinar, and your audience won’t have to worry about downloading anything, either. Here’s Taylor’s thoughts on using Wistia versus Zoom:

“First and foremost, the unstable internet connection notification in Zoom gives me agita. My internet is fine 99% of the time, but somehow the minute I go into a Zoom meeting or webinar, it’s unstable. I had far more issues hosting five Zoom meetings than I had hosting Litmus Live with Wistia.”

Taylor Anthony
Marketing Specialist, Litmus

Faster turnaround time on post-event content

Pre-recorded content boosted the turnaround time on creating post-event content like their Litmus Live recap blog post with embedded video recaps. When Litmus divided pre-recorded content between their team members to watch on Wistia to edit transcripts, they also created three main takeaways from each video. During the live event, they had team members assigned to sessions to grab screenshots of positive comments they might want to feature. Daniel Hawkins, Marketing Designer at Litmus, said:

“Having the bulk of the videos pre-recorded allowed me to work on daily recap videos while the event was happening. I cut out highlights from the pre-recorded videos and added in the actual live clips as soon as they were done. This meant recaps were ready as soon as an hour after the event was over for the day.”

Daniel Hawkins
Marketing Designer, Litmus

The future of Litmus Live and webinars

With the success of using pre-recorded content, Litmus would consider full-on virtual conferences being a permanent fixture in their marketing calendar. They plan on doing more pre-recorded and hybrid events. Another strategy they’re considering is having smaller in-person events like one-off conferences that are recorded and gathering those recordings to host as an event.