Phase One is a leading producer of high-end professional cameras, and Capture One is the software suite that photographers use to edit and manage photos. Capture One has grown exponentially, expanding into new markets and solidifying its spot as a favorite solution among professional users of not only Phase One, but Nikon, Canon, and other camera brands.
The Capture One team began hosting webinars in 2012. Their approach is to educate customers, demonstrating techniques through 5-7 minute short-form tutorials as well as longer-form webinar-based walkthroughs. The team's goal is to demonstrate the software, show that you don’t have to be a computer genius to master it, and build confidence while preventing the frustration that learning new software can cause.
"The goal of our webinar series is to make users successful and prevent new users from being frustrated by the process of learning new software."
David Grover
Business Support & Development Manager
The Capture One team measures results both qualitatively and quantitatively. Qualitatively, they look at ratings and comments to get a directional sense of how they're performing against their goal.
"99% of reviews that come in are 5-stars, and nearly all tell us we're achieving our purpose of making new users successful."
Quantitatively, Capture One asks customers during the upgrade process why they upgraded, and uses statistical methods to attribute actions to different channels and tactics--measuring cause and effect. This analysis led to a remarkable insight:
"At least 35% of people who attend a Capture One webinar end up buying one of our products, because they attended a webinar."
"It's so important to our customers that there are people on hand to help them learn the software," David continues. "And webinars are the perfect way to teach them. BigMarker has been such an asset to smooth out the buying process."
"One of the reasons why our webinars are successful," David continues, "is that they're almost like being in the same room. With BigMarker, we use Chat and Q&A extensively, so each webinar feels like a real-life setting. This is very different that the experience of our previous webinar software provider."
"It's hard to be the "go to" solution when you don't provide the most interactive environment."
"The other webinar software platforms are just not as interactive as BigMarker is," David continues. "We tried many of them, and they just weren't personal. You feel really alone up there presenting when you're not getting the audience feedback you do with BigMarker.
"When you're presenting and you see "Hi, I’m John from Chicago!" or "I'm Bob from Copenhagen!," it really energizes you. We reach 200-500 people from around the world in each session we host, so ultimately, we've used webinars to build a customer community."
"We have a nice bunch of creative people that join us," David continues. "They love to interact with each other, and appreciate the chance to meet and exchange ideas." It's harder to do that in traditional ways, which often require travel. "The alternative would be trade shows, which are not feasible to attend frequently. Any excuse creatives can use to come together is great, and our webinar series is at the center of that."
More than half of Capture One's attendees are already customers, so webinars drive more than activation--they drive further-down-the-funnel metrics like retention and upgrades too. "Our software is subscription based," David says. "You can buy a license to a version outright or pay monthly with the ability to cancel. So retaining our monthly customers is super important. The competition is working hard, so we have to work even harder. We can’t be complacent."
Capture One has an excellent grasp of its user journey and upgrade paths. "First, users go from basic to informed users, a big accomplishment that demonstrates that they've overcome or avoided the frustration of learning new software. The more users we convert to informed users, the easier we make it for customers to stay with us. This step is so critical to our business model because once we lose a user, they’re usually gone forever."
"Webinars lubricate our acquisition and onboarding funnels, pushing people down at every step -- from prospects, to new users, to informed users, to first time and then upgraded customers. They provide serious bang for our buck. The ROI is amazing."
A big issue Capture One faced with previous webinar software vendors was consistent quality and reliability. Given their business in the photo editing space, you can imagine why this topic is so important to them.
"The goal of our webinars is to demonstrate our product, so reliable HD screen sharing is a must-have. Our previous providers simply couldn't deliver -- screen sharing would crash, we'd run into audio issues, and glitches. With BigMarker, it just works, every time."
The icing on the BigMarker's cake, according to David, is its ability to accept an RTMP stream. "RTMP is really the way to do it if you want to host a professional production quality broadcast," David says. "The effects we layer on really add to the experience, and in fact, I just got an email from an attendee today, saying:
"The image quality and transmission speed is awesome. Your webinars are excellent. I got to see the awesomeness of what you were doing when you zoomed in."
"The next step for us is to explore BigMarker's capabilities in streaming to Facebook, YouTube, and (soon to be) LinkedIn," David continues. "We think there's an opportunity there to unlock our next level of growth by catching users while they're browsing their Facebook feeds."
But aside from that, the Capture One team will keep playing to its strength: providing value to users. "I was losing sleep over not having a webinar platform that worked, so BigMarker was a game changer. The software works great, email and chat support have been fast and responsive, and the engineering team just keeps cranking out new features. We love BigMarker, and can't wait to see what you guys come out with next!"
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