How Wistia Helped Litmus Pull Off a 4-Day Live Event

Hosting a fully virtual conference is no joke. The tech, the timing, the logistics — it’s a lot. Most people wouldn’t do it again. But the folks at Litmus? They’d host another one in a heartbeat.

Last October, the all-in-one email marketing platform ran its annual event, Litmus Live, online. The four-day event featured 36 sessions, drew over 6,000 registrants, and was a smashing success.

What’s their secret?

Wistia.

Our webinar platform turned what could have been a logistical nightmare into a seamless experience — so much that Litmus is now thinking about making fully virtual conferences a permanent part of their strategy. Wistia provided all the features they needed to keep everything running smoothly before, during, and after the event. Let’s talk about some of ‘em.

The ability to play pre-recorded videos

This is the feature the folks at Litmus raved about the most.

Wistia lets you queue up pre-recorded videos (clips, full presentations, or anything in between) before your event and play them right from your account when you’re live.

Litmus recorded 20 presentations ahead of time and mixed them with 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.

This capability turned out to be such a game-changer for them. Here’s what it made possible:

More polished presentations

One thing about live webinars is you can never expect everything to go as planned. Someone might clam up when it’s their turn to speak, a fire alarm could go off in the background, or a last-minute tech issue could throw things off.

Pre-recording their presentations helped Litmus avoid those surprises. Their Marketing Specialist, Taylor Anthony, explains how this approach made a difference for her team:

In a nutshell, the presenters felt more confident, the team had fewer last-minute tasks, and their presentations ended up being high-quality, on brand, and free of unexpected hiccups.

Faster turnaround time on post-event content

Taylor also told us that pre-recording their presentations helped her team recap the event much faster than usual. Litmus Live wrapped up on Halloween, and their recap blog post went up the very next day, complete with video clips!

Here’s how they pulled it off:

While editing the pre-recorded presentations before the event, Litmus’s team pulled three main takeaways from each one. During the live event, they grabbed screenshots of positive comments in the chat.

With those assets ready to go, all they had to do was drop them all in one place, write some supporting copy, and hit “Publish.”

The blog post wasn’t the only post-event asset that went up right away. Litmus’s team also shared highlight clips and social clips the same day each session aired. Their Marketing Designer, Daniel Hawkins, explains how he made that happen:

“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

More reliable streaming quality

Before Wistia, Litmus had to cross their fingers and hope every speaker’s internet connection held up during live sessions. Multiple speakers meant multiple points of potential failure — anyone’s connection could lag, cut out, or cause disruptions.

By recording all of their speakers ahead of time, Litmus had to worry about only one internet connection during each live session: their own. They were the only ones streaming the presentation to their audience.

Wistia made this a smooth experience. Since Litmus could play videos right from their Wistia account, they didn’t have to worry about laggy screen shares or juggling multiple tabs. And since Wistia is browser-based, the streaming quality was much more stable than with desktop apps like Zoom.

Taylor shares why this made such a difference:

“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

More time to engage with attendees

One of the biggest benefits of a webinar is being able to connect with your audience — but that’s tough to do when you’re also presenting on camera. And it becomes even harder when you have thousands of attendees like Litmus did.

Litmus solved this by letting their pre-recorded presentations take the stage. Their team could jump into the chat and focus on what mattered most: connecting with the audience. They chatted with everyone, answered questions in real time, and made the event feel more interactive.

“We used Wistia’s chat feature 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

Fewer logistical headaches

Running a multi-day virtual event is no small feat. But Litmus was able to streamline their entire process because they pre-recorded their presentations and hosted the event on Wistia.

No last-minute slide mishaps, no speakers scrambling to go live, no complicated permissions or invite issues — just a seamless experience from start to finish.

“If something happened during a session I wasn’t hosting and someone needed help, I could click a link and jump into their sessions without worrying 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 could do the same for the other team members hosting sessions, which made it so convenient for them.”

Taylor Anthony
Marketing Specialist, Litmus

Easy event setup

Wistia lets you set up your events ahead of time, and that’s exactly what Litmus did.

The weekend before the event, Taylor set up each session by adding a pre-session image to allow for video lag, a post-session image to direct attendees to Slack, and a call to action (CTA) button to guide them to the event agenda.

Since everything was saved in Wistia ahead of time, Litmus Live hosts — many of whom weren’t as familiar with the platform — could log in and start their sessions without any last-minute scrambling.

Wistia was so user-friendly for the hosts that they could jump in and use it at the high-pressure event with very little training. They had only one mistake over four days.

And the best part? No one had to download any software. Wistia is completely browser-based, so the hosts, audience, and everyone else just needed to open their favorite browser to participate.

Calls to action

Finding the right session in a multi-day event can be frustrating. To create a more seamless experience for their attendees, Litmus used Wistia’s CTA feature to add a clickable link about five minutes before the end of each presentation. The link sent attendees back to the event agenda page, where they could easily navigate to the next session.

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

Taylor Anthony
Marketing Specialist, Litmus

Fun fact: Litmus loved this feature so much that they plan to use it in their regular webinars.

Seamless video editing & management

When Litmus’s team edited the pre-recorded presentations before the event, they used Wistia’s text-based editing feature. They could open up the transcript for each video (which was generated automatically as soon as they uploaded the video to Wistia) and cut out bad takes, flubs, or anything else. No professional editors needed.

Litmus found managing their videos in Wistia incredibly easy. Having all their live webinar recordings and on-demand content in one place meant they could quickly find and access anything they needed.

Wistia transformed Litmus’s strategy for Litmus Live

The folks at Litmus have been running Litmus Live for 11 years, but this was the first time they used a hybrid format with both pre-recorded and live content.

And thanks to Wistia, it worked so well that they’re making this a permanent part of their event strategy. They’re also thinking about hosting smaller in-person events (like one-off conferences), recording them, and repurposing the footage as pre-recorded presentations for online events.

We love to see Litmus embracing a new way of hosting events, and we can’t wait to see what they do next!