An in-person seminar works because people show up, listen, and ask questions face to face. Moving that online means solving three separate problems — hosting, follow-up, and knowing what actually worked — without losing what made the in-person version effective in the first place.
An online seminar removes the geographic ceiling on attendance, cuts venue and catering costs to near zero, and lets you run the same presentation repeatedly through an automated replay rather than rebooking a room every time. It doesn't replace in-person entirely — some prospects convert better face to face — but as a volume channel alongside your existing seminars, it's worth building deliberately rather than improvising with a generic video call link.
This is the piece most advisors underestimate. A basic video call platform works for a small internal meeting, but a real seminar funnel needs registration pages, automated reminder emails, a proper live room with chat, and ideally an automated replay for people who couldn't attend live.
Kartra handles the surrounding funnel — registration pages, email sequences, follow-up — well, but its own live webinar hosting is intentionally basic and only unlocks at the $189+/month Growth tier. WebinarJam, made by the same company, is the dedicated hosting tool built specifically for live seminars, with more robust live-room features. Many advisors use both together: Kartra for the funnel and follow-up, WebinarJam for the actual seminar room.
The registration page is your new front door — treat it with the same seriousness as your in-person invitation. Beyond the sign-up itself, build an automated sequence: a confirmation email, a reminder 24 hours before, a reminder 1 hour before, and — critically — a follow-up sequence for people who registered but didn't show. In-person seminars don't have a "no-show" recovery step; online, that's often where a meaningful share of your conversions actually happen.
Once you're running an online seminar alongside other marketing — Google ads, email, social — the question that mattered less in-person becomes critical: which specific channel is actually generating registrations and calls? CallRail assigns a unique tracking number to each channel, so a call from your Facebook ad and a call from your email campaign show up distinctly, rather than as one undifferentiated pile of "leads." Without this, you're guessing which channel to keep funding and which to cut.
This is built directly from our own experience running in-person retirement seminars — the online version genuinely works, but only if you treat the follow-up and attribution pieces as seriously as the presentation itself. Most of the value in going online isn't the webinar room — it's the automated follow-up catching people who wouldn't have converted from a single hour-long event, and the attribution data telling you which marketing dollar is actually worth repeating.
A registration and hosting platform, an email follow-up system for attendees and no-shows, and ideally a way to track which marketing channel drove each registration.
Kartra's webinar features are basic and gated behind its Growth tier. WebinarJam, from the same company, is more robust for actual live hosting — many advisors pair both.
Call tracking tools like CallRail assign unique numbers per channel, showing exactly which one generated each call — essential once you're running multiple channels simultaneously.
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