A comprehensive training platform for professionals: the Weleda Online Academy

Interview with Petra Seibold, Head of Training and Event Management at Weleda

The Weleda Online Academy is a platform offering training courses on Weleda products as well as on the most important topics of natural beauty and health. The offer is aimed at a specialist audience, primarily pharmacies and specialist retailers, but also doctors and alternative practitioners.

Ms. Seibold, you have been running the Weleda Online Academy since 2015. What motivated you to set up an online academy back then?

Weleda has always been committed to training professionals. It is extremely important to us that they are fully informed about our products so that they can in turn give their patients and customers the best possible advice. In addition to face-to-face training, we wanted to offer our target group a range of training courses that they can attend from the comfort of their own home or on the move.

What is the format of the courses at the Academy?

In addition to short learning videos, our online offering mainly consists of live webinars. This means that a speaker gives a presentation and the participants join in live from home or on the move. Participants can see the speaker and his presentation alternately. Following the live event, the webinars are also available on-demand in the Online Academy. The accompanying documents are also available for download.

Who holds the webinars?

Our webinars are held by experts from the fields of natural cosmetics and anthroposophic medicine. Some of them are employees from our own company. For the most part, however, they are doctors and pharmacists who deal intensively with our products and the associated topics.

What is particularly important to you about the Online Academy?

There are several points: Firstly, it was important to us that the academy is our own platform and that everything has the Weleda look and feel and is tailored precisely to our needs. In addition, we want our training courses to be an experience for the participants. We therefore rely on high-quality webinars that are produced in a professional studio. Our training courses thrive on our speakers, who all have a lot of experience and charisma. This comes across very well in this format.

The most important thing for us is that, although the training courses take place online, we do not have to forego interaction with our participants. Our webinars offer numerous opportunities for this.

What exactly does the interaction with the participants in your webinars look like?

On the one hand, there is the polls feature: the speaker can send various types of polls to the participants. After the participants have voted live, the results are displayed directly in the webinar and can be discussed. We use this, for example, to ask participants about their experiences in certain areas. This allows the speaker to respond better to the audience in the webinar.

Participants can also ask the speaker questions via a question box. These can then be answered live in the webinar by the speaker or one of our employees can answer directly via the question box. Our participants' questions are very important to us. After all, feedback from our customers is a key component in the continuous improvement of our products.

In your opinion, what are the success factors for webinars?

Of course, the most important thing is the content, which must be relevant to our target group. Here it is important to have a concept that is reflected in every webinar - just as with face-to-face training.

To convey the content, it is important to have authentic speakers. They don't have to be professionals in front of the camera. What is important is that they feel comfortable presenting in front of an audience or camera and are able to convey their extensive specialist knowledge well.

On the technical side, we are convinced that the opportunities for participants to interact with the experts make our webinars particularly attractive. We also focus on the highest quality of image and sound.

What feedback do you get from the participants?

The feedback is very positive and motivates us anew after every webinar.

People who have already attended a classroom training course are now happy to see the speakers in front of the camera. But it also works the other way round: we regularly gain new face-to-face participants who previously only knew us through the webinars.

The participants also appreciate the interactive content and the contributions with a wide variety of media, which makes it varied and entertaining. However, a product experience is also a must for webinars, which is why each participant receives a small product package from us, which is also very well received so that they can experience the product despite the medium.