Improve ROI by Integrating 3rd Party Webinar Tools with your Marketing Automation Platform

October 20, 2020 Stan

If you’re looking to improve engagement and ROI on your webinars, integrating with your email marketing technologies may be the way to go for your marketing team. Most 3^rd party webinar applications integrate with the major marketing automation platform (MAP) players in the industry, including Oracle Eloqua, Marketo, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. If your events team is using platforms such as GotoWebinar, CVENT, On24, ReadyTalk, Aventri, or Zoom (to name a few) there are opportunities to integrate directly with your MAP for capturing registrations, sending real-time communication with registrants and attendees, and improving your closed-loop reporting for your events by sending leads to your CRM.

Each of the MAPs will communicate with the webinar apps in slightly different ways and have differing capabilities. We’ll run through the big-ticket opportunities with integrating your MAP and webinar tool.

Promoting and capturing registrations

You set your date, created your emails, and are ready to start marketing your event to your database. You have two options when it comes to capturing those registrations. You can link your emails to a form hosted within your MAP or you can point to the landing page hosted by your webinar tool. If you choose the latter, you will need to make sure that your integration is able to sync registrants bi-directionally.

Marketo integrates with all of the above platforms but, out-of-the-box, prefers for all registrations to take place on a Marketo form. If you use your webinar tool’s registration form, you will likely need a custom API to sync those leads back into Marketo and your Event Program.
Oracle Eloqua also integrates with cloud-based apps for all five of the above noted webinar tools and allows for syncing registrants from the app directly onto your campaign canvas.
Pardot can sync registrants from GotoWebinar, Webex, and ReadyTalk, but with some limitations on prospect data and timing depending on platform.

Communicate in real-time

Now that you have promoted your event, you should continue sending event-related communications to your registrants, attendees, and even your no-shows. Best practice is to send confirmation emails, event day reminders, and post-event follow-up messages directly through your MAP so that you can report on email performance and more fully control the branding in your emails.

Tip: Consider moving registrants (both attendees and no-shows) into nurture campaigns that are appropriate for their place in the funnel. This is a great way to organically continue the conversation around the products and services you’re promoting in your webinar.

The integration with your MAP will help you to identify the right audience for each communication, among registrants, attendees, and no-shows, so that you can segment appropriately and engage with the audience in the way that makes the most sense for your campaign.

Make decisions based on registration and attendance

Now that your event is over and you have synced your data from your webinar tool into your MAP, you can make decisions through the help of your integration on what to do next. Depending on your MAP’s system setup, you can change the frequency of how often the sync runs, when to evaluate for attendance, and who to send over to CRM for sales follow-up.

Help your sales team close the deal by sending them warm leads hot off the heels of your webinar. If your sales team is interested in seeing those who attended the event in your CRM campaign, within your MAP you will be able to filter out those who attended and apply any necessary updates to send over to CRM.

In Marketo, the Events program will automatically identify attendees after the event ends. You can then change their program status to ‘Webinar > Attended’. Depending on how your integration with your CRM is setup, this can trigger the event automatically.
In Oracle Eloqua, use the attended decision step to filter those contacts over to your CRM update program to create or update a lead with campaign association.
In Pardot, you can identify engagement at the webinar and prospect level, score prospects based on attendance, and/or create prospects from registrations.

Webinar 3^rdparty apps are just one of the many integrations available in the app cloud that you can use to help improve or execute on your email marketing strategy. Check out how to extend Pardot with their Connected App catalog, Marketo at their Launchpoint service, or if you are utilizing Oracle Eloqua or Oracle Responsys, you can browse the Oracle Cloud Marketplace for integrations or visit Relationship One’s AppCloud Catalog. To learn more, check out other articles on our company blog or contact us with questions!

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