In this final episode of Driving event registration success with Eloqua, we brought together various key points covered in episodes 1 & 2 to expand our thinking & CX to a large, multi-venue event registration process.
What did we learn from the driving event registration success with Eloqua series?
The process you walk people through to register for an event is much the same regardless of it being a webinar, a small in-person event or a larger national roadshow event.
What separates the three examples above has more to do with the objective you have for each event. Is your event serving customers? Is your event designed to progress a prospect on their buyer’s journey? The questions you ask at the point of registration, throughout the event and for access to post-event assets, can and should alter the experience.
Getting the entire onto the same page is the key to success
For larger organisations where you may have an events team, a marketing automation team, a digital team and others, you need to ensure everyone is on the same page. In order to design an elegant registration process, it’s critical that the Eloqua team have a solid understanding of what’s required during the registration process. For smaller teams, this should be a little easier, but don’t underestimate the value of a solid, well-documented plan for your large multi-venue event.
The go/no go point
It can become a colossal waste of time for the Eloqua team if they build their assets e.g. emails, landing pages, form or forms only to have critical details change.
Specifically, I’d suggest you don’t go further than creating your invitation email and the registration page until you have the following details locked in and confirmed:
- The dates for the various events e.g. various cities/locations
- The actual venues are booked and confirmed
These two sets of information will be used again and again on invitation emails, confirmation emails and landing pages. Date changes will also impact the design and configuration of various elements on the Campaign Canvas.
Your colleagues don’t know what they don’t know
There are many things you can do to hyper-personalise your event registration process. The underlying driver of that personalisation will be your data. If you don’t have confidence in the quality of your data, do something about it.
Get a plan in place to scrub it and get into shape. Remember Eloqua has a range of data tools to help you scrub and maintain your data.
If you need a hand, contact us today to explore ways to get your data in order.
Your colleagues may not be familiar with Dynamic Content, Field Merges and Custom Objects. Each of these functional areas of Eloqua can make a significant difference to the impact of your registration campaigns.
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This is the fun, this is where you design an elegant registration CX
When you have multiple events with campaigns that could be feeding new contacts into those campaigns for several months leading up to your event, it can easily become complex. However, there are a few things you can do to reduce the complexity and ensure clarity on the end-to-end registration process.
The Campaign Canvas
When breaking down the registration process into stages, it’s likely to look a little like this:
- The issuing of invitations. This includes multiple email invitations as well as social marketing to drive prospective attendees to your registration microsite. You will likely send multiple “invitation” emails to people. You’ll be able to determine who has and has not registered via the Campaign Canvas and Shared Lists.
- The delivery of venue-specific confirmation emails. The confirmation process should also include venue specific landing pages. If your event is taking place in multiple cities or venues you want to deliver a CX that makes it very clear to the registrant. This can reduce in-bound calls to your Account Directors or Customer Support Team.
- Issuing reminder emails to registrants. To reduce confusion I refer to “reminder” emails as those which are sent to registrants. The “reminder” is for them to attend, not a reminder to register.
When you look at these three stages in the registration journey, you may see that having each of these stages on a separate campaign canvas is a good idea. I agree. When you consider that the confirmation canvas has to issue a confirmation email to multiple venues, it’s a lot easier to do this on the Canvas v’s using the Form Processing Steps.
The Form Design Editor
Each event registration form you build will be unique. The processing steps will be unique and require specific configuration based on your data, your data architecture and more.
However, the front-end experience, the experience your target audience has when they reach the registration form can be a little magical. Some things for you to think about:
- Don’t ask the same questions you always ask. Use this large event as a way to enhance the profile contact data you have stored against each person.
- Do use Progressive Profiling. Progressive Profiling enables you to only ask questions that you don’t already know the answer to. Email address is the only required field from an Eloqua perspective. You could, in reality, include First Name, Last Name, Company Name etc. in Progressive Profiling List Mode and configure it to only display contact fields you don’t already have the data for.
- Use Hidden Fields for UTM/Lead Source tracking: You’re going to want to analyse your multi-channel strategy after the event to determine which channel performed the best. You can either post the UTM values to Lead Source fields, a Custom Object or simply export the Form Submission data following your event.
To help avoid the stress, some things to remember
You know how this works, you arrive at the office at 9:00 am Monday & someone has decided that your event needs to changes dates and/or venues. What next!
Core Eloqua functionality to remember.
- You can edit Emails & Landing Pages without deactivating the canvas.
- You can also edit/adjust the registration Form e.g. turn processing steps off or alter conditioning without deactivating the canvas.
- You can Move a Contact from one Canvas element to another if needed.
- If you need to edit canvas elements e.g. adjust the flow of campaign members or add a new element, the canvas will have to be deactivated.
The use of various Eloqua Components will help you deliver a more personalised experience.
Dynamic Content
Remember, Dynamic Content is driven by data you have stored on the Eloqua Contact or an Eloqua Custom Object. If you want to drive Dynamic Content based on a response captured at the point of registration, you will most likely need to post the form submission data to a Custom Object.
You could post the form submission data to the Eloqua Contact, however, you want to think that through carefully. You can create a maximum of 250 Custom Fields on the Eloqua Contact. This may sound like a lot of fields, but that number will diminish quickly if you start to store event form submission data on the Contact.
Shared Lists
When you have no common data point to associate or group Contacts to, a Shared List is your solution. Dropping all event registrants into a Shared List, via Form Processing Steps, is helpful as a source of truth for event registrants.
Field Merges
This is how you personalise your emails and landing pages. At the most basic level, it’s “Hello First.Name“. Remember you can personalise confirmation landing pages. Why not say “Thank you for registering [FirstName]. The registrant has just given you their name in the registration form, you know who they are.
Enhanced security for blind form URL’s, SSL certificate management & more.
The main focus of the 21C release is security with enhancements to help make PII (personally identifiable information) contained in a URL private, this is typically associated with blind form submissions
As details become available for Release 21D, due in November, we’ll be sure to get details to you.
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Oracle Eloqua Releases take place once per quarter, typically in the second month of the quarter i.e. February, May, August & November.
As details become available, our Customer Success team read through the documentation and consolidates the most important information into this subscription.
