How to deliver a webinar registration CX with Eloqua’s campaign canvas
This episode was delivered live to subscribers across the Americas & EMEA only
Overview
Webinars provide an opportunity to capture engagement data & responses from polls, helping you enhance future segmentation & audience design. Delivering a smart webinar registration experience goes a long way to helping you reach your attendance goals
Why this topic?
Webinars are essential for most organisations in their lead capture, customer campaigns, and partner communications.
Apps from Zoom, ON24, GoToWebinar, WebEx and others help you deliver an on-brand experience while also maximising Eloqua’s capture of digital body language.
This episode focuses on using webinar apps combined with Eloqua to automate all webinar-related communications
Eloqua clients can access apps to support all communications related to their webinar campaigns. These apps connect your webinar platform to Eloqua, so Eloqua knows how each campaign member has engaged.
For example, you can use the apps to determine who has or has not registered following the first invitation. You can then automate the second invitation, ensuring it’s only sent to those not registered.
Some of what you read below isn’t found in user guides
How far you choose to automate the Eloqua/webinar experience will be driven by the volume of webinars you host and the number of marketers available to make it happen.
From a time perspective, using Eloqua with a webinar app may add a little more time to the build process. However, the improvement in the experience you deliver is hard to beat.
Templates for emails, landing pages, forms, segments, and campaigns can save time and streamline your build process. If you don’t use templates, you will make mistakes. Simply “saving as” an asset is an amateur move.
The first step is determining the CX you want to deliver. How will your webinar communications be delivered, and to whom?
Before we proceed, the suggestions outlined in this blog post are a guide. How you design your campaigns may differ based on each webinar’s target audience and the format of your webinar. For example, your audience may consist of:
Prospects
Customers, Clients, Members, Students
Channel Partners, Advisors, Media
Faculty, Staff, Partners
The other variable to consider is the format of your webinar. For example, which format will your webinar follow?
- A stand-alone webinar.
- A webinar series containing multiple episodes, e.g. four episodes delivered over four weeks on a set topic.
- A webinar subscription, e.g., a User Group held monthly for subscribers.
Once you determine your target audience and webinar format, you can begin to design the registration and post-webinar communication experience.
Comparing the workload, the amount of effort required to create your webinar & the associated assets
Creating a webinar campaign without Eloqua/marketing automation
- Create your webinar
- Upload branded assets, your logo, banners etc
- Configure the registration form, determine the questions you want to ask
- Add your speaker’s photos and biographies to the registration page
- Perhaps make edits to the registration confirmation email
- Configure when the reminder emails will be sent. Again, you may edit them slightly.
- You most likely use Eloqua to send an invitation email to your audience with a link to the webinar registration page.
The points below outline why using Eloqua to deliver webinar communications is a more effective approach
How Marketing Automation enhances the webinar experience for marketers & attendees
- Using Eloqua ensures your webinar assets are on-brand.
- All emails are sent “From” your secure domain—a win for deliverability.
- You have greater control over the registration form with progressive profiles and form processing steps.
- Using Eloqua landing pages, you have infinite control over the look and feel of the webinar registration and confirmation pages.
- With Eloqua Content Blocks, you can maintain consistent branding and ‘look and feel’. For example, you can build a library of regular speaker headshots and short biographies, ready to drop into emails and landing pages.
- Using Eloqua means you have a single point of opt-in capture stored against a single profile, which is a compliance win.
- You can ensure follow-up invitations are only sent to those not already registered because Eloqua knows who has and has not registered.
Webinar innovation began when Zoom introduced Zoom Events
10th August 2021
The following is from the first release notes in 2021.
“Zoom Events is a versatile, all-in-one platform that allows you to create a variety of engaging virtual experiences for Attendees.
With Zoom Events, you can manage your own branded event hubs, customize ticketing and registration, control user access from one dashboard, and allow networking during your Zoom Events.
Hosts can easily create multi-session events—which can be free or paid and public or private events.
This platform is useful for businesses, organizations, and enterprises—both large and small—to reach out and engage with their Attendees.”
There are many ways to design your campaign canvas. Watch the webinar replay for specific examples showing the layout and design of the canvas
The main point I wanted to make in this month’s webinar was about striking a balance between what some may see as best practice and the reality of the amount of time you have available to build your webinar campaigns.
It’s all well and good to aim for best practice, but if you don’t have the time to make that happen, Eloqua is flexible enough to work within the time frames that work for you.
Shift your thinking from ‘webinars’ to ‘events
Before 2020, I spent a reasonable amount of time with clients in their offices, providing Eloqua coaching. For other clients, we used Zoom Meetings; from early 2020, that changed to 100% Zoom Meetings with travel limitations created by the pandemic.
We also saw clients have to pivot quickly, especially those with planned conferences or significant in-person events.
Before the pandemic, most people viewed a “webinar” as a talking head accompanied by slides and maybe a guest presenter.
The pandemic forced many marketers to shift their thinking and view webinars as events. Zoom quickly identified that marketers were looking to re-create the in-person experience online. Zoom Webinars only went so far.
Zoom Events is not just another webinar platform, it’s so much more, that’s why it’s referred to as an Events platform
With ticketing, richer branding functionality, virtual networking and hyrbid event functions, Zoom Events is a game changer.
Combined with Zoom Sessions, which works with Zoom Events and Zoom Webinars, you can bring in a lot more data to your marketing automation platforms.
This data can be used to hyper-personalise future campaigns.
We’ll be exploring these functions in more detail in 2025. Subscribe to our The Art of What’s Possible service today, this ensure you don’t miss an invitation as we cover a range of topics to support marketers, helping you enhance engagement and get more from your CX objectives.
This month’s Eloqua Hack
Tips to help you maintain data integrity
Regardless of how you run your webinars, either with Eloqua driving the registration process or natively with your chosen webinar platform, you need to be aware of something. It relates to the “Join Meeting” process and your audience’s email address when they enter your webinar.
A compliance issue you need to be aware of
Minutes before your webinar begins, registrants will click on the Join Webinar link in their reminder email or from their calendar if you provided an add-to-calendar option.
When they reach the webinar platform, they will generally have to enter their first name, last name and email address.
This next step is the issue. Your registrants will experience Chrome, Firefox, and other browsers auto-populate the webinar form and, in some cases, not with the same email address they used to register for your webinar. It could be their personal email address.
We run 25+ webinars each year. In my experience, this is an issue I experience at least 50% of the time.
How to identify problematic email accounts
This is generally easy for me to spot when I look at Zoom webinar reports. Our clients all have corporate email accounts. This means anything @gmail.com, @hotmail.com, @yahoo.com etc all stand out and are an immediate red flag.
Eloqua users can create a Segment, as shown below, to narrow down any Contacts created on the day of your webinar. A quick glance down the list of Contacts can ensure you haven’t added an email to Eloqua that hasn’t opted in to hear from you.
What happens after your webinar is arguably just as important as the preparation for the webinar
With so much time and energy invested in developing a webinar, many marketers are exhausted within five minutes of the webinar ending.
The content creation process, securing speakers, briefing them, and driving registrations for the webinar takes time. Webinar platform providers have helped marketers by having replays available almost instantly.
More discerning marketers know that simply sending a replay link with a short “sorry we missed you” or “thank your to attending” note is a lost opportunity for greater engagement.
Some ideas to consider for your post-webinar campaigns
Discuss these tactics with your team as you think about your post-webinar communications:
- Prepare a summary for no-shows. Either a blog post or email content only, or both
- Gate replay content for prospects but not for customers. By “gate”, I mean present prospects with a form to access the webinar replay
- Try a highlights reel of the webinar as a hook to offer gated access to the full replay
- Use QR codes in your webinar, with attribution details directing people to an Eloqua landing page and form to access more content. These QR codes need to work for people who watch the replay in a week or 12 months from now
What’s new? What’s coming soon?
The big news with Release 24D, the final Eloqua release for the year is the inclusion of Guided Campaigns for Standard and Enterprise clients.
Subscribe to our Important Updates service to learn more about Guided Campaigns. Important Updates is sent once a quarter in line with each Eloqua Release.
Release 24D Highlights
- Guided Campaigns: Now available to all Standard (5 users) and Enterprise (10 users) customers as base functionality; add-on still required for Basic or to add additional users at all editions.
- Redwood UX: Redwood is now the default UX upon logging into Eloqua, and loads of other great Redwood additions:
- End-to-end Redwood experience for Simple Campaigns and A/B Testing
- New launchpads for email, landing pages and dynamic content
- Signature Rules: Create
- Field Merges: Launchpad and Create
- Forms: External form integration wizard and Template chooser
- AI Add-on: Refreshed Subject Line Optimisation (SLO) model enabled for all customers with Add-on SKU just after the 24D arrives
- APIs: Support for the Signature Rules Endpoint
- List Unsubscribe Header: Changed the list-unsubscribe header from global unsubscribe to group unsubscribe to allow for better unsubscribe experience
- SFTP Imports/Exports: SSH cipher updates – updates to Host Key Algorithms, Key Exchange Ciphers, and Encryption Ciphers
We filter through Oracle Eloqua release details, then deliver what you need directly to your inbox.
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 reads through the documentation and consolidates the most important information into this subscription.
