Designing Effective Webinar Workflows With Eloqua Marketing Software

The world we know has changed massively in just a few months only. Companies whose primary sales channel used to be live events are nowadays switching their attention to the online medium, given its similar, if not improved results. Still, putting together a comprehensive action plan for a successful webinar configuration is not a very simple task. Yet, companies rely more and more on this channel.

According to ON24, one of the world’s leading webinars platforms, 95% of the marketing and sales specialists agree on webinars being key in their lead generation and marketing efforts, with the potential to generate, on average, 19% of conversions. BrightTALK, another important platform for hosting webinars, mentions that this conversion rate can even be increased to up to 35-45% with simple activities like sending registration reminders. Even so, having all resources available to manage everything when it comes to hosting the webinar, is not easily achieved, when vital employee time is ever-so-precious and plenty of highly technical knowledge is required.

The good news is that you do not actually need so many internal resources to make the most of your webinar strategy. The only thing you do need – a marketing automation platform with the necessary setups in place. In this article, we’ll dig into the more specific details and walk you through how proper, effective implementation of Eloqua Marketing Software tools and features can boost your marketing efforts and webinars’ effectiveness. Let’s dive in!

Ensuring the Proper Webinar Flow with Eloqua

Every company has at its disposal an extensive contacts database, thorough with its customers, prospects, subscribers and essentially anybody who, at some point, registered via a website form to receive any information. Having these members all in one place is tremendously important, but also makes for a tough, time-consuming process when it comes to segmenting, profiling and accurately targeting exactly those community members who should receive a particular webinar registration invite. So, who, and how, should you explicitly target?

Segmentation

Undoubtedly, any campaign aims to target specific segments of your audience, at explicit stages in the buying cycle, those users most likely to engage, convert and who show interest in a certain topic, as enabled by your marketing automation tool. Segmenting your audience into smaller groups, based on key attributes such as industry, region, particular preferences, and all relevant information stored into their digital footprint, is but a few clicks away. This infinitely helps refine your communication, fine-tune the message and understand who is most likely to register or attend the webinar, and why.

Eloqua offers the ability to segment your users based on many variables, from all their content consumption, pages visited and searched terms to anything else relevant for you. Wherever users may be in your buyer’s journey, you can be certain in your ability to translate this customer data into a highly tailored experience.

During times in which consumer behavior shifts from a pattern to another across many industries, Eloqua’s tools help ensure your customers are always presented with relevant content, in real-time, based on demographic data, firmographic data and their digital footprint. Thus, finding the appropriate audience for your tailored webinar message can become rather straightforward.

End-to-End Webinar Workflow

Once your segments are well defined, the entire webinar promotion can start. This activity could be very time-consuming, but with the right assets and custom workflows set up, invitations, registrations, landing pages, email confirmations and reminders are all done automatically in Eloqua. All these labor-intensive tasks do not necessarily require daily manual handling, were you to implement a set of trigger-based workflows into your system.

On average, webinars’ attendance rates seldom situate between 35% and 45%, with slight variations depending on the industry or topic. In comparison, studies indicate that setting up and utilizing a predefined custom workflow, with multiple reminders, can increase the attendance rate even further, by up to 30% more than the initial one.

Right from your Eloqua platform, you have all possibilities at hand for creating, collecting and storing any information or asset you specifically need for a webinar. There are of course many ways in which you can set up your own webinar configuration, based on any current needs you have, but two crucial asset types needed within the implementation of any webinar campaign are emails and landing pages.

At the very first stage, in simplistic terms, each webinar begins with creating a registration form for participants to sign up, which gets included in the registration page, in turn, sent to target segments via the invitation email. Each asset you create based on specific naming conventions, contains the static values specific to your project, alongside the webinar IDs, embedded in all HTML codes.

Of course, the entirety of project assets needs to be created in perfect accordance of your brand identity guidelines, and to do so, when it comes to either emails or landing pages, you begin by importing your usual templates. Within them, you are able to implement any specific customization you’d like. For instance, your Call to Action buttons might be directly imported from your webinar vendor, by setting up and adding the right Cloud Content. There are many possibilities you can take maximum advantage of when customizing your HTML, ranging from the style and aesthetic appeal of any button to that of any piece of information.

The same can be said about another important factor, which is setting up and including your Add to Calendar files. The .ics file links directly to a user’s Outlook/Apple/Google Calendar. Likewise, the creation of your registration form in accordance with your brand identity and data needs is of high paramountcy, as you may need specific Registrant Information filled in by each contact, or other webinar-specific customer data. You may want to simply use the form generated by your webinar vendor, but in Eloqua, you have the tools at hand for merging fields and creating your own custom registration form, where you can view and track submission data belonging to the segments you have targeted. Similarly, you may have attendees signed up via different sources than your target email invitations. You can set up the lists to refresh automatically every 15/30/60 minutes (or more) so that the information collected on these registrations is included in your submission data, and registrants are able to join the webinar via its custom link.

Essentially, your options here are vast and any particular preference you may have, your Eloqua platform can probably support its implementation. Any additional fields you might find useful for event tracking can be added here, in turn creating a very comprehensive pool of information for you to access before, during and after your webinar.

If you are interested in finding out more about our experience configuring quick, efficient Eloqua digital campaigns, such as webinars, lead nurture campaigns, or newsletters, check out more information on what sets our experts apart in our blog post.

Otherwise, download a handy INFOGRAPHIC: Operational Excellence in Campaign Production to better familiarize yourself with the extent of our MarTech expertise, or check out our best-practice know-how applied to email nurture campaigns.

Taking Maximum Advantage of Eloqua Canvases

There are different types of canvases used when configuring a webinar, predominantly when opting for a Multi-step Campaign Canvas. One, for starters, concerns the flows you set up to send invitations and the latter, to send your reminders, or send your follow-up emails. Both make use of several decision steps.

For example, when sending invitations, you include a seed list in your canvas to keep track of registrants and accurately exclude people you do not want to target with an invite. In this sense, you may naturally want to exclude previous registrants, but also your unsubscribes, bounces or even people who had previously not at all engaged with your content. All of this is possible by incorporating decision steps into the canvas.

Once your invitations go out, and an individual is successfully registered, they are then redirected towards the Thank You landing page, while also receiving an email confirmation. With this complete, the reminders canvas comes into play. When configuring webinars with Eloqua, you can create and tailor brand-specific follow-up emails to send to your target audience and registrants. Multiple reminders are an important option you have at your disposal and, depending on your explicit needs – there can be 1-week / 1-day / 1-hour reminders or as many as you otherwise see fit.

Even for moments after the webinar will have been hosted live, there are still assets that need to be prepared beforehand. These include your email communication with the audience after they attend / not attend the live event. Eloqua’s integrations with many webinar vendors offer the possibility of easily importing this information into your CRM. So, without the need to invest substantial time into the matter, you have access to your Attendee and Non-Attendee lists and are able to send customized Thank You / Sorry We Missed You follow-up emails. This canvas also makes use of crucial decision steps; has the user attended the webinar for X-given seconds/minutes? Do they qualify as a lead?

A simplified webinar workflow in Eloqua Marketing Software could look like this:

With all your assets created and successfully delivered via your chosen channels, and all pre-webinar workflows utilized to their maximum potential, the promotion of the event is complete. Now, it all boils down to hosting the live webinar, sharing the knowledge, and starting your live conversation with attendees. Eloqua’s integrations make it very straightforward to identify registered members of your audience and live webinar attendees, without any need to manually cross-check any lists. This allows you to automatically track and transport each contact’s digital footprint into your CRM, offering you access to a very comprehensive list of new business opportunities based on your webinar performance.

In 2019, we’ve helped our clients host successful webinars and contributed to $4.3M Marketing Generated Opportunities.

Want to find out more about our experience in webinar configuration? Contact us for all the details or benefit from a demonstration of our trusted Eloqua Campaign Production services – on the house – and access your Campaign Production Process Audit.

Tracking the Digital Footprint and Measuring Performance

Once the webinar is done, meaning the live streaming has happened, the work is still not over. Another set of essential activities begins, referring to nurturing each contact and including them accurately into the sales funnel. If done manually, yet again, analyzing results, extracting insights, and identifying potential buyers is a highly time-consuming task. Nonetheless, just as all the pre-webinar tasks can be handled by making optimal use of your Eloqua Marketing Software, all post-webinar activities can be automated likewise, saving up on paramount time and resources.

An extremely important KPI to measure after a webinar concerns the most effective marketing channels used to promote the event. Based on data collected after delivery of the webinar, you can analyze the engagement and returns for each source you used in promotion, to determine your most efficient platforms.

Of even further relevance to your business, interpreting the digital body language of your customer is key to delivering Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). As we know, Eloqua can track all details automatically and offers a widely comprehensive digital footprint of each person who registered, attended or viewed the webinar. Every bit of information is kept track of and measured with real-time data and detailed analytics tools, from the very first interaction with your brand, opening an email, accessing a landing page, registering by filling in the custom form, to the point where they attend the webinar or any specific session, asks questions, views recordings and so forth.

Why are these individual details so important? For starters, they are a part of two much bigger pictures – Lead Scoring and Lead Nurturing.

A long-used objective approach of ranking prospects against each other, lead scoring helps determine insights as to where customers are in the buying process, while their nurturing is often centralized around the idea of not allowing prospects to fall out of the sales funnel. Engagement with customers constantly evolves over time, through various campaigns and strategies. Webinars are a substantial factor here.

All data collected about a customer via webinars, centralized in Eloqua, offer you the information you really need. In return, collecting all these details gives you the perfect opportunity to provide personalized content or offers and send tailored custom messages. The true essence of marketing automation revolves around the ability to understand an individual’s digital footprint and to engage with them based on their behavior.

According to an Epsilon study, 80% of consumers are more likely to do business with a company if their experience is personalized. A recent McKinsey survey for senior marketing leaders highlighted proven ways to drive 5% to 15% revenue increases and 10% to 30% increases in marketing-spend efficiency with personalization and analytics. With this in mind, nobody could still doubt the power of effective analytics powered by marketing automation software.

Eloqua Marketing Software enables businesses to create dynamic, cross-channel campaigns with personalized elements that attract buyers and adapt their experience in real-time. Usually, after a webinar, the relationship with a registered contact is far from over, it is actually just the beginning of the journey. With Eloqua, businesses can set up triggered-based workflows that automatically walk a contact through all stages of a buying cycle. And since marketing and sales work together in Eloqua, identifying the high-value opportunities across the engagement cycle after a webinar is done much faster by both teams.

Finally, having a centralized performance dashboard via your Eloqua Insights module will provide you with valuable insights about the bottlenecks in any marketing strategy. Marketing automation is really all about increasing efficiency and performance; therefore, understanding where challenges are in a marketing process is key to doing so.

Final Thoughts

The fast-paced business world will always bring new challenges for marketing teams, and if we are also facing global challenges, matters can become even more difficult. Fortunately, digital environments offer handy solutions for businesses.

Webinars, as explained in the article, could be a life-saving solution if organized effectively with marketing automation tools. Every business needs to work smarter, act quickly, and be transformative, to make the most of their webinars. No matter what webinar platform you use, Eloqua Marketing Software can help you create an end-to-end webinar workflow with the potential to drive more than just webinar attendees.

Are you looking to streamline your webinars’ strategy with Eloqua? Let us boost your internal marketing operations efficiency in just a few days. Contact us for more information.