Our challenge

Having run a number of Webinar campaigns since joining Cloud Direct, ranging in topic, attendance & conversion rate. I wanted to explore the use of Eloqua to manage these live webinars better.

My aim was to increase:

• Engagement
• Percentage of click-through’s
• Number of registrations
• Number of accurate form fields submitted
• Number of attendees
• Conversions into marketing qualified leads

By optimizing at every stage:

• Invitation emails
• Landing pages
• Registration forms
• Follow up emails

Our previous marketing system was very labor intensive to manage a webinar campaign. You are tied to using the default email’s created by the webinar system. Then you need to export registrations / attendees using csv files and import these into the email marketing system in order to send out follow up emails.

If attendees were not ready to immediately talk to sales it was almost impossible to effectively nurture them into Marketing Qualified Leads.

With Eloqua’s ability to track digital body language across all our marketing channels, I wanted to more easily identify buying signals from those who attended or registered. Then to better nurture them, to ultimately convert them into Marketing Qualified Leads.

Though the use of the webinar system “Gotowebinar” and its cloud connector you are able to register attendees using our own landing pages and forms and manage the reminder, and follow up emails.  You can then get a feed into a shared list of all those who attended. Further info on how to set up the Gotowebinar cloud connector can be found here: http://topliners.eloqua.com/community/do_it/blog/2012/01/10/installing-the-gotowebinar-app-from-the-appcloud

Our goal

The main goal of using Eloqua to run our webinar campaigns was to increase the conversion rate to Marketing Qualified Leads, in order to do this we also needed to:

• Increase the conversion rates of all of our assets using A/B testing
• Take control from the webinar application so we can control the look and brand of every communication associated with the webinar campaign
• Allow us to automatically track contacts who registered and nurture them further after the webinar
• Increase the number of MQL’s as an outcome of registering with the webinar

Benchmarking

As a benchmark I identified the following from using the old system to run webinars:

• Average number of registrations
• Average number of attendance
• Average number of leads

Implementation steps

A/B testing

When running a webinar there are a large number of elements that contribute to the number of registrations and attendees. There are no hard and fast rules as every industry and business is different, therefore A/B testing is one of the best ways to identify what variables factor towards a more successful campaign for your business.

The main variables that should be tested are:

• Number of invitations
• Date and time of invitations & reminders
• Invitation content / subject line
• Personalisation and targeted content copy
• Email Call-To-Action
• Landing page style
• Landing page copy
• Form fields
• Form Call-To-Action
• Confirmation email
• Reminder email

There are a few other great Topliners blog’s to check out around which helped me identyify the key areas to A/B test:

• Features to test http://topliners.eloqua.com/community/do_it/blog/2014/06/09/email-features-to-test
• Landing page A/B testing (one that I wrote) http://topliners.eloqua.com/thread/9663
• Maximize Responses with A/B Testing - Eloqua Power Hour http://topliners.eloqua.com/docs/DOC-6033

All of these elements can be easily tested using the campaign canvas using a technique where you split your contacts using a filter based on their Eloqua ID. You can find instructions on this: Using filters to filter contacts using id number http://topliners.eloqua.com/community/do_it/blog/2011/12/13/e10-how-to-run-ab-email-testing-on-the-campaign-canvas

The latest Fall 2014 release of Eloqua offers you the ability to run A/B testing on single emails. http://topliners.eloqua.com/message/53853#53853 This looks awesome and I look forward to Its available as a step on the campaign canvas

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Social Sign-on

The next aim was to increase the accuracy and number of form fields submitted on a webinar registration form. For this I experimented with LinkedIn social sign-on. This gives the option to register using their LinkedIn profile and returns a wide range of fields (http://topliners.eloqua.com/community/do_it/blog/2012/05/29/social-sign-on-fields-returned ) that can be recorded using hidden fields on the form.  Instructions on using this can be found in a quick cast or as part of a live class:

• Social Sign on http://topliners.eloqua.com/groups/eloqua-university/blog/2013/12/02/eloqua-university-quickcast
• Eloqua 10: Social Suite Applications http://www.eloqua.com/content/dam/eloqua/Downloads/Education/Abstract_EU_EPI-SOSU.pdf

Using Gotowebinar – registration cloud connector

The simplest way to use the Gotowebinar Cloud connector is on the campaign canvas, instructions can be found here: Installing the GoToWebinar App from the AppCloud
http://topliners.eloqua.com/community/do_it/blog/2012/01/10/installing-the-gotowebinar-app-from-the-appcloud

However I found that there was at least a 15 minute delay after registration, before the contact would receive their GoToWebinar confirmation with calendar invite.  As most of us know when you register on a webinar you want the confirmation to arrive as quick as possible so you can put it in your diary. 15 minutes later is not really good enough.

Then I found out you could actually trigger the cloud connector directly from a form processing step: Cloud Connector as processing step “Events in the cloud” Class http://www.eloqua.com/content/dam/eloqua/Downloads/Education/Abstract_EU_EPI-EVCA.pdf

This makes things much quicker.

However in the past 6 months I have been having issues with intermittent faults with Gotowebinar registrations, about 25% of people filling in the form do not get registered with Gotowebinar.

I identified this by:

• Exporting registration list from “form submission data”
  
• Exporting gotowebinar registration report
• Then de-duping all email addresses
  

As there were email addresses not on both lists they need to be registered.

• Uploading list of these email addresses as a segment
• Create campaign with the segment and send them to the cloud connector again.

The main problem with this is that those that did not automatically get registered by the cloud connector will not have received their calendar invite just after filling in the form. If they receive it more than 30 mins after registering it is unlikely that they will put the invite in their diary and attend.

Gotowebinar - registration Cloud Connector problem and how to fix it

Having waited for a number of months for Citrix and Oracle development teams to fix this intermittent fault with registrations, I found the following simple solution on my own.

The idea is that you can use the campaign canvas to check to see if someone who submits the registration form is actually registered on the webinar. If they are not, it attempts to register them again. It keeps doing this until they are actually registered. Simple

The easiest way I saw to do this was:

1. In the registration form, ensure the “Gotowebinar registration key” contact field (a custom field you must add) is blank. It could already have content in it if they have attended a previous webinar
2. In the cloud connector setup ensure that under the mappings section the registration key is mapped to the correct contact field in my case its “Gotowebinar registration key”
3. Create Segment
4. Create filter criteria for that segment and select ‘compare contact field’ select field ‘Gototwebinar registration key’ select ‘is blank’
   
5. Save segment then right click on the filter and select share
   
6. This shared filter can be used for any webinar so give it a name like “Gotowebinar ID is Empty – So has failed”
7. Then on the campaign canvas after the email that is to be sent out. Create a step that asks if the registration form has been submitted. If it has then
8. Create a 30 minute wait step to give the cloud connector time to work.
9. Create a filter step and add the filter “Gotowebinar ID is Empty – So has failed”. If yes then.
10. Create a campaign canvas cloud connector for “Gotowebinar – registration”, edit the connector information as before.
11. After registration loop it back to the 30 minute wait step. As seen in the screenshot below
    

This appears to solve the problem, and ensures that registrations that fail initially will receive their registration email quicker than if I were to keep checking it manually.

Results

So after a lot of A/B tests, a lot of playing around with different ways to fire and fix cloud connectors. We now have our webinars preforming better than they were before.

Stats

To summarise the results of our A/B testing. Obviously every business and targeted segment will behave differently, however the following achieved higher conversion rates for us:

• Text based personalized emails had a higher click through rate than graphic heavy ones
• Strong call to actions in a complimentary colour
• 3 emails before the webinar: 14 days before, 6 days before, 1 day before.
• Reminder the morning and 1 hour before the webinar
• The use of the presenters photographs

The use of Eloqua to manage our webinar campaigns has resulted in a x 4 times increase in registrations. And a 3 x increase in actual attendees. Our actual increase in Marketing Qualified Leads from those who attended the webinars has gone up by at least 4 times. However we were unable to accurately track leads before the implementation of Oracle Eloqua. We hope by increasing the frequency and reach of our campaigns and by making them more targeted we can increase these figures even more.

Post Webinar nurturing

Nurturing those who attended and who did not attend with a video recording of the webinar on a landing page using the Youtube cloud component (http://topliners.eloqua.com/docs/DOC-4133) , along with a gated transcript. Gives more opportunity to record digital body language to identify levels of engagement. These emails can then be followed up with more Learn/Justify or evaluate emails and content dependent on where in the buying stages the webinar was aimed at in the first place.

What would I do differently going forward.

The A/B testing has been a long, drawn out and continuing process, I plan to regularly revisit past tests to see if our target audience have changed their behaviour at all.

I plan to change the fix for the Gotowebinar registration issue into a program that can be triggered from any campaign canvas.

Going forward I will be experimenting with Webinars that are targeted at different buying stages. Answering different questions and using polls to automatically segment our attendees. Watch this space.