Academy | Blog post

Mastering Webinar Programs in Marketo: Best Practices for Time-Saving Success

15 July, 2024

Estimated 3 minutes read

Overview

Webinars have become a cornerstone of effective digital marketing strategies, offering a powerful way to engage with your audience, generate leads, and drive conversions. For marketers using Marketo, creating a seamless and efficient webinar program can be a game-changer. At Kapturall, we've honed a formula for managing over 20 webinars per week, ensuring that each one is perfectly aligned with brand objectives and executed flawlessly. Here’s how you can elevate your webinar strategy with best practices that save time and boost results.

1. Design your Desired Webinar Experience
2. Determine Your Webinar Assets
3. Outline and Automate Your Webinar Workflow
4. Tokenize Your Program
5. Schedule and Activate Everything
6. Conduct Thorough Testing
7. Implement a Quality Assessment Process
8. Additional Best Practices

Design your Desired Webinar Experience

Start by outlining the ideal journey for your webinar participants. This includes creating necessary communication touchpoints:

Registration Landing Page: This is where attendees sign up for your webinar.
Confirmation Emails: Send immediate confirmations upon registration.
Reminders: Schedule reminders for one day, and one hour before the webinar.
Cancellation Option: Provide a cancellation link in confirmation emails for easy opt-outs.
Follow-Up Strategy: Plan post-webinar follow-ups, including thank-you emails and content for those who missed the event.

Define the stages your customers will move through, such as Invited, Registered, Cancelled, Attended, No Show, and Attended on Demand. This structure ensures you can track and analyze their journey effectively.

Determine Your Webinar Assets

Identify and create the essential assets for your webinar:

Emails: Invitation, reminder (both 1 day and 1 hour before), confirmation, thank-you and miss-you follow-ups.
Landing Pages: Registration, thank-you, and cancellation pages.
Reports: Set up an email performance report to measure engagement and effectiveness.

TIP: Use one global form in the Design Studio for all webinar registrations to maintain consistency and efficiency.

TIP: Ensure your cancellation page link is included in registration emails, automating status changes to “Cancelled” when clicked.

Outline and Automate Your Webinar Workflow

Efficiency is key, so automate your processes to streamline webinar management. You’ll need at least six campaigns:

Invitation Emails: Two separate campaigns for “Invitation” and “Invitation Reminder”.
Registration Confirmation: One campaign.
Reminders: Two campaigns (one day and one hour before).
Cancellation and Follow-Ups: One campaign for each.

TIP: Ensure you include the Change of Status flow step in all campaigns, analyzing the webinar performance in the members tab of the program allows you to see how many participants are in each stage, much like a funnel.

TIP: A good practice is to send the one-hour reminder to those invited but not yet registered, increasing last-minute conversions significantly.

Tokenize Your Program

A Marketo program token is a variable that you can define at the program level, which can then be used across multiple assets (emails, landing pages, etc.) within that program. Tokens are placeholders that get replaced with specific values when the program runs.

What are the advantages of using tokens?

Efficiency: save time on repetitive edits.
Consistency: ensures uniform information across all communications.
Scalability: easily clone and update webinar programs by simply changing token values.
Error Reduction: minimizes manual entry, reducing the risk of typos.

How to tokenize your program?

In Marketo, you can tokenize various elements of your webinar program, such as:

From Email Address
Subject Lines
Webinar Titles
Dates and Times
Agenda
CTA Links
Speakers

This approach means you can update your entire program without manually editing each asset, saving time and reducing errors.

Once your desired webinar experience, assets, campaigns, and tokens are in place, create a “Center of Excellence” folder for your marketing team. This repository should house your webinar template, making it easy to clone and customize for future webinars.

Schedule and Activate Everything

Ensure all elements of your webinar program are scheduled and activated in advance. This proactive approach minimizes last-minute scrambles and ensures everything runs smoothly.

Conduct Thorough Testing

Testing is vital to ensure your webinar program works flawlessly. Send all emails to yourself, check all tokens and links, and register via the landing page to confirm you receive the appropriate emails. Use a “test smart campaign” to view everything from a customer’s perspective, rather than relying on sample sends.

Implement a Quality Assessment Process

Regularly assess the quality of your webinars and processes with your team. This ensures continuous improvement and the ability to adapt to any challenges or opportunities that arise.

Additional Best Practices

Dynamic Content for Multilingual Webinars: Save time by using dynamic content in your emails and landing pages to automatically translate common text elements.
Trigger Expiration Dates: Schedule expiration dates for your active triggers to avoid unnecessary load on Marketo after the webinar is complete.
Period Cost: It’s important to add a period cost to your webinar program in Marketo. This helps track the investment and ROI for each webinar, providing valuable insights into the cost-effectiveness of your webinar campaigns.
Limit Registrations: At Kapturall, we offer a solution to cap webinar registrations, automatically stopping new registrations once the limit is reached.

By implementing these best practices, you can create a scalable, efficient, and highly effective webinar program in Marketo. At Kapturall, we have extensive experience managing high-volume webinar schedules and can help you achieve your brand objectives with ease. Happy webinar hosting!

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Manuela Hernández

Senior Marketing Consultant at Kapturall

Manuela began her career in the marketing field by creating from scratch the marketing department of a law firm, and then specialized as a Marketing Automation consultant at Kapturall, achieving the Adobe Marketo Expert certification twice. Currently, she manages several clients, helping them grow in their Marketing Automation processes. Likewise, she manages a team within the same area, which has allowed her to increase her leadership skills, project management, and knowledge in Marketing Automation.

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