What’s New in ReadyTalk Conference Center?

ReadyTalk continues to evolve our product and service offerings to make the chairperson and participant experience even more seamless.  We’ve made some updates to the ReadyTalk Conference Center, where the chairperson schedules meetings and manages recordings:

New Meeting Details: Remove Default for Registration Type

Now, when creating a scheduled meeting, the chairperson will be required to choose the type of registration they would like for participants. In the past, the registration type defaulted to ‘Register at Time of Meeting’ which caused issues for some of our users, since the registration type cannot be changed once a meeting has been created and saved.

There are two types of registration that enable flexibility in your pre-meeting planning:

1^st Option: Register at Time of Meeting

What’s this? Registration information is collected from your participants when they login at the start of the conference.

When should I choose this option? This option is most useful for internal audio or web conferences or non-lead generating webinars.  As a chairperson, you want to know who attended your meeting, but mostly for roll call purposes only.

2^nd Option: Pre-Register before the Meeting

What’s this? Registration information is collected from your participants before login.

When should I choose this option? This option enables a chairperson to track attendance, control access to the meeting, and is most helpful for lead generation webinars. In addition, a chairperson can then choose to automatically or manually confirm registrants.  The manual confirmation process is especially useful for highly confidential meetings, such as an investor call, while the automatic confirmation process is helpful when managing a large amount of registrations.

Participant Registration Process: Require Double-Entry of Email Address

This enhancement requires a participant to enter their email address twice during the registration process before entering into the meeting. Often, participants’ accidently make a mistake when entering their email address, causing them to not receive confirmation emails, meeting updates, etc. In addition, capturing accurate participant email addresses is crucial for post-event follow-up and driving attendance with event reminders.

What other information can I gather from my participants during the registration process?

With both types of registration (pre-register or register at time of meeting), participants are required to provide their first and last names, as well as their email address (twice!). As a chairperson, you can choose to gather even more participant information such as company name, job title, industry, or create custom registration fields.

Participant Lobby Page: Countdown Timer to Start of Meeting

It’s more than likely that meetings are held in multiple time zones, and it can be challenging for the chairperson to convey every participant’s time zone in the meeting invite.  In turn, participant confusion over the meeting start time can impact attendance rates.  Now, when a participant joins your meeting, there will be a countdown timer displayed on the Meeting Lobby page, letting the participant know, to the second, when their conference will begin.

Beth is a Product Marketing Manager and works with our customers to understand their needs as they relate to event services and our conference center, which is used to setup the details of our clients’ upcoming meetings. Outside of the office, Beth loves to spend time with family and friends, cook, and hit the slopes.

A couple of weeks ago Ken Molay wrote a great blog post, Conversion Features For Webinar Technologies. He expanded on a post by Brian Massey, which explores what features and experiences customers should expect from webinar vendors (among others).

Ken outlines the elements that he believes should be available to every webinar organizer and I agree. I also think the timing of this week’s launch of the Eloqua Cloud Connectors for ReadyTalk couldn’t be better, since it addresses and expands on many of Ken’s requirements.

Here are a few of his requirements that the cloud connectors address:

Allow Customizable Registration Pages. ReadyTalk’s registration pages are pretty flexible and allow event organizers to create as many 100 custom registration questions (warning: you should be careful about the number of questions you include since as the number registration questions increases the number of participants typically decreases).  Customers, who use Eloqua, can now fully customize the registration pages to maintain a consistent look and feel with existing marketing materials.

Follow Lead Source Tracking From Start To End. ReadyTalk already had a built-in campaign tool for tracking where registrations were coming from; but this data lives outside of a customers’ marketing automation program. This is one of the reasons that the Eloqua Cloud Connectors for ReadyTalk  are so powerful. I would also mention your registrants are cookied as well so you can track their digital body language – something a conferencing service does not offer.

Allow Total Control Of All Email. Not only does the Eloqua Cloud Connectors for ReadyTalk give you control of the look and feel of your emails, using Eloqua lets you automate the email processes so that after the event you can send emails based on actions customers took. For example, registrants that didn’t attend can receive one email and those that did can receive another….and this process can be fully automated.

One thing that neither Brian nor Ken touched on is the need for these vendors to integrate with each other. Whether it’s out-of-the-box integration or the ability connect via an open API, the ability to move data seamlessly from one platform to another is essential. Eliminating manual spreadsheet works saves significant time and ensures the accuracy of data. It also makes actionable data available faster.

What other features would you like to see incorporated into your webinar program? Are there platforms you would like to see integrated?

“Spreadsheet hell” is what we call it at ReadyTalk.

It happens when your conferencing service data is isolated from your marketing automation service. It delays lead follow-up, lead scoring and the lead nurturing process. It complicates the entire process and can lead to data errors.

As a marketer, I am always looking for ways to accelerate lead conversion, arm my sales team with valuable information, simplify reporting and gain a solid understanding of metrics.  The new Eloqua Cloud Connectors for ReadyTalk allow me to take advantage of Eloqua’s platform without falling into spreadsheet hell

.Let’s look at the old way vs. the new way:

As illustrated in the steps above, integrating ReadyTalk webinar services with our marketing automation platform, Eloqua is saving us significant time and eliminating manual processes that can lead to errors and other problems.

If you’re interested, you can learn more about Eloqua Cloud Connectors for ReadyTalk.

What marketing automation platform do you use? Are there other marketing platforms that you’ve integrated and seeing the benefits? If not, what would you like to integrate?

ReadyTalk will unveil its newly designed website soon. We’ve changed quite a few things – all for the better (we hope you’ll agree). You’ll notice an entirely new look and feel; you will still be able to easily access our platform whether you are hosting or attending a meeting; we’ve made it easier to learn about our features and new product launches; and we’ve improved the navigation to make it easier to find what you are looking for.

Here’s where we started:

The current site was outdated and didn’t allow for much navigational and content flexibility. Our goals had changed in the years since the site first launched and we wanted to better reflect ReadyTalk’s values and culture in the imagery.

We started out by defining our site goals and objectives (see the post “Creating a New Website“), did some competitive reviewing of other sites, and put a timeline together. We studied our site user personas, determined our metrics for success and put together technical and functional briefs. Wireframes and site maps were created and new navigational structures were developed and vetted by internal and external users. Our information architect created paper prototypes and facilitated scenario testing with our customers. Then he revised the wireframes and began building out the mockups. Images were carefully selected to reflect our locale and our work culture. Once that was all approved the process of building it out in Drupal began.

We used the Agile process throughout the project. The team broke down the tasks to be done in two week iterations and then we facilitated a daily “stand up” in front of whiteboard to discuss what was completed and what tasks were blocked. It has been almost a year-long labor of love.

Here’s where we ended up:

The site is cleaner, easier to navigate, provides a wealth of support and training information and makes it easier for potential customers to schedule a live demo, sign up for a free trial or purchase our services immediately.

For this first phase of launch we wanted to make sure that the site continued to make it easy to join a meeting; provided information on how to use ReadyTalk through robust training and support); and communicated ReadyTalk’s values and culture.
We look forward to your feedback once it launches. Please tell us what you think as a comment below or send us an email. If you have any suggestions, we’d love to hear them – positive or negative. And keep watching the ReadyTalk blog because we have more exciting things in store for the site in 2011.