Tips for Advancing Your Eloqua Webinar Programs: Key Takeaways from the 12/5 Webinar

We had a great webinar this week where Jody Mooney from Eloqua, Kaila Garrison from Compendium, and Mike McKinnon from ReadyTalk shared 10 tips for taking your Eloqua webinar programs to the next level in 2013. In case you missed it, here’s a recap of some of the top tips from the event. Want all of the details? You can view a playback of the webinar here.

Tip #3: Leverage Social at Every Stage

Adding social to the mix throughout your webinar can make a real difference in results. Extend your reach by encouraging your audience to share the event with their network. One of our customers increased registration numbers by 111%, blew away their registration record by a whopping 246 people, and nearly doubled their attendance numbers simply by adding social sharing buttons to their webinar landing page and emails.

Add social sharing buttons to your Eloqua webinar landing pages and emails

Here are a few other ideas for weaving social into your next online event:

Increase landing page conversions by offering a social sign-on option for registrants
Encourage audience engagement by creating a hashtag for the event, including it on every slide, and asking people to join the conversation on Twitter
Make it easy for your audience to share your message by including easily tweet-able statements that concisely communicate key points on each slide
Reach a broader audience with your recording by posting it to your blog, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter after the live event

Tip #4: Make “Add to Calendar” Easy

To increase attendance rates as your webinars, be sure to include an ICS file with all of the information people need to join the meeting (including their unique “join meeting” link) in the confirmation and reminder emails you send from Eloqua. This makes it easy for registrants to add the webinar to their calendar so they don’t forget to attend and very simple for them to join the event with the click of a link in the calendar item.

When Compendium started doing this for their webinars using the ReadyTalk Cloud Connectors, they saw a 15% uptick in attendance rates. Pretty impressive results!

Include an ICS file in confirmation and reminder emails from Eloqua

Tip #7: Use Polls to Capture Qualifying Data

Polls are definitely a great technique for keeping your audience’s attention during a webinar, but they also provide an opportunity to learn more about them to help in the selling process. Ask the right polling questions during your webinar and then pull each prospect’s responses into Eloqua to drive lead scoring, segmentation into different nurture tracks, follow-up workflows, etc. For example, at ReadyTalk, we may ask people how they are using web conferencing in their business and then segment people into sales demo, online training, and marketing webinar nurturing programs based on their response.

Use poll responses to segment prospects into different nurture tracks

Tip #8: Make the Most of the Recording

Creating compelling content for a live webinar takes a lot of time and energy. Extend the life of this content by making the most of your webinar recording. Just last week, ReadyTalk released a major upgrade to our integration with Eloqua. This new version makes it easy to create a unique playback URL for each Eloqua Contact, include it in webinar follow-up emails sent from Eloqua, and capture data on how long that person watched your recording. You can also use the integration to run standalone Eloqua programs to promote your on-demand webinar content.

Tip #9: Go Beyond “Thanks” and “Sorry” for Follow-Up

Using Eloqua for post-webinar follow-up opens up a world of possibilities beyond the standard “thanks for attending” and “sorry we missed you” emails that most marketers send today.

Here are a few ideas for more sophisticated follow-up options:

Use attendance duration data to trigger more tailored follow-up emails based on how long each prospect attended the event.
Segment prospects into different nurturing tracks based on their response to a specific polling question about their top of mind issues.
Increment each prospect’s lead score based on how long they viewed the webinar recording.