Webinars are a very effective channel to educate customers, display your expertise, and generate leads. In fact, 51% of B2B marketers prioritize visual content. This, of course, includes webinars, those live presentations that audience members register for ahead of time to learn about a specific topic from an influencer or a brand.
However, planning, promoting, and hosting webinars is easier said than done. It takes rigorous organization and execution to pull off. That’s why you need to work smarter, not harder.
There are several tools available that can help speed up and optimize the process of webinar marketing, along with automating many steps along the way. This helps your business generate and nurture more leads, more effectively, in less time.
Whenever automating and streamlining your processes, Zapier is bound to come up. This freemium platform allows you to connect several apps together to create “Zaps,” which are essentially your custom automated cross-platform processes. The second is a webinar and lead generation platform called ClickMeeting, which gives you the necessary tools for hosting webinars and nurturing relationships with registrants.
Together with the 1500-plus tools that have available Zapier integrations, you can set yourself up to automate follow-ups, reminders, demo bookings, and more – without lifting a finger.
That’s why today we’re going to show you five ways you can use ClickMeeting and Zapier together to growth hack your webinar marketing.
Let’s dive in.
1. Book one-on-one demos with leads using a dedicated webinar
If you know one thing about lead management, it’s that closing leads is the most important step. That’s why offering one-on-one demos to showcase your product is a great approach for converting prospects once they’re in your funnel and have demonstrated that they’re ready to hear your pitch. However, doing this well requires a substantial amount of time and organization – the back-and-forth to nail down an appointment timing alone can be a productivity killer.
That’s why you’d be wise to consider using ClickMeeting, Zapier and Calendly in conjunction, to completely automate the scheduling of one-on-one demos with leads. Calendly is a powerful scheduling tool that makes setting up appointments a breeze. It syncs with up to six calendar apps, including your Google Calendar, to avoid double-booking and to quickly find dates that work for both parties.
You can begin creating this Zap by clicking the “New Zap” button on the top right of the navigation. Next, search for Calendly in the search bar, and select it from the list of apps. Choose the “Invitee Created” option under “Choose Trigger Event” then click the continue button to move onto the next step.
Here you will need to search for ClickMeeting and add that as the triggered action. Ensure that you choose the “Invitee’s Name” option by clicking the “Insert a Field” button on the right to personalize the demo. The “Webinar” room type can be selected when you are hosting a live webinar for a large audience, but in this case, where you’re having a one-on-one demo, you’ll want to use the “Meeting” room type.
Next, choose the access type of your meeting. “Public” allows any user with the URL to the demo meeting to attend it. You can optionally create a password via the “password protected” option or choose “token protected” to keep meetings private. Tokens are special codes emailed to leads they can enter on the meeting page to join.
Turn the Zap on via the top right slider when you’re finished, to activate the automation.
You can set up Calendly to send confirmation emails to your contacts. It’s probably also a good idea to automate event reminders via ClickMeeting’s “Schedule Event” page when setting up a sales demo.
To do this, just head to your account settings in ClickMeeting, select the “Automation” tab and expand the “Event promotion rules” section. Set when you would like to remind attendees of events via the dropdown menu, save your changes, and you’re good to go.
2. Send high open rate follow-up messages with Facebook Messenger
There are over 20 billion messages sent between users and businesses on the Facebook Messenger app every month. It’s also one of the most popular mobile apps of all time. HubSpot recently ran an experiment and found that Facebook Messenger yielded an open rate of 80% and a CTR of 13%. This is drastically higher than the 33% open rate and a 2.1% CTR that email generated.
This is why you should consider using ClickMeeting to automatically send a Facebook Messenger follow-up to users who’ve registered for your webinars. This can be used to drive attendees back to your website or for promoting a future event or to send them timely discount offers once they’re ready to buy.
Since the Messenger app only allows Facebook Page accounts to send messages to users who’ve already contacted you on the platform, it will require you to create a landing page with a call-to-action (CTA) to message you. Check out like this one, for the 2019 edition of The BAMF Bible e-book, as an example:
Upon clicking on the CTA button, people are forwarded to a Messenger chat with BAMF Founder Josh Fletcher’s Page, where they can interact with a chatbot to receive a link to the e-book.
It’s easy enough for you to take this same approach but offer your webinar as the lead magnet instead. Just use a CTA like “Message us on Facebook to get the webinar registration link.”
This will require you to design a landing page like the one above and then use Facebook’s special m.me links to use as the destination of the CTA. This is Facebook’s URL shortener that can be used to forward users directly to a Messenger conversation with your Page.
First, ensure that you’ve created an automated greeting through the “Settings” and “Messenger” tab on your Facebook page to prompt a response from users like such:
Click the save button when you’re finished. A Facebook m.me link can then be created by adding your page’s name after https://m.me/ – like https://m.me/pagename, for example.
Set this URL up as the destination of your landing page’s CTA, and then complete the following steps to set up a Messenger autoresponder that confirms webinar registration and includes instructions for accessing the webinar.
Create a new Zap, add Facebook Messenger, and choose the “New Message Sent to Page” trigger followed by your Facebook account and page.
Add another Facebook Messenger step with the “Send Message From Page” action event.
Choose the Page-Scoped User ID (PSID) for the recipient ID on the next prompt. This contains the Facebook user’s information, which can be used to customize the autoresponder message in the “Text” box.
Take advantage of dynamic merge fields like the sender’s first name when creating your message along the lines of, “Hey [First name], thanks for messaging us. Here’s the link to our upcoming webinar as promised: [URL]”
The follow-up messages can be automated by adding the “Delay For” Zapier with the “Delay For” action event.
Enter the number in the first field followed by the unit in the second like this:
Finally, repeat the same steps that you took to create the first Messenger message, but this time, the message needs to be altered to drive traffic to your web content, promotional offer, or simply to offer people any advice they might need.
That brings us to our next point.
3. Remind registrants via text message to join your webinar
Most people are in hands-reach of their smartphone during the day. As a matter of fact, the amount of worldwide smartphone users is approximately 3.2 billion as of 2019. That means text messaging is becoming one of the most accessible channels for engaging leads and reminding them of upcoming webinars, versus email which only has an average open rate of 17.92%.
You can send text message updates to new leads through Zapier by creating a new Zap with ClickMeeting and using the “New Registrant” trigger along with a webinar ID.
Being able to ping leads when a webinar is about to begin will increase the number of people who attend it. Executives are busy people with crowded inboxes, after all, so this serves as a healthy reminder.
Connect a text messaging service afterwards such as TextMagic and choose the option to send a new message.
Customize the text message to include the lead’s name along with a link to the ClickMeeting’s webinar.
Set the message to be sent out five or so minutes before your webinar using the scheduling options:
Remember that calls to action and using urgency in your text will help increase click-through rates and ultimately the number of attendees.
4. Send out segmented multichannel retargeting ads
Every audience member is different. That’s why segmenting your leads is crucial for webinar marketing success. Furthermore, retargeting enables you to re-engage with audience members who didn’t previously take action, by serving them new ads at a later time.
It’s important to nurture your webinar registrants across all channels, and you can do this easily by connecting AdRoll to Zapier. This way, you can retarget people who registered for webinars but did not attend, or people who did attend but have yet to make a purchase. This enables you to get them back into your funnel, reduce churn, and upsell them with other products.
Begin by creating a new Zap, choosing ClickMeeting, and creating the “New Registrant” option.
After this, select the AdRoll app and “Add User to CRM Retargeting Segment.”
Select the CRM segment you wish to add leads to from the dropdown menu afterwards.
Furthermore, you can exclude users who registered for your webinar to only target attendees by creating a new audience on Adroll and entering the webinar URL as the destination.
Then, when you set up your campaign in your AdRoll dashboard, select the list of attendees for retargeting and exclude the registrants. You can also set up a custom audience consisting of customers, and exclude these people from any of your campaigns, so that you don’t waste money and goodwill pitching to the converted.
Generally, your retargeting campaign should be centered around a message that tells attendees you have more content or offers that they’d be interested in. You can set this all up through Adroll’s ad creation tools during the campaign creation process.
This will help maximize the number of leads you convert by staying on their radar once a webinar has ended.
5. Get alerted about new VIP registrants via Slack
Having a clearly defined ideal customer will help you narrow down what webinar attendees are the most likely to convert and become high-value, long-term customers. You can then reach out to these “VIP registrants” manually, to nurture them differently from your one-size-fits-all approach, thereby improving conversion rates. This approach is especially effective if you’re engaged in account based marketing (ABM).
You can use ClickMeeting, Clearbit, and Slack together to get alerts when especially high-quality leads register for upcoming webinars. These leads can be invited to private demos, consultations, and given exclusive content like whitepapers or case studies.
To do so, create a new Zap starting with ClickMeeting’s “New Registrant” trigger option. Clearbit is capable of collecting several different pieces of company data, such as:
- Find a person and their company name
- Find a company by domain
- Find a company’s domain by name
- Find an individual person
Next, add the “Filter by Zapier” app to only create alerts when a specific criteria is met. Begin by choosing Clearbit and edit the filter according to your buyer persona. For example, an employment role containing the text of “CEO” would alert your team when a lead with that job title registers for a webinar.
Connect Slack afterwards with the “Send Channel Message” trigger to alert your sales channel when a lead meeting this criterion has successfully registered.
Customize the message with the lead’s information so your sales team can reach out to them, forge a personal connection and remain on their radar.
Conclusion
Webinars are an amazingly effective channel to begin generating leads and nurturing relationships with prospects.
While they take serious dedication in terms of planning and hosting, you can optimize and automate most of the process thanks to Zapier and ClickMeeting.
Demos can be booked with individual leads when they register for a webinar to help convert them and nurture the relationship. You can also keep in touch with leads by integrating Facebook Messenger or a texting service and automating it all through Zapier.
Stay updated in real-time with Clearbit and Slack while you’re at it, and dispatch retargeting ads with AdRoll to win back anyone who needs a nudge to get back into your funnel.
Apply what you learned today about Zapier and Clickmeeting to begin taking your webinars to the next level.
