If you don’t know by now, webinars are a great way to generate high quality leads. However, using webinar software alone for lead generation has severe limitations.
For starters, if you are sending people to a webinar registration page, you are missing out on the opportunity to cookie the visitor when they complete the form. However, if you use something like Net-Results integrated with GoToWebinar, you can build a custom landing page and form that automatically registers the user into a webinar AND sets the tracking cookie. Then, after someone registers for a webinar, you get the added benefit of executing all of your pre-built automation rules, like scoring prospects for specific webpage visits, alerting sales staff, etc.
Additionally, webinar software itself has a limited amount of follow-up actions that can be done, email reminders being the usual extent of options. However, if you’ve integrated your webinar software with marketing automation, a whole set of new options become available. Aside from the standard follow-up email series, you can set actions to add new webinar registrants to additional marketing lists, segment webinar attendees vs. absentees for different nurturing paths and apply lead scoring rules.
Further, by connecting marketing automation and webinar software, and having your marketing automation connected to your CRM, you’re able to pass all the relevant prospect and lead data regarding various webinar attendance right into your CRM. Your sales team now has better information on the prospect to have a more relevant follow-up conversation. Instead of having to manually provide attendance lists in spreadsheets to your sales team, your marketing automation software will automatically give sales all the info they need to follow-up with each and every prospect or lead coming from your webinars.
Lastly, if a sales person really wants to be savvy, they could do the following (as an example):
Set-up a few recurring webinar series for, say, their introductory sales calls and build an auto-responder for lead gen forms that automatically sends them an invite to join one of these recurring webinar times. By doing this, they are automating their follow-up, scheduling and getting alerts to when leads schedule with them vs. having to manually reach out, propose various times and do unnecessary back and forth scheduling. Once someone schedules, they can trigger also other actions like adding to a “hot leads” list to move them into a nurturing campaign, set a reminder or task in their CRM, etc.
As you can see, marketing automation integrated with webinar software can provide you powerful ongoing marketing, lead generation and sales automation functionality.
