At the start of the summer, we launched an educational webinar series called the Summer Sessions and it had one main goal: to teach our community all there is to know about Splash.
This project first began as an experiment for developing more generalized Splash trainings, but ended up giving us something even more valuable: insight into how to effectively (and easily) execute an entire webinar strategy on our platform. Everything from landing pages to handling registrations to follow-up emails. And this insight and data made our next webinar series, Fall Semester, even better.
Now we’re giving you a look behind the scenes. Check out the process we used, which can be recycled for any company looking for new ways to engage with their customers -- whether it's through a virtual event or through product training.
See how we did it from beginning to end:
Before we did anything, we needed to make sure our entire organization was informed throughout the webinar series. After all, our goal was customer engagement -- which wouldn’t mean anything if we didn’t have the registrant data to pass on to the rest of our organization.
To ensure that our Sales and Customer Success teams were notified of any activity from their leads, contacts, and accounts, we needed to integrate Splash with three other technologies that would do all the communication and data syncing for us automatically:
1) Salesforce: Using Salesforce, we were able to sync registrant data to Salesforce (and back to Splash), which allowed the Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success teams to get a look at the prospect and customer engagement, automatically.
2) Slack: We set up a Slack channel to receive notifications whenever guests registered to sessions; and again later when they showed up to the webinar.
3) Zapier: Zapier integrates with GotoMeeting, the platform we used to host our webinars. You can use this integration to automatically add registrants to your webinar whenever a new registrant RSVPs on a Splash page.
Next, we needed a place to host our landing pages and agenda, and more importantly, direct our potential registrants somewhere they can revisit.
We began by creating a hub page, which was essentially the “homepage” for the series. From there, we linked out to separate pages for each individual session.
The hub page made it easy for our Sales and Customer Success team members to send out one easy link to potential Splash School attendees.
Post-event, we updated the hub to show which sessions had already happened and which ones were yet to come.
The great thing about a hub is that this happens automatically. Once an event is over, the hub listing automatically converts to a post-event "state.” Additionally, you can have the Splash pages automatically update to a post-event experience. Which means, the registration functionality is automatically replaced with the webinar recording.
Creating 6 identical and on-brand pages were easy. We only had to create one event page, and all its components (content, rsvp questions, confirmations, email templates). Then, to duplicate the pages, we saved that page as a template in Splash (a theme) that allows you to use the same theme to duplicate additional sessions without missing a detail.
To maintain consistency across all the pages (individual event pages and hub), we kept the header and footer the same throughout. This is accomplished with a feature called "Linked Blocks," which allows mass update consistent content sections, like a navigation or footer, by editing it one time.
See below:
We wanted information to be easy to find so that no prospective attendees were ever lost, so we hit them with buttons every chance we got. Multiple sessions were then featured on every single event page so that someone who signed up for Session 1 was encouraged to stick with us for the rest of the summer.
The interconnectivity of these session pages allow your users to easily move from one event to another, and choose the ones they want to register for.
Any time a guest registers to a webinar that’s listed on the hub, they’re automatically registered. Their information can then be accessed from the “Subscribers” tab in the hub.
Why are registrations valuable? When you throw a webinar, you're developing a list of program subscribers.
This is useful for two important reasons:
1. Building our database. Now we have a list of people we know are interested in webinars, meaning they will be targeted next time we roll out an education series, such as a webinar, workshop, or user groups event.
2. Building a targeted list. It's a list of people we can quickly email about the entire webinar series. If we add another session or run an incentive, we know we have a target audience that would be interested.
We had two different types of confirmation messages so that guests wouldn’t receive the same exact message in two places. On-Page confirmation screen displayed an ‘Add to Calendar’ function as well as a link back to the main series Hub where all the other sessions were listed.
The confirmation email included the link to join the webinar. We also included a ‘Day of Reminder,’ which will be sent a few hours before the webinar start time.
Making sure our guests were accounted for, we used the our check-in application to virtually check them off as they joined the webinar. That way, like previously stated, we can create distinct post-event communication for different segments of guests and distribute targeted content.
This brings us to our communication strategy.
We sent out emails before, during, and after our event using our Email Sender. Since we saved the email templates, they transferred over when the session pages were saved as a theme. From there, we just had to make a few quick switches to update them for future events.
What did we send? Here's every touchpoint:
1) The Invitation: we sent this off to all of our users, providing them with everything they needed to know about our Summer Sessions.
2) Registration Confirmation: Any time a guest registered for a session, they received a personalized confirmation email from us, as seen below.
3) Day of Reminder: This email provided a link to the GotoMeeting where guests could join the webinar:
4. Thank You Email: This email only went to users who attended the webinar. included an incentivized survey CTA (we talk more about surveys later).
5. On-Demand Webinar Recording: also linked were Help Center resources, which addressed questions that came up during the webinar.
When it came to sending out these emails, we utilized different guest statuses. Those who attended the webinar received a thank you, while everyone who registered (even if they didn’t end up making it) received the email with the webinar recording.
After giving the summer scoop in each webinar, we celebrated with ice cream. But our jobs weren’t over. Our post-event strategy was threefold (or fourfold if you count our ice cream celebration):
1) Thank You Email: We sent out the previously mentioned thank you email to all checked-in guests.
2) Survey CTA: Collecting Valuable Data
The thank you email included a link to a survey asking guests for their input on how we did. As a bonus we added a gift card incentive to encourage participants to take the survey. There also wasn't a need to create separate surveys for each session. All we did was include a question asking the guest to indicate which session they were giving feedback on.
The feedback we got was incredibly valuable. We used this data to come up with the topic list for our current series, Fall Semester.
We also got great information about ways we can improve the overall quality and professionalism of webinars in general, such as investing in better equipment for audio and visual and upgrading our webinar platform to one that allows for better chat and attendee gestures.
Just because our webinar was live, it didn’t mean we couldn’t reuse the content.
We embedded the webinar recording back on the session page and added it to our site's webinars page. This allowed anyone who wasn’t able to attend the session to still engage with the content afterwards.
Attending the webinar itself is great, as it gives you a chance to be an active participant and ask questions in the live chat box. But being able to watch and listen to the recording post event is still incredibly valuable as you can learn more about what’s being taught long after the live session has ended. And it’s also shareable!
1) Email Templates. This saved us a ton of time. Emails saved as templates on one session page were transferred over when the page saved as a theme, so we didn't have to manually create new emails for each session.
2) Linked Blocks. this feature allows you to save a block as “linked” and add it to other pages. This way,when you update it from the original site, your changes are automatically updated across all sites that you added it to.
3) Stages. This allowed us to prepare the post-event pages in advance of them going live.
4) Modals. We used these pop-out elements for the series schedule and instructor bios.
Luckily for you, our series didn't truly end. You have a whole new season of webinar sessions -- everything from Splash basics to mobile optimization to our powerful Salesforce integration (mentioned in this blogpost!).
Sign up or get caught up on our newest webinar series, Fall Webinars. Learn more about it.
