Webinars Made Simple: How to Host a Killer Webinar on Splash
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Written by Camille Sides

@camillesides
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Webinars Made Simple: How to Host a Killer Webinar on Splash

November 13, 2017

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Webinars Made Simple: How to Host a Killer Webinar on Splash
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Written by Camille Sides

@camillesides

Webinars Made Simple: How to Throw a Killer Webinar on Splash

November 13, 2017

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:

1. Integrations: Ensuring Our Teams and Technologies Talk to Each Other

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.



1. Community
Building and strengthening our members’ sense of belonging.

 
2. Engagement

Creating opportunities to deliver a complete Equinox experience to drive advocacy, retention, and acquisition.


3. Scale

Leveraging technology to manage, evolve, and expand our events strategy.


Using these 3 major tenets and a killer events program, Matt was able to get better customer engagement, less churn, and, ultimately, everyone’s goal -- more customers.


See how below:

Want your event to run as smoothly as a duck? Here are 5 best practices for reaching your highest door goals.

2. The Homepage: Landing Pages and the Agenda

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.

equinox marketing strategy

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.

Individual Landing Pages: Keeping Them Consistent and On-Brand

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:

equinox marketing strategy
equinox marketing strategy


The Agenda: Making it Easy For Attendees to Navigate

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.

For example, clicking on the schedule? See what’s coming up in the next few weeks.

equinox marketing strategy

 

Viewing an instructor’s bio? Check out the additional sessions they’ll be teaching:

equinox marketing strategy


Looking at the Session 6 page?  You can easily return to look at the series from numerous places.

equinox marketing strategy


3. Registrations: Lead Forms, Confirmations, Check-Ins

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.

equinox marketing strategy

Event Marketing Budget Decisions

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.

equinox marketing strategy

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.

 

Webinar Check-In

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.

4. Communication Strategy: Pre- to Post- Tactics

3. Scaling: Putting it All Together with Technology and Data

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.

 The Post-Event Strategy: Surveys and the On-Demand 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.

The On-Demand Recording

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!

 

Bonus: Splash Webinar Tricks to Make Your Life Easier

We used a couple of useful Splash tricks to avoid repeating the same steps over and over.


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.


Summer always goes by too fast.

In-Person Event Marketing

Lead Generation

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.

❤️  Special thanks to Zach Napolitano for his help with this post.


Event Technology

• Event technology can help increase event attendance by 20%, increase productivity by 27%, and decrease costs by 20-30% (Source - Enterprise Event Marketing)  
• 88% of B2B companies use content marketing (Source - Forbes)
• The most used technologies by event planners are photobooths (45%), event apps (44%) and livestreaming tools (44%) (Source - Engaging Events)

• 64% of event planners find it difficult to secure budget for event technology tools (Source - State of Mobile Event Technology Report)
• 53% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority. (HubSpot, 2017) (Source - Hubspot)
• 73% of surveyed consumers found that content with a strong personality helps in forming loyal relationships (Source - Econsultancy)
• By 2019, video will account for 80% of global internet traffic, and 85% in the US (Source - Cisco)

Email Marketing Campaigns for Events

• Over a third of email subscribers read their newsletters exclusively on mobile devices (Source - Unlockd)
• 74% of marketers say that email is their most commonly used tool for event promotion (Source - Marketing Charts)
• More than 75% of B2C companies use email marketing to promote their events (Source - Hubspot)
• Email marketing was the top channel for increase in digital marketing spend over the last year, with 61% of marketers increasing their investment (Source - TopRank)

• 50% of event marketers say that getting attendees to respond to their event invites is their largest challenge (Source - Hubspot)

Attendee Engagement and Experience

• 53% of event professionals say that their attendees want greater interaction with speakers at their events (Source - Engaging Events)

• 91% of event professionals stated that increasing engagement at their events was an important priority for their organization (Source - Engaging Events)

• 48% of event attendees find in-person interactions with brands more valuable than 2 years ago (Source - Live Marketing)

Marketing and Event Automation Integration

• 14% of marketers plan to integrate marketing automation with their events and only 7% currently do (Source - Capterra).

 

Event Promotion

• The average B2B company spends 5-8 weeks planning an event (Source - Hubspot)
• 87% of B2Bs use social media to promote events (the third most popular channel), and it ranks as the second most effective channel for event promotion, tying with websites at 68% of respondents (Source - eMarketer)

 

Increasing Sales Pipeline

• 83% of brands say that their #1 reason for event participation is increasing sales (Source - Live Marketing)
• 65% of brands say that their event and experiential programs are directly related to sales (Source  - EMI & Mosaic)
• The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics stated conventions and events are expected to expand by 44% from 2010 to 2020 (Source - U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)

Event Follow-up

We all know event data is important. But does it even matter if you don't know what to do with it? Learn how to effectively use and distribute your event data.

See how they built it:



Do you have what it takes to leverage event technology? Learn more from Matt Burton in this 20-minute video.

event-team-collaboration-app

Not only is it helpful to quickly solve any issues (and there are always issues), but it’s also helpful to communicate with your team inside the venue on the status of check-ins. Most importantly, alert your sales team that their VIP guests have arrived.

5. Dos-and-Donts for Not Breaking The Law: Keep Count Of Your Attendee Numbers

The last thing you want to think about is hitting capacity. Because hitting capacity for your event would be a good thing… right?


Unfortunately, not keeping track of the number of attendees, and subsequently, violating fire permit laws, is a common problem for many event planners. Avoid this by using an old-fashioned clicker or the Splash App using the “checked out” status -- that’s key for tracking who’s in and out of the space.


Pro tip: have the fire permit in hand and contract printed out. And have another person keep track of how it feels inside the event, whether it’s hot in the venue or too crowded.


A couple good questions to consider asking the venue manager about the space:


• How many people in the venue makes it feel full?

• How many people makes it feel empty?

• Where can lines form?
• How many people can be at the bar at a time? (A typical drink order takes about 2 minutes. Alleviate bar crowds by having cocktail waitresses holding pre-made drinks.)

Bonus Details:

Timing: Start Door Duty an Hour Before Event

Sure, attendees may arrive late. Sure, you may still be organizing right up until the last minute. But people will begin showing up 25 minutes after starting time, which means, security has to be ready for the flow of arrivals. Some people will also arrive early and if the door isn’t staffed, you don’t want these people sneaking in before it’s time.

Staff Up: The Golden 1:50 Ratio

To maintain organization, have a 1:50 ratio between the company and guests. This may vary based on how complex the on-site registration is.

Veterans know: there is no such thing as too many RSVPs

When I was a rookie planner, I remember being very nervous that there were too many RSVPs and the right people wouldn't get in.

 

As much as the experience at the door matters, remember: a packed event is a good thing. A very good thing. A line makes you look popular, and people don't really mind waiting (if it moves). Much worse than over crowding is UNDER crowding... no one likes an empty room.  And when someone on your team is stressing, tell them to chill. You got this.

Do you have what it takes to leverage event technology? Learn more from Matt Burton in this 20-minute video.

author

Camille Sides

Camille Sides was a Client Success Intern at Splash for Summer 2017. She is currently a fourth-year student at the University of Virginia, majoring in Media Studies and American Studies and plotting her return to NYC.

About the Author

Ben Hindman is co-founder and CEO of Splash, the country's fastest-growing event marketing platform that helps businesses and brands more effectively market through their events. An event planner turned tech entrepreneur, events are in Ben’s DNA. Prior to starting Splash, Ben was the Director of Events at Thrillist, where he produced large-scale events from concerts to mystery fly-aways.

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