The last couple of years has been full of challenges, but if there were any good that came out of it, it would probably be the rise in popularity of virtual events. While most organizations were skeptical, they realized that switching to virtual events can actually help them gain more attendees. This can be attributed to the fact that people can join now from anywhere in the world at any time.

With this boom in the number of attendees joining your webinars online, you now have access to a whole new set of data.

Who is interested in your virtual events?
What percentage of the registrants are actually joining the event?
Are they staying all the way until the end, or do people drop off early?
Who is engaged in the webinar polls?

Suddenly, you now have new webinar information that you didn’t have before. Typically, you can check this data in your webinar platform. Sadly, having data is not enough. You should collect this data and compare it to other information you have on your audience. The best way to do this is to connect your webinar platform with your CRM.

This article will go over four reasons why connecting your webinar platform with your CRM is crucial.

The 4 Reasons Why You Should Connect Your Webinar Platform With Your CRM

1. Get a holistic view of your attendees.

Half of the marketing battle is learning more about your target audience. The more data you collect on your audience, the more you learn about them. To do this effectively, you need to connect their webinar information with their contact information in your CRM. Connecting the webinar information to your CRM can give you a more holistic view of who they are.

Here are a few examples:

• Are they new to the organization, or have they been involved with your organization before?
• Where are the registrants from?
• Are they a current member, or have they purchased something from you before?
• How did they learn about your webinar?
• Have they attended webinars or events in the past? If yes, which ones?
• For nonprofits: Are they current donors? If yes, small or large donors?
• and so forth…

All of this information is important not only for marketers to make better campaigns but for the entire organization when making decisions.

Send personalized communication based on their webinar activities

When you add your webinar data into your CRM, you can not only communicate with your audience right away, but you can also send them more personalized messages. Here are a few of the types of messages you can send to your attendees.

• Information regarding your webinar to ensure a higher attendance rate.
• A personalized thank-you note to your attendees once the webinar is over.
• Invitations for future webinars they might be interested in, depending on the data you have about them.

Once you have your attendee data on a CRM, you can quickly go in and create specialized campaigns for different audiences. This results in campaigns with better conversion rates overall.

Learn from your past webinars and improve future ones

If your organization is doing more webinars in the future, try to learn from your past webinars to improve future ones. Connecting your webinar platform with your CRM can help with that. When you have all of your webinar data in your CRM, you can analyze the success of your webinar in more detail. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself when checking your past webinars to help improve your next one.

• Is your webinar reaching your target audience?
• What percentage of your attendees are converting after your webinar?
• How is the last webinar compared to the success of your previous one?
• How many new leads did you gain by holding a webinar?

Studying your data and comparing it to your most important metrics will help you increase the success of future events.

Access advanced webinar reports

Creating reports is a smart way for you to take a good look at your data. But what a report can tell you heavily depends on the data you have available. The idea is simple, the more data, the more comprehensive your reports can become. Once you add your webinar data to your CRM, you will be able to use all of that data to pull more in-depth reports. Here are a few examples of reports you can create with your attendee data:

• List of repeat registrants and/or attendees
• Your most engaged Contacts and/or Leads based on webinar attendance
• Contacts and/or Leads who spent the most time in your webinars
• New Contacts or Leads gathered by doing webinars
• All registrants and/or attendees who live in X geographical area

Contact and/or Lead’s Webinar History

• Contact and/or Lead’s who attended X, Y, and Z webinars
• Contact and/or Lead’s who attended at least X amount of webinars
• Contact and/or Lead’s who spent at least X amount of time in webinars

How to integrate your webinar platform with your CRM

This depends on what webinar platform and CRM you are using. Your best option is to research an existing integration for your current setup. All integrations have their pros and cons, so choose one that fits your needs the best. If you don’t find an existing solution, you should see if you can create one using a connector tool like Zapier or iAutomate. Depending on the CRM you are using, you can also check out if they have native apps available.

In case you are using Zoom Webinar and Salesforce, check out ZFusion. The integration will automatically add all of your Zoom Webinar data into Salesforce. It helps you automatically collect attendance data and comes with many pre-built reports. It’s a straightforward option that you can choose if you want to connect your Zoom Webinar account to Salesforce.

Reaping the Benefits of an Integrated CRM and Webinar Platform

Adding your webinar data into your CRM can help you understand your webinar performance, audience, and success on a much deeper level. It will also allow you to pull advanced reports using your existing CRM data to give you advanced insights at a glance that you will be able to analyze and present to your leadership team. All of these things will have a positive impact on your marketing efforts in the long run.

Outline

With the bigger interest in virtual events, platforms like Zoom, EverWebinar, WebEx and Demio have been booming.

Virtual events – booming , You are gathering a lot of information via webinars that you didn’t have before

3 reasons why connecting your Webinar platform with your CRM is crucial

• Learn more about your audience: Who are they? What events are they interested in? Who are your most engaged people based on events they are attending?
• Use the webinar information and other information you gathered on your leads to segment your audience further and send them personalized information. Easily send event reminders to your audience
• Improve your webinar experience based on the newly learned information

How to integrate your webinar platform with your CRM.

Depends on what platform you are using