Recently I was presented with a fun challenge: one of our Marketing Managers wanted to host a workshop series, and, during campaign planning, we discussed the possibility of using a single form where leads could choose one or more sessions.
Having never had the chance to set something up like this, I took some time to investigate how to do it and was then able to implement exactly what my stakeholder wanted. So, now I get to share the process with you all – let's dive in!
Getting Started
A few things to know before you start implementing your webinar series:
- Confirm the number of sessions (you’ll use this in your program and form setup)
- A Custom Field will be used as the basis for your form functionality
- An Operational Program will manage the form process
- Multiple Webinar Programs will manage the individual session processes
To give a more illustrative view of how things will look, here’s a general workflow from @Josh_Hill13 (ref: How to Setup Recurring Webinars in Marketo).
Setup Your Custom Field
In Marketo, go to Admin > Field Management > New Custom Field (ref: Create a Custom Field in Marketo) to set up your Webinar Date Code field.
- Type: String
- Name: Webinar Date Code
- API Name: webinarDateCode (Marketo will generate this for you)
Notes: As this field is only being used in Marketo, it doesn't need to be mapped to SFDC or MS Dynamics (or any other CRM).
Setup Your Operational Program
Create an Operational Program to house your form, landing pages (if applicable), and emails. Here’s my testing setup for reference/inspiration:
Form
Note: I used a Marketo form embedded on our website.
- Include whichever fields you require for webinar sign up
- Add your new Webinar Date Code field to the form and choose Field Type: Checkboxes
- Add all the session dates for your series (the display value is what leads will see on the form; the stored value is what Marketo will use – keep this compact)
- Make the Webinar Date Code a required field
Smart Campaign
- Smart List:
- Use a trigger to pull in leads that fill out your webinar form
- Add a second filter to ensure that the Webinar Date Code field is not empty (this is built-in redundancy as it should be a required form field)
- Flow:
- Use a Request Campaign flow step for every option in your series (i.e. if there are two sessions, use two), with a constraint to identify the session the lead has chosen (you may have to come back to this if you haven’t set up your webinar programs yet)
- Add a Wait Step to allow the campaign to work, emails to send etc., before resetting the Webinar Date Code to NULL (allows the lead to come back to the form in the future and not have any issues with prefilled fields)
- Schedule:
- This will be activated as a Trigger campaign when you’re ready
- Update the settings to allow a lead to run through the flow every time
Emails
We like to send an alert email to stakeholders to:
- Let them know when someone fills out the form
- Show which session(s) the lead has chosen
- Optional: Prompt the stakeholder to go into the respective webinar program and approve the lead’s registration (we Waitlisted everyone so that the team could monitor registrants for competitors etc.)
Landing Page(s)
If you’re hosting this webinar series form on a Marketo landing page, be sure to have a related thank you page that includes information about the session(s) that the lead has signed up for.
Set Up Your Webinar Programs
You will need one webinar program per session and each program should house a Smart Campaign to add leads to that program (this is what the Operational Program will request and is one of the most important elements of this process):
Note: The Webinar Date Code value should be match the program it’s part of.
Check and Test!
Once you have all the various elements set up, it’s important to check the following:
- Make sure your dates and assets/campaigns match in their respective webinar programs – you don’t want someone registering for Session 1 and getting information for Session 2, for example
- If you set the Operational Program up before the Webinar Programs, go back to your Operational Smart Campaign and add the appropriate Webinar smart campaigns to the Request Campaign flow steps
- Make sure you’re always using “contains” for the Webinar Date Code – this is especially important when leads are allowed to choose more than one session in a series so that Marketo looks for any value (see Setup Multi Asset and Webinar Registration on One Page by Josh Hill and this Marketo Community post for more details)
When you’re ready, activate your respective smart campaigns, and run tests for single and multiple selections on the form to check that everything flows as it should. Now you can show off your webinar series form skills to your stakeholders 🙌
Note: If you use an integrated webinar platform that uses forms (GoToWebinar, WebEx), check out this Community post for specifics on how to manage a multi-session webinar.
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