Event nurture - best practice

[Ellie_Boardman-]

I'm currently working on an event nurture program and looking for a few tips around best practice. Our events team work on hundreds of seminars per year which are currently managed outside of Marketo but we are looking for the most efficient way to manage this volume in Marketo.

Each event currently has its own page on our website. Would you suggest one global event registration form (rather than having to create separate local forms for each event)?

Due to events currently being a visible area on our website, would it be best for the emails to link to these individual event pages rather than duplicating work and creating separate LPs? Also, if we have one global form, how will this work if this sits on the event pages on our website in terms of knowing which event they’ve registered for/reporting? Would this be through a SC – ‘completed form = <event registration form> with constraint ‘on web page = <event webpage>?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Ellie,

You may want to use 1 program for each event (so that you can manage registrations and attendees) + an umbrella program for the registration. The umbrella program will host your web registration page and have a form field to capture the session on which someone wants to register. You will need a custom field (let's call it "Registration date") to store that info + a smart campaign:

• smart list
  • trigger: fills out form
• flow
  • change program status. Choices
    • if registration date = day X -> add to program event day X
    • if registration date = day Y -> add to program event day Y
    • ...
  • change data value. attribute= Registration date, new value = NULL (so that it is blanked immediately, and can reused if the lead wants to register again)

In each event program, you will have an confirmation email that is sent to the person who just registered.

The hard point will be to permanently edit the form in the umbrella program to maintain the list of dates accurate, remove past event and add newly planned ones.

-Greg

[Ellie_Boardman-]

Thanks for the quick response Greg.

Just to make things more complicated, we often have more than one event on one date so unfortunately I don't think we could use the 'registration date' as a field to determine which event they want to register for. Each event does have its own reference number/campaign ID, which is also linked to SF. If I create an extra field on the form for 'event reference number'  which can made clearly visible on the specific event webpage, do you think this would be the best option?

Then would the umbrella program/smart campaign be the same as you suggest but changing 'registration date' to 'reference number'? If they come directly through the website then 'add to program <event>' would work but if they already exist in the event program and were sent the initial email invitation, go to the site & fill out the form - in the original program would I just have a smart campaign which is:

• filled out form <event form> - on webpage <event webpage>
• reference number = xxxxx
• change program status = 'registered' --> send trigger confirmation?

The current event process is very manual for the team - there is one event form which sits on every event webpage. The events team receive the form submission which is then passed to BST to follow up with a phone call to confirm which event they want to register for. The current form does show their 'last visited webpage' but obviously this isn't 100% accurate in terms of determining that's the event they wish to register for. Any process we can implement to support and automate this process would be fantastic.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Ellie,

Yes of course, the custom field can contain anything you want. You can even have it display something and store an internal code. The hard point is that it will not be possible to have this field getting its list of values from SFDC, as this is likely a campaign field in SFDC and campaign fields do not sync to Marketo. So you will have to maintain the list of values in your Marketo form.

And yes, if you have a Landing Page for each smart campaign, you can have a smart campaign to send the registration confirmation. Just change the "filled out form" (a filter) with "fills out form" (a trigger).

You also should consider preparing 1 program template, put as many things as you want in program tokens, and then clone it to create all the event instances and just change the token values. It will save a huge amount of time and reduce the potential errors.

This process is where a few ideas I have entered in the past would come handy though:

• ​
• ​

-Greg

[Dory_Viscoglio]

If you are always going to be using the same fields for your events, then having a single form will definitely be easiest. This also allows you to tweak the form overall, and not need to update 100+ forms. You could either do a constraint on the trigger campaign as you mentioned, or you could use a hidden field on the form that would populate based on a value in the URL.

[Ellie_Boardman-]

Thanks Dory - sorry, I hadn't seen your response before I replied to Greg.

Could I create a hidden field that populates the relevant event reference number I've mentioned above once the form is submitted? Although not sure how I would create this so it's bespoke for each event on the one form? The reference number/campaign ID will be synced between SF-Marketo once set up.

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Hey Ellie, yes, you could have something like www.yourwebsite.com/landing page name?eventid=1234. As long as there is a hidden field on the form to capture the event ID, you will now know that someone registered for event 1234.

Also, I should have mentioned this before, but in rereading your original post this sounds like a phenomenal use-case for tokens. Tokens will minimize the amount of duplicate work that you have to do for each event, while allowing customization of each program. Even if there are a lot of unique things for each event, this will give you the framework to make creating each of these much less onerous. I'm going to apologize in advance if the next few parts are too basic... I figure this might be helpful if you don't already have a template program set up that you just clone for each of your programs.

At the top level, I would make this into individual programs for each event. The program would house the event page, the thank you page, the follow up emails, and the smart campaigns for the program. There would also be numerous {{my.tokens}} for things like event name, event date, event time, event location, etc. This way, your thank you email and follow up emails could look something like:

     Thank you for registering for {{my.event name}}.

     Date: {{my.event date}}

     Time: {{my.event time}}

     Add to Calendar (hyperlinked to {{my.add to calendar}})

The landing pages could easily be tokenized in the same way.

The benefit of this (in case you don't already have this), is you would be able to clone a template program that you've created as an outline, update each of the tokens 1x, activate your campaigns, and you're potentially ready to launch. Once you've created the template/outline, the majority of the work is done. 

If you're interested in learning more about how tokens can help with creating these 100+ programs, there are a ton of threads that will get more in depth than I have here. Hope this helps!

[Ellie_Boardman-]

Thank you both for your help & in-depth answers - really helpful!

[Anonymous]

As Greg and Dory noted, your use case is perfect for optimization using tokens.

I wanted to offer one other thought around where to house the registration campaign. Greg made a great case for creating that at the global level if you wanted to consolidate pages.

I am not sure if this works in your case, but another option is to house that registration progression campaign within the event program itself and not worry about reg date, ids, etc. For the trigger, you could use the page constraint of the program's local page while using a single global form (assuming form is always the same).

This would make sense if you want to create a page for every event so you can make each event page relevant (Use photo of Miami for events in Miami). Using above with combination of tokens will create a ton of effociencies in your process.