Live event registration via Marketo

[Anonymous]

We'll be holding an event with multiple shows and limited space for each show. For simplicity let's say we have 5 daily shows with 500 attendees capacity for each. We would like to leverage Marketo for registration purposes and tracking purposes, in which the user chooses what event he would like to attend, depending on availability of course. Does Marketo have an integrated solution for such activity, and if not, who is your partner for this type of activity? Preferably we would also like to send out and approval SMS with a unique code.

[Anonymous]

We've leveraged Marketo for some of our event registrations and tracking.  I'm not aware of any Marketo solution that would accomplish what you are looking for.  We have set up the event where each session has its own program and we checked people in as they attended the session.

You have to be careful using Marketo for event registration, especially if you are synched with somethimg like Salesforce.  Marketo updates records based on email address, so any change in a person's profile is updated.  This can get especially messy when someone tries to register multiple people with the same email address (i.e. one team member tries to register an entire team but wants all correspondence sent to the same email address).  Sorry for the tangent there.  Just wanted to give a quick warning.  We had to spend a fair amount of time updating our CRM after an event registration because of incorrect edits synched over.

[Anonymous]

There a number of live event vendors that integrate with Marketo (looks like Marketo uses CVENT for their own events). 

I'd check out launchpoint and evaluate the different features based on what you need. 

[Josh_Hill13 · Accepted solution]

cvent and eventbrite are the vendors you will likely want to go with for this level of control. The data will be sent through to Marketo in a Program.

Mike is right that you should control the data that gets sent back. Sometimes people try to register guests, etc on the same email. The event platform should be able to block that if you desire. You want unique emails for each guest.

[Anonymous]

Thank you guys,

I've checked your proposals and indeed Eventbrite seems as a good solution for our needs. I've also seen there's a 3rd party Marketo integration. The only pain is that I would like to connect this also with SMS approvals and reminders.

Any ideas?

[Anonymous]

Check out Twillio: https://launchpoint.marketo.com/twilio/986-twilio-sms-for-marketo/

I believe you can integrate SMS into your campaigns this way, so as long as Eventbrite does a passback upon registration you could then do reminders etc. via SMS potentially. 

I haven't used it myself but they are the well known SMS provider in the space. 

[Veronica_Holme4]

Hi - as Justin says, Twilio and many other SMS providers can give you API access to their SMS gateways - when Eventbrite updates the regstration status in your Marketo program, you can use this status change as a trigger to call a Marketo webhook to send out an SMS through the third party gateway. It's pretty seamless and I've used it to good effect many times.

[Anonymous]

Thanks guys,

I've looked into twilio, and indeed it seems as a proper solution for my needs

Thanks,
Arthur