On24 vs Marketo webinar invitations

[Milena_Volkova]

Hi everybody.

If you run a webinar in On24, you can send webinar email invitations from either Marketo or On24. What are the benefits and drawbacks of each platform where email invitations are concerned? We send from Marketo, but I realize I can control the look and feel of emails in On24, too, and it sounds like it might be more efficient to send emails from On24. (Our On24 instance is integrated with Marketo). 

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

Well, you can customize the look and feel of the emails in Marketo too. You might need to get help from a template developer to create a modular template with all the modules you would like to use in the email, but it's possible. Emails in Marketo are very customizable (and personalizable too); you get to write the HTML and CSS of the email, so customization is very much possible. Well, I'd slide with creating and sending emails out from Marketo, as it is far superior to ON24 in:

1. Advanced targeting and segmentation
2. Dynamic content and personalization
3. Nurturing sequences and follow-up campaigns: Easily set up pre- and post-webinar email sequences to keep your audience engaged and drive registrations and attendance.
4. Detailed reporting and analytics: leverage email performance reports in Marketo for email engagement analysis. This data could also be synced/downloaded to other BI/analytics platforms you have integrated with Marketo. You'd have to build a separate process to get this data from ON24 if you send email from there.
5. People run through all your operational setups based on the engagements via email sent from Marketo instead of having to build out a separate process/modify campaign criteria.
6. You've got all your people in Marketo, so you can just spin up a campaign within the program, set its filters, and you're good, whereas in ON24, you might have to import people you want to send invite email to if it doesn't have the people you want to target.

I think with ON24, you might be able to leverage the built-in webinar promotion tools (social sharing buttons and countdown timers) to boost registrations, but with a bit of customization, you can always add those (or similar) components to Marketo assets too (usually people add a count down time on the registration page linked in the email instead of adding it in the email itself).

Given that your platforms are integrated the registration data should flow from the source to the destination through it, so at the end of the day, you should have the registration data in both systems. Registrations that originate in Marketo are only added to the ON24 event by the webhook and Registrations that originate in ON24 will be known to ON24 before they are shared with Marketo.

Here's the latest Marketing Nation article on the New ON24 Webinar Integration for your (and for the people who read this in the future) reference. It has got the entire process including links to the setup instructions/links to the relevant ON24 documentation links.

[Katja_Keesom]

Totally agree with Darshil here. The whole point of integrating platforms like this is to have one central point where you manage and (importantly) track the engagement with your campaigns and that platform of choice in this case should be Marketo.