Webinars are a great marketing initiative in engaging and warming up leads, but also acquiring new ones. The challenge I came across when I started using Marketo, is how to build a webinar program from scratch? After spending endless hours reading various articles, testing different ways, I though it will be a great idea to put my knowledge in a blog and help you spare the time in building a Webinar Program.
First and foremost, choose your webinar provider. I have experience of using GoToWebinar, and Webex by Cisco. Both platforms have their pros and cons, choose wisely. If you need help in evaluating, you can always reach out to me.
1. Create a Webinar Program Template
Start of by crafting your webinar program template. Decide on a naming convention you would like to follow, I have been using
[Year]-[Month/Quarter]-[Webinar]-[Webinar_Name], for example:
2017-June-Webinar-How_to_be_efficient
I suggest you to not use spacing in between, if you would like you can use UTM_campaign, when building your UTM tags…. I will come to this a bit later.
Create Tokens:
As Marketo defines it “token is a variable that can be used in emails, landing pages, and smart campaign to make your life easier.” You can read about the different tokens in Marketo Docs.
Create local tokens, i.e tokens that lie within the program (on a program level). You can add as many tokens as you wish to make your life easier. We will use these tokens in the emails.
Organize the Folders in Your Program:
The smart campaign folder contains the smart campaigns we need to execute the webinar material, from Invitation to Follow up.
Invitation
With this smart campaign you can send one general invitation to your targeted audience. My recommendation is to send the invitation 3 weeks prior to the webinar start date.
In the smart list, select the filters to create the audience that should receive the Invitation. An example can be either or all of these:
In the Flow step have the following filters:
Select Schedule -> Run Once
Invitation
The second invitation can be send one week prior to the webinar as personal invitation from one of your sales team, or the speaker of the webinar. (use Blank Template, and create short email, as you would send an email to your prospects).
The setup of this Smart Campaign can be as below:
And the Flow:
2. Registration Confirmation
This step is great to test before you actually send out the Invitation emails. First you need to send the invitation to yourself, click on the CTA button, fill out the form on the landing page, and see if you will receive the confirmation email. If you do, WELL DONE!
In the Smart List you can use the following trigger:
*Note: You shouldn’t see red underline, that means something is wrong or doesn’t exist.
The flow should look like this: 
3. Reminder Email
The Reminder emails is best to be sent automatically from your webinar provider. You will save a lot of time putting the emails together. The webinar provider emails contain useful information on how to join the webinar.
4. Follow Up emails
The information of your attendees and non-attendees will be synced after some time from the webinar provider. You won’t need to worry to extract the data and/or manually changing it. When the sync is ready you should be able to see how many attendees and non-attendees you got. The easiest way to see that is to click on your program.
No Show and Attended will get the numbers. When that is done, it’s time to send the follow up emails.
Thank you for attending
The smart campaign Thank you for Attending can be set up like below: In the smart list drag and drop the filter Member of Program. To add Program and Program Status fields, click on Add Constraint.
The flow has an easy setup: just choose the Thank You for attending email. A tip is to include the recording link, PPT slides, and a few action points or CTAs with related articles, or contact us.
Sorry we missed you (SWMY)
The same set up as above, BUT make sure to change the program status and the email:
