Webex Webinars

Act-On's Webex integration lets you schedule and manage Webex Webinars in Act-On. Registration, invitation emails, reminders, and follow-ups are all built in Act-On, and attendance data flows back for reporting, lead scoring, and CRM sync.

Connect Act-On to Webex

1. In Act-On, go to Settings > Connectors > Webinar > Cisco Webex.
2. Under Webex Webinars (New), click +Connect.
3. Enter your Webex account details.

Using Webex for the first time

Once the connector is set up, you can reach the Webinars area two ways:

• Automation > Webinars, or
• Quick Start menu on the Start page > Events and Webinars.

On the home page, you will see a notification telling you which Webex account you are connected to, so you can change accounts if needed. The listing has two tabs, Upcoming and Past, and all times are shown in your browser's time zone.

If you have used this Webex account to schedule webinars before connecting to Act-On, both past and upcoming events are pulled in automatically. If this is a brand-new Webex account, the tabs will be empty until you create your first webinar.

For more on the listing and how to manage it, see Managing the Webex Events and Webinars Listing.

Schedule a webinar

In the Webinars listing, click New Webex Webinar in the upper-right corner to open the scheduling page. Fill in the following:

• CRM: if Act-On is integrated with Salesforce, choose whether to make this event part of a Salesforce campaign.
• Webex Event Type: reflects the options available on your Webex plan.
• Event Name: title of your webinar.
• Date: date and start time.
• Time Zone: the zone shown on event collateral (can be different from your profile zone).
• Duration: intended length of the webinar.
• Password: must conform to the password rules set by your Webex site administrator.
• Teleconference: Webex teleconference options, including Mute on Entry and Attendee Entrance (beep, silent, or name-announce).
• Unlisted: tick this to hide the webinar from your company's public Webex listing.
• Alerts: optional email alert containing full webinar details, sent to an address you specify. You can also send it later from the Webinar Details page.

Click Create Webex Webinar in the upper-right to create the webinar in Webex and open the Webinar Program Editor.

Webinar header icons

Once you are inside a webinar, the header gives you quick access to the most common actions:

• Details: shows the important links for the host, panelists, and attendees. If you are not the host, use the Send Webinar Details link at the bottom of the panel to pass the host link on.
• Panelists: opens the panel to add panelists. Add them one at a time (Webex is notified each time), then hover over a panelist to send their invitation. If a panelist loses their join URL, grab it from Details.
• Start: begin the webinar immediately.
• Campaign (Salesforce only): change the Salesforce campaign associated with the webinar.
• Edit: change the webinar's scheduling details.
• Refresh: reload the browser view.
• Close: saves your changes and returns you to the listing.

Build forms and messages

In the Webinar Program Editor you build everything your registrants will see: the registration form, auto-response, promotional emails, reminders, and follow-ups. Before you start, double-check that the title and time of the webinar are correct.

Registration

Click Create Default Form or Copy Existing Form.

• Create Default Form: creates both a form and an auto-response email in one go. Each contains the standard and custom fields defined in your webinar. Click Continue to edit the default messaging. Hover over Signup Form or Auto-Response Message to edit them individually.
• Copy Existing Form: opens a list of every registration form you have already built. Click a title to preview, then click Copy to use it as the starting point for this webinar.

Edit the default registration form

The default form picks up whatever branding you have already set for your templates. Every field can be edited, moved, deleted, or replaced with a new one.

Registration and attendance automatically become part of each contact's Act-On Activity History, which you can use for lead scoring and list segmentation. A couple of extras worth knowing about:

• You can cookie registrants for Beacon Tracking, which lets you trigger alerts when someone who registered later visits a particular page on your site.
• You can create multiple trackable URLs for the same form, one per channel (email, landing page, partner promo, ads), to see which promotional method drove the most registrations.

Edit the default auto-response

• Hover over Auto-Response Message to bring up the menu.
• Click Edit to open the message. This is the acknowledgement email that goes out when someone registers.
• Click Replace to swap in a different confirmation message instead.

Promotions

Here you build invitation emails and any "last chance" messages. These work like any Act-On email: new message, draft, template, previously sent message, pre-made HTML, or plain text are all options.

When building an invitation, you can pick the lists you will send to in Step 2 of message creation. If you skip that now, you can go back and add lists later.

Attach the registration form to your invitation

Your invitation email has to link to the registration form. Two ways:

• Hyperlink text or an image. Add or edit a rich text block, highlight the text (or click the image) you want to link, click Insert Link to Act-On Form, and pick the form for this webinar.
• Insert a Form Link. In the message builder, choose Insert Form Link and pick the form. Act-On adds a centred button that links to the form. If you do not provide a button image, the button is a dark blue rectangle.

The External Promotion option under 2. Promotions gives you a trackable URL for the form that you can use in external campaigns. Views, signups, and updates are all tracked. Once a promotional message has been sent, hover over it and click Open to see its performance report.

Reminders

Create one or more reminder messages for the time period before the event. Reminder messages work like any Act-On email: start from scratch, a draft, a template, a previously sent message, HTML, or plain text.

Follow-ups

After the event, there are three things you can do from the Follow-ups section:

• Click Attendance to import the attendee list from Webex. You can do this both before and after the event.
• Click Follow-up Segments to choose from three actions:
  • Upload registration: upload registered attendees to your Act-On database.
  • Import from Webex: trigger the Act-On/Webex sync manually.
  • Create Segments: create segments (for example, attendees, no-shows) so you can send tailored follow-ups.
• Create one or more new follow-up messages.

Choose or change an invitation list

If you skipped picking a list when you created your invitation, you can go back any time. Open the Webinar Program Editor, go to Promotions > Invitation, open the unsent invitation, and move to Step 2: Address. By default the message sends to full lists, but you can switch to segments, and you can suppress any lists or segments that should not receive it.

Whenever an invitation is sent, Act-On automatically suppresses anyone who has already registered, so that suppression never has to be built by hand.

Reporting

After the event, click Reports at the top of the webinar dashboard. The first page shows a graphic summary of attendees, registrations, event views, and segments, plus a list of registrants and whether they attended.

Click Change Reports to drill into:

• Webinar activity: including traffic sources and length of attendance.
• Messages: invitations, last-chance invitations, reminders, and follow-ups.

You can also click Registrations for every registrant and their data, or Promotions to see how individual messages and traffic sources performed.

Sync registration data to your CRM

Act-On pushes registration data to Salesforce, SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics, and Infor CRM.

Salesforce campaign mapping

Salesforce users can link the webinar to a Salesforce campaign so a contact's status updates automatically as they move through the event.

1. On the webinar header, click the Salesforce campaign icon.
2. Click Change to select an existing campaign or create a new one.
3. Map each webinar status (Initial, Invited, Registered, Attended) to a status in your Salesforce campaign.

When promotional messages go out, existing Salesforce campaign members are moved to Invited. As contacts register or attend, their status updates to Registered or Attended, and new registrants are added to the campaign if they are not already members.

Related articles

• Managing the Webex Events and Webinars Listing
• Promoting Multiple Webex Events Sessions from One Interface