Imagine this: you are going to host a webinar on a platform that is integrated with Marketo. You build beautiful landing pages, set up emails, create a flawless registration process for your Marketo program. You get hundreds, no thousands of registrants. Miraculously 90% of them attended the webinar and let you know that they love your content. The sales team parades you around the office in your chair hoisted up on their shoulders chanting something like “Who do we love? Marketing! Why do we love them? Too many reasons to list!”
Then you snap back to reality from your daydream and realize that while all of that may in fact have been true, you’re faced with the minor inconvenience of the [silly] people who register for the webinar after the event has taken place. (Come on people, do you not look at the dates?). While this doesn’t seem like a huge deal, and really it’s not, it can still mess with your membership data (why are there 2 people sitting in the “registered” status when everyone else is distributed between “attended” and “no show”?), and it can cause those [silly] people to get a little annoyed that they can’t actually attend the live event.
While Marketo did promise landing page expiration settings at last year’s Summit, we’re still waiting for that feature so, in the meantime, here’s a simple way to manage your registration pages after a live event. The solution does require some time and planning but, if you incorporate it into your regular program checklist process, you really won’t notice a difference in the time it takes to optimize your events.
Some people’s first instinct is to edit the registration landing page copy as soon as the event is over to reflect some verbiage like, “sorry, this event has taken place”. We hesitate to make any changes to a registration page, because if you ever wanted to go back and assess what made this particular page have that killer conversion rate, or clone it for a future webinar’s page, you’ve lost all original copy. Instead, create a landing page in design studio that is a generic “sorry this event has already taken place” page, with a link to your on-demand recordings, resource library, whatever makes the most sense for your business. Then, set a reminder on your calendar for the day of the event and create a redirect rule in Admin from your registration page to this generic post-event page. (Note: to create a redirect rule, go into Admin>Landing Pages>Rules>New>New Redirect Rule).
The result is that you’ve prevented people from registering post-event, provided them a direct link to access recordings of other webinars (or even this one if you’re quick to post after the event is done!), and retained all original copy and layout of the registration page for reference. Now I’ll leave you get back to your daydreams about sales throwing confetti as you regally strut down the red carpet between cubicles…
– Vivi Gehan
