If your managing events, webinars or teleconferences there are several levers you can push to increase the success of your next event. You’ll want to pay close attention to; list size, registration rate and attendance rate. If you’d like some ideas to use to increase your registration conversion, and you haven’t tried pre-populated data on your landing page form, you might want to check this out… Over the past year, I’ve been able to successfully convert between 50-90% of landing page visitors into a registration (depending on the offer).
If you’re already an Eloqua user, you might not be too impressed with this overview, but hopefully my conversion rates detail will be helpful. I’ve been using pre-pop technology for the past three years with Eloqua, so I was surprised again at how unique this tool is when speaking with another email service provider last Friday. I’ve been toying with a few different platforms with other projects I’ve been doing. While on the phone with the “other” providers support group… I was trying to find out if I could pre-pop the data from the database into the prospects form. I’ll just put it this way, I had to repeat my question two or three times before they even understood what I was asking about…
If you’re familar with the typical email drop, landing page / squeeze page strategy, you typically could expect somewhere between 5-20% conversion on a form page. You gain a significant advantage when you can use an integrated technology such as Eloqua to pull the prospects information from the database and populate their information into the form as their landing page loads. You might think that people find this intrusive, or scary but we’ve received such great results I have to believe most people are cool with this functionality now.
The pre-populated data is extremely valuable in generating free offer requests, or in this case event (webinar or teleconference) registrations.
Results from last months event:
We’re marketing to a consumer list, so our open rate is lower than most B2B marketers would expect, but on par with the B2C space. This is a conservative sample of our form conversion from one email batch promoting an event in December. I’ve seen as high as 90% conversion, but I believe anything over 40 or 50% is very good. Eloqua allows you to build the email creative, form and landing page all within their platform. It’s an easy and non-technical way to quickly setup and deploy a campaign. Without going into all the details, you’ll start by generating your email creative, form layout and creating your landing page layout. When you’re ready to setup your pre-populated data, go to the Forms area of Eloqua. Within the form’s area of Eloqua you can select the data fields to use within your form, and edit the details of each field. In this example, I’m editing the “First Name” field to pre-load data from Eloqua, the prospects First Name. The drop down allows you to select any data point which you’ve already loaded into your system. You can also create an unlimited amount of custom fields and insert that data into either a form field, or email content. When you want to setup the next field for pre-pop, just edit the next one until your finished.
Edit Form Field Details:
It’s my opinion, the the conversion rate is so high, due to the fact that we’re telling the consumer… “Hey, we already have your information.” and “By submitting this form, you’re not providing data that you haven’t already provided to us.” In addition, it makes the experience much easier for the prospect. It should tell your prospects and customers, we know who you are and we want you to have a great experience with us. Whatever the reason, it’s been extremely effective for us, and has allowed us to register upwards of 3% of our entire list for an event through multiple emails, over the course of 10 days. Once a user submits the form, we have a set of triggers that update the user and move them into a registrant contact group, and allow us to deliver follow up reminder emails for attendance. If you haven’t used this feature yet, or are interested in learning more… I’d recommend checking it out. Have you had success with event registration, or experience using this functionality within Eloqua or another ESP? I’d love to hear your thoughts or get your feedback. CP
