Follow the next steps for an easy connection between GoToWebinar and Pardot.
- GoToWebinar comes as a standard connector within the Pardot package and is accessible for all Pardot versions (Growth, Plus, Advanced, and Premium).
- No integration to GoToMeeting or GoToAssist
- Webinar types of Standard, Webcase and Recorded Webinars can be synced.
- Recurring webinars, i.e. series of the same webinar at different dates, cannot be synced. Therefore, you need a webinar for every date.
- The connector user must be the GoToWebinar organizer of the webinar.
SETUP CONNECTOR
Go to the Pardot settings, go then to connectors and hit create new connector. Select GoToWebinar. Make sure you have sufficient permission to access the connectors and credentials to GoToWebinar.
Note: The connector is a GoToWebinar only connector and doesn’t work with other GoTo logins.
Enter your credentials and optionally select the option to create new prospects in Pardot if not existing, as well as if previously hosted webinars shall be pulled into via the connector. Click verify and Now Authorize.
SETUP CAMPAIGN
Campaigns are used, as usual in Pardot, to capture the Prospect data relation in Pardot. Setup your campaign in Pardot or Salesforce, if connected campaigns are enabled. Name your campaign. Recommendation: Use a defined record/campaign type in Salesforce for Webinar or virtual Events for further distinction.
After the campaign setup, adjust the campaign member statuses to reflect the following status:
- Registered or Responded (set as default)
- Attended
- Absent
SETUP of required marketing assets
To capture all required information we need a landing page (Pardot hosted or other third party tool), a form or formhandler and lists.
Note: Information on webinar registration is captured in Pardot first and then sent to GoToWebinar.
Go to forms and create a new form. Add all required fields, like name, email address and optin for further marketing contact. If you already use existing external forms, you also can use form handlers to capture the data. GoToWebinar just receives the first, last name and email address.
Make sure that you add completion actions to assign the captured participant as campaign member with the status of Registered, add the prospect to a static list for this webinar. Alternatively use tags to capture the information of the webinar registration for further email automation. Additionally, add the completion action “Register for Webinar” and select the webinar synced from GoToWebinar.
Note: Please keep in mind that if you host a series of webinars with the same topic but with different time slots, you still need to create them as single webinars to be respectively captured in Pardot.
After the form is set, we go to Landing Pages and create a new landing page and embed the form. Your webinar registration is ready to go!
The list of registered participants now can be used as a suppression list if you send out emails and reminder emails with invites to your existing prospects. That will be the easiest way to avoid spamming your prospect if they have already registered. Additionally this list can be used as a follow up if you want to share a recording or slides after the webinar.
All the reminder about the upcoming webinar and sending of the invite link is handled directly from GoToWebinar and is not facilitated by Pardot. And if you want to share the recordings or any other follow up material via Pardot, make sure to turn off the follow-up email function in GoToWebinar.
IDENTIFY ATTENDEES
After the webinar you can set up an Automation Rule in Pardot to capture attended prospects. Change their Campaign Member Status to “Attended”. Set all the other prospects of the webinar to the status “Absent”. Use a second automation rule for this action.
Please keep in mind that the connector syncs every 10 minutes and the further away into the future the webinar is, the less often the sync will happen.
Both automation rules can be used as a one-time automation and are not required anymore in the future.
Boom – we are done.