Hosting virtual events & webinars in Zoom and matching automated follow-ups in Pardot is an easy win with the standard plugin. Quick tutorial and recommendations for Dos and Don´ts.
Pardot comes with standard connectors to WebEx, ReadyTalk and GoToWebinar (NOT GoToMeeting), but also offers additional integrations respective data capture from additional webinar or virtual event hosting software.
The most common technique is the use of FormHandler to capture data getting injected from the tools. Zoom Webinars offers now (2019) also a bi-directional integration via the Pardot API.
Follow the steps for both use cases.
SETUP VIA FORMHANDLER
Note: This is not longer recommended by Zoom.
SETUP VIA PLUGIN
First, you need to check the App on the Zoom App Marketplace and install it. Important to mention: Only works with Zoom Webinars, Zoom Pro Account and your Zoom user needs the “view all user information” & “view all user Webinar” permissions.
Installing it requires your Email and Password, as well as having admin permission within Pardot. Additionally, you need your User API Key (Go to Pardot > Settings > My Profile > API User Key).
Note: Zoom requires a Pardot only user. On the other side, Pardot requires with the Spring21 release a SSO user between Salesforce and Pardot. The likelihood of the integration to break is given.
Add-on feature is the domain filtering to avoid having defined domains on your Pardot lists. This is also done on the setup of the connection and applies for all lists for all webinars used later on.
So the technical setup is done. Next steps is creating a campaign in Pardot or Salesforce if you use connected campaigns.
Then we hit the list building per Webinar. In Pardot build three static lists for the webinar.
- List to capture users/prospects that registered for the webinar: registrants
- List to capture users/prospects that attended the webinar: attendees
- List to capture registered users/prospects that were absent from the webinar: absentees
Please make sure you use a consistent naming convention as you will always use three static lists per webinar. This will make you build up a massive amount of lists over the years.
Move to Zoom and select the Webinar you want to sync. Make sure the Registration required is turned on and then check for the Integration tab. The fields are for your Webinar ID and for the three static lists we just build in Pardot. Search for the respective lists and save.
Once connected your registrants, attendees and absentees are handled between both systems. Obviously, you can re-use the existing lists for other webinars, but this might only make sense if the topics are generic or it´s a series of webinars hosted about the same topic.
To add additional information onto your Pardot prospect, make sure that on the Pardot configuration page in Zoom all field mappings are set up. In case of custom questions in Zoom – add the fields to the Webinar registration and to the mapping in the Pardot configuration. The respective fields in Pardot must be set as custom fields on the prospect and use the same field name. Please consider the exact name, or the Zoom App automatically creates the fields in Pardo for you.
Summary of integration via plugin
PRO:
- Easy setup, stable and fast sync between Zoom and Pardot.
- Form management and invite management handled in Zoom.
CON:
- Setup of three lists per webinar, resulting into the need for proper list and folder management.
- Information on the webinar status is not added to the campaign member status or timestamped anywhere.
- All automation rules and marketing automation needs to be done by list membership. This means also that your sales reps, will not see this on their engagement component in Salesforce.
