Running an event either virtual or live, the basic setup process looks like this:
What you will need
What’s the point of doing all of this?
Events can be a fantastic way to educate buyers. The event registration itself may not be a high enough intent signal for sellers to engage with buyers. For example, if you had 100 people register for an event, its unlikely sellers will consider those to be qualified, and many might not even follow-up with registrants. Many registrants might not be ready to engage with sellers either. But, we can all agree that the engagement can contribute to a buyer’s journey with you and should be marked as such.
So, all of this setup will give you the perfect experience for the buyer, and allow marketing to properly attribute the event in the buyer’s journey. In TekStack you’ll see traces of this engagement in a number of places:
In the timeline on the Contact and Account record, you’ll see the Campaign Response that a contact registered for an event.
- Setup a Landing page with registration form
- Promote the event on social or through email marketing
- Communicate event information to registrants
- Run the event
- Communicate post event to attendees, registrants who did not attend, and your larger invitation list.
- Landing Pages will be built on your website (though you could use Click Dimension’s handy Landing Page tool).
- We’ll be using Microsoft Teams Live Event functionality.
- You are using Click Dimensions Business Edition, not Basic Edition.
What you will need
- Campaign. A container to track all the campaign responses and conversions from this event.
- Two website pages need to be created: 1) Landing page URL, 2)Thank you for Registering page. Samples for you to refer to are in the links.
- Two marketing lists need to be created: 1) Contacts that should be included in your invite list. Make this a static marketing list. 2) Registration list. We will be adding contacts that register to this list.
- Web Form. This form will be used to capture registrant information. More on this later in the document.
- Campaign Automation. This will automate the communication to registrants in advance of the event, and handle a couple other things. More on this later.
- Setup a Live Event in Microsoft Teams. You’ll need the Attendee Link URL for your invite, see next item.
- An ICS file which is the universal calendar invite that people can download so that the event and registration link can be saved to their calendar. This file needs a URL so it should be uploaded as an asset to your website.
- Four Email Templates or New Email Sends.
- The email invite that will go to your invitation list. The email should include the landing page URL.
- The email that is sent to registrations. This will be used in the Campaign Automation. This email should have the link to the Live Event and/or the ICS file.
- Reminder email, you may even want two reminder emails.
- Sorry we missed you. An email that contains the recorded event. To be sent to either all invited, or all registered.
- Sequence for attendee follow-up. It might be a nicer personal touch to send attendees an email through Outbound Sequencing versus marketing. This sequence could be a simple one step automated email that includes the registration link and an invitation to engage with the seller.
Tips and tricks
Each of these steps is well supported with articles from Click Dimensions. We are not going to recreate those knowledge articles, but rather focus on configuration best practices.
| Step | Recommended Best Practices |
| Create a Campaign | Every event should have its own campaign so you can properly measure the results next to event cost. |
| Set up Web Form | A few things we would recommend. Most of this will be configured in the Form Designer.
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| Create an ICS File | While Teams will put a calendar meeting into Outlook for all presenters, you don’t want to share that with your attendees. So you will need to create a second Outlook Calendar meeting that is at the exact same time and date. This meeting will simply have the registration link in the message body. Go to File, Save As, ICS, and download the file. You then need to upload the ICS file to your website as an asset. Grab that URL and use it in your email. |
| Campaign Automation | To automate the email communication after registration, we recommend the following Campaign Automation to be published:
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| Configure Teams Meeting Connector | This is a nifty integration from ClickDimensions. It’s a bit limited because of what Teams can share but basically it will create an event and event participation record automatically. This saves some manual setup and an import process post event. |
| Setup Scoring | Click’s new scoring model is fantastic. It allows you to boost engagement scoring for registrants or event attendees. You can also boost the score in the Campaign Automation above, and through the email click, and form submission. |
Why Microsoft Teams Live Event vs Webinar
Teams offers three types of meetings:
- Schedule Meeting. Just your regular Teams meeting.
- Live Event. Our recommendation.
- Webinar. An alternative, but not recommended for marketing events.
Why do we recommend Live Event?
Its certainly more work to setup because Live Event doesn’t include a registration page. However it does give you more control over the webinar:
- Inevitably with Webinar, you’ll accidently send or forward the Presenter’s link to an attendee. Microsoft makes it too darned easy to do that. So during the event you’ll see people popping in with their mics on and cameras on, and you’ll be in a dizzy to demote them from presenters.
- The event itself, attendees will see each other’s avatars so if you have a low attendance event, it will be obviously so.
- The recording will also include the avatars, much like a regular team meeting recording looks. It takes up too much real estate. In your post edit, you’ll want to crop the avatars out and this just takes more work than necessary.
- Live Event gives you much greater control over the content that is being presented and shared and allows you to toggle the speaker’s video on and off even if you aren’t the speaker.
- Registration Page. By building the registration page using your website, you get tremendous benefit of converting the visitors cookie so you can track future visits, and automating the creation of the contact record.
What’s the point of doing all of this?
Events can be a fantastic way to educate buyers. The event registration itself may not be a high enough intent signal for sellers to engage with buyers. For example, if you had 100 people register for an event, its unlikely sellers will consider those to be qualified, and many might not even follow-up with registrants. Many registrants might not be ready to engage with sellers either. But, we can all agree that the engagement can contribute to a buyer’s journey with you and should be marked as such.
So, all of this setup will give you the perfect experience for the buyer, and allow marketing to properly attribute the event in the buyer’s journey. In TekStack you’ll see traces of this engagement in a number of places:
In the timeline on the Contact and Account record, you’ll see the Campaign Response that a contact registered for an event.
- On the Contact record, under Marketing Activity, you’ll see the Campaign Response, Form submission, Pages visited, and Event Participation record. This gives sellers full context before engaging with a contact.
- On the Account and Contact record, you’ll see the Total Engagement Score showing the cumulation of engagement score which will then trigger movement on the Account Stage. This allows sellers to prioritize their efforts with high intent accounts and contacts.
- On Opportunities, you’ll be able to attribute any new opportunities that are created based on this event.
- On the Campaign Record (found under the Marketing area), you’ll be able to see attribution. Both middle touch and last touch (Opportunity Creation). It will show you that if an event cost $1000 to run, but generated $100,000 in opportunities, with $30,000 closed; the ROI as 3000%. This gives you fodder for your marketing spend and programming.
- Marketing often struggles with middle touch attribution. With this setup, if a new deal closes, you can show all the education and awareness that occurred between the time the account was added to the system and when the opportunity was eventually created. Every email sent, every event attended, every page visited, every form filled.