ON24 for Financial Services: Converting Leads with Webinars
Now I want to talk about webinars, and we’re on one right now. We’re actually going to be doing a webinar in 15 minutes for financial advisors as well, because we do quite a few of those.
We’ve been working with ON24 now for a couple years, and, you know, we really kind of scoured all the competitors that are out there and did an RFP, and we are just incredibly delighted that we’re working with ON24 not just because we have an opportunity to share some feedback with you, but because they’re just been a great partner for us through the years.
We do webinars, both for financial advisors, which includes for CE credit, continuing education credit, and we do webinars for our audience. Reason why webinars are so important to Investopedia is because our site is about making people smarter around finance and investing. That’s our entire goal and entire mission, and webinars exactly align with our mission of helping to make people smarter around finance and investing because webinars is a great way to hopefully share information, kind of like I’m doing today.
If you think about three things I want to share with you around just best practices on webinars. The first is how important email marketing is. When you’re doing a webinar, our number one acquisition vehicle for for users of the webinar is email. By far. Number two is social, and number three is kind of call outs on our site, on our homepage for people to join the webinar.
But far and away, the best source of acquiring new people is through email. Number two’s thought is around helpful user feedback. What I mean by that is that we gain insight from attendees constantly. We put our polls — I don’t happen to be using them right now, but we’ll do polls on our webinars, and we’ll do surveys through our webinars.
We had a webinar on learning about robo advisors and whether or not robo advisors would be helpful for you or not. We had a sponsor for that, for example. We then told people and asked them if they’re more or less likely to either robo advisor because of this webinar. We then were able to target different marketing to people who were more interested in robo advisors because of this, versus people who are less interested.
And that gets to our last point, which is around data really helps sponsors convert leads. On ON24 you have something called an engagement score. Every lead that you have is scored something a number, and based on that number, it allows you to really determine how engaged that individual is.
Did that person ask lots of questions? Well, then they get some engagement score. Did that person close up that, you know, the webinar halfway through? Because they weren’t should they obviously get a much lower engagement score, and you’re able to really get a level of engagement. And what’s important about that is allows you to target your marketing and to have more broad type marketing for people who are less engaged, and more direct marketing that will really facilitate an action for people who are most engaged. So webinars has been a really wonderful part of our growth at Investopedia, and I really wanted to make sure that it was clear that was one of our top three in fact, areas of growth.