I had a Marketing Over Coffee listener ask me about using Manticore (Email, web analytic, demand generation) with GoToWebinar (Online meetings). I thought that this was too much “Inside Baseball” even for MOC, but it fits here.

Do you typically send out your webinar invitations as part of a Manticore Demand Booster Process? It gets sort of tricky because once someone uses the invitation to register for the webinar, then GTW sends them back a personalized URL for accessing the webinar.  As you know, GTW does a great job of managing registrations.  Post-webinar, it can also provide a list of attendees and a separate list of registered no-shows.

It seems that the easiest thing would be to wait until the webinar takes place, then start the demand booster process at that point using the lists of attendees and no-shows.

This is an interesting problem. I thing the big issue is that GoToWebinar doesn’t have an API (at least at my last check with their tech support). You could build all the same stuff (registration, follow up email) on your own site through Manticore and manage it all there.   That still wouldn’t solve the problem though, just change the direction of data you have to load – instead of pulling the reg list out of G2W, you’d be uploading the projected attendees into G2W, and since there’s no easy way to do that unless you want to start scripting something that goes through HTTP, and that makes my brain hurt.

I do send the invites out via Manticore, you can grab the HTML and load it right up. And a tip – if you include the “Register Now” button the tracking of opens will work over in the GoToWebinar reporting.

I don’t do webinars as part of any demand booster tracks, I don’t like anything to be in a track that is locked to a specific date, that really increases the labor required to reuse the track.

Hopefully by putting this out there, somebody will have a better idea…

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