How To Do a Webinar with HubSpot and GoToWebinar

As mentioned in some of my other blog posts, webinars can be an incredibly useful tool for attracting visitors to your company, converting those visitors into leads, closing those leads into customers, and delighting those customers into becoming evangelists.

But now it’s time to get down to brass tacks: How does one actually conduct a webinar using HubSpot and GoToWebinar (GTW)? Here are the essentials.

1. Have Accounts at HubSpot and GoToWebinar

Okay, this is probably obvious, but you have to have accounts at both HubSpot and GoToWebinar to make everything work.

2. Set up the integration

(You only have to do this once.)

Log-in to HubSpot to set up the integration. It’s super-easy to do, and here’s a HubSpot knowledge article that walks you through it: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/integrations/use-the-gotowebinar-integration-with-hubspot.

Note: HubSpot only supports one GoToWebinar integration per account, currently. If you have multiple GoToWebinar accounts, you’ll need to connect using Zapier.

3. Create a new webinar in GoToWebinar

Log-in to GoToWebinar and click the Schedule a webinar button. The only fields you need to fill out are the title, date, and time. Because you will be creating the registration page and emails in HubSpot, GoToWebinar only needs these three fields on the main creation page. (You can add additional registration fields in GTW; however, these have no relationship to the registration form we'll be creating in HubSpot.)

After you’ve successfully created the event, you’ll need to scroll down to the Panelist section and click Edit. This is where you’ll add the email addresses of your presenter(s) and moderator. (If your company has multiple GoToWebinar accounts and an internal speaker has a GTW account, you can add them under the Co-Organizer section.)

Note: If you want a poll during the webinar or a post-event survey, you’ll also need to set these up in GoToWebinar prior to the event. The benefit of doing a post-event survey using GoToWebinar is that it will pop-up automatically when the attendee closes the webinar window. The other option would be to create a survey using SurveyMonkey or HubSpot and email it to attendees later; however, the level of participation using this method is much lower.

(GoToWebinar support article on customizing your webinar: https://support.logmeininc.com/gotowebinar/help/customize-your-webinar-g2w020002) 

4. Turn your webinar “On”

Back in HubSpot, you have to turn on each webinar you want to use and track in HubSpot. Go to Integrations, click on GoToWebinar Settings, and then click the “On” switch for your new webinar. This seems like a silly thing to call out, but I can tell you that I have had several instances where I was banging my head against my desk because I couldn’t figure out why my webinar wasn’t showing up in HubSpot. And then – like a light bulb – oh yeah, you have to turn it on!

Image from HubSpot.

5. Create your registration form and landing page

Next you’ll want to create a form and landing page in HubSpot for your webinar. Be sure to include all of the custom form fields you want registrants to answer (and/or progressive profiling) in order to register.

On the landing page, you’ll have the option to select your new webinar under “GoToWebinar Registration”. Because this is where the integration actually happens, you can use the same form for different webinars if you’d like. Here’s some more information on setting up your registration page: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/integrations/use-the-gotowebinar-integration-with-hubspot. 

Don’t forget to also create a thank you page!

6. Create your email invitation

Although GoToWebinar has a standard email you could use, you’ll want to create an email in HubSpot using your email template and branding. Simply include a link to the registration landing page in addition to the abstract, title, date, time, and presenter in your email. You may want to also consider sending a second email using just text.

There is only one type of webinar email that HubSpot can’t do: the email with the unique link to join the webinar sent to people after they register. You'll have to use GoToWebinar for these emails. Most marketers also send out a reminder (with the link to log-in) one-day prior and one-hour prior to the webinar starting. These must also be set up in GoToWebinar because they also have the unique join URL. (See: https://support.logmeininc.com/gotowebinar/help/share-webinars-manage-registration-and-send-emails-g2w020004#Email)

Note: A second option is to use Zapier to pull the unique join URL from GoToWebinar to HubSpot. This is a great article on how to do that: http://blog.inalign.com/how-to-integrate-gotowebinar-with-hubspot.

7. Manage registrations

To easily see who’s registered for the webinar, create a Smart List and select people who have registered for the webinar. (Make sure to exclude this Smart List of people who have already registered from future email invitations.)

Image from HubSpot.

You’ll probably also want a Smart List for people who attended the webinar and people who registered but didn’t attend for your salespeople to follow up with.

The registration list is also available inside of GoToWebinar. As HubSpot sometimes has a delay in porting over registrants, this list is always the most accurate. Also when people cancel, the list in GoToWebinar will be updated, but HubSpot will not be.

If someone wants to cancel their registration with you personally (instead of using GTW), it has to be done in GoToWebinar. If you want to approve all registrations before they are confirmed, this is also done in GoToWebinar. If a registrant loses their confirmation email (or it goes to spam), you can re-send it from GoToWebinar.

Note: There is no way for you to see a registrant's unique join URL or copy and paste it into an email that you send them directly. The only option is to re-send their confirmation email through GTW.

8. Conduct the webinar using GoToWebinar

If you haven’t logged into GoToWebinar since creating the event, you’ll have to log in to practice the session and to start the real webinar. If it’s your first webinar, you may want to have one or two practice sessions so that you (and your speakers) get used the controls and where the panels are located.

GoToWebinar Tip: Panelists can’t see the questions. If you want your speaker (or moderator) to be able to see the questions, right click on their name after the webinar has begun and select “Make Organizer.”

9. Use Excel to combine polls, questions, interest rating, in-session duration, and post-event survey answers

I wish the HubSpot / GoToWebinar integration was complete, but unfortunately, it is not. Interest rating, in-session duration, poll answers, questions asked during the webinar, and post-event survey answers are all in GoToWebinar and are not pulled over to HubSpot.

You can export all this information to Excel in the GoToWebinar reports section. You'll need to download two reports: the Attendee Report to get everything except the poll answers which are under Survey Reports. 

Image from GoToWebinar.

However, the complete registration information is in HubSpot, not GTW. (GoToWebinar only has the name and email from the registration.)

To create a complete Excel spreadsheet, you’ll need to export your registration Smart List from HubSpot to Excel. Then you’ll need a whole lot of VLOOKUP formulas to combine all of the sheets based on email address.

This combined spreadsheet is what I used to send to our salespeople to use in following up with registrants. Alternatively, you could type the additional information from GTW into HubSpot; however, if you have hundreds of registrants, that might not be possible.

10. Follow-up email and recording

Don’t forget to send up a follow-up email after the webinar with a link to the recording! Emails should be personalized based on whether the registrant attended or not. You can use a workflow to determine this, or you can use the Smart Lists you created and send two separate emails.

Next you’ll want to create a new form to access the recording of the webinar and either modify your old landing page to be for the recording or create a new landing page. (If you modify the old one, all of the statistics will be combined both for people who attended the live webinar and people who accessed the recording.)

Tip for using YouTube: Use GoToWebinar to record the webinar and then download it to your computer. After editing it, (usually just cutting out the beginning and ending blank space), upload it to YouTube as an Unlisted video. Copy the embed code and put that on your thank you page for people to access after they submit the form to view the recording. 

Or get Wistia and embed it that way. 

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Most of what I’ve learned using HubSpot and GoToWebinar has been through trial and error. Do you have any integration tips to share?