The Webinerd’s Guide to Winning at GDPR With Engagement

FOREWORD 3

INTRODUCTION 4

SECTION 1: SETTING THE FOUNDATION FOR GDPR-COMPLIANT AND ENGAGING WEBINARS 5Analyse the current state of your consent data 5

Understand your company’s perspective on legal compliance 6

Establish your consent and engagement goals 6

Get your systems ready to record compliance 7

Delivery is key: find your evangelist 8

Focus on the experience 8

Be ready to test, learn and experiment 9

SECTION 2: HOW TO PLAN AND DELIVER AN ENGAGING GDPR-COMPLIANT WEBINAR 10Market the webinar in a compliant fashion 10

Eight steps to engineer consent and engagement 11

Use the data to improve your follow up content 13

Keep the engagement going—build webinar programming 13

SECTION 3: CHECKLIST FOR SUCCESS 14

INSIDE ON24 16

contents

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FOREWORDFROM Joe Hyland, CMO, ON24

Even though it’s been some time since the GDPR legislation went into effect, there are still no shortage of things about the regulation that are confusing. But perhaps the most perplexing aspect of the European Union’s data regulation bill is the cloud that surrounds the “legitimate interests” and the gaining consent piece of GDPR.

The exact wording goes like this: “[Data] processing will be lawful if it is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller or a third party, except where such interests are overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject which require protection of Personal Data, in particular where the data subject is a child.”

This passage raises more questions than it answers: After all, what does legitimate interest constitute, how can companies acquire or measure this interest, and how should they engage if they have gotten this consent?

It’s quite the minefield for marketers to navigate, and the stakes are higher than ever. A wrong turn in the past meant you irritated customers. A wrong turn in the GDPR world spells potential legal action and fines.

Like any marketing company, we at ON24 were initially concerned that GDPR could potentially cut into market-qualified leads and reduce pipeline. But once we dug deeper, we gained a better perspective: we now think of GDPR as an opportunity to better organize our data and shorten our marketing funnel, by engaging with folks who are genuinely interested in our offerings.

So how do you do this in practice—gaining both consent and the engagement that turns prospects into buyers? In this whitepaper we’ll walk you through the steps including:

1. How to set the foundation for both compliant and engaging webinars.

2. Ways in which you can market your sessions in a compliant fashion.

3. How to engineer your webinars to win consent.

4. What to do after the webinar to keep the engagement going.

It might surprise you to hear this, but we now think that GDPR is one of the best things that has happened to our industry. It has made us better marketers. After reading this guide, we believe you’ll feel the same way. Are you ready to win?

#WEBINERD

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Introduction

Increasing privacy regulations have resulted in B2B marketers rethinking their approaches. Whereas previously consent was often assumed, or was as a result of a pre-filled box on a form, such permission can no longer be taken for granted. This comes at a time when it is easier than ever before to amass data on individuals, and where marketing approaches have been based on having access to that data. In many cases, collecting data has simply been too easy—resulting in a volume-based “spray and pray” approach.

However, the practices of the past few years and the stories hitting the headlines have caused regulators to act. The General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and other laws now have both implications for companies globally and the threat of stiff fines for non-compliance.

But the threat of legal action isn’t the only reason that marketers need to change the way in which they look to drive leads and business.

Inundated with low-quality approaches, buyers are increasingly switching off. Emails remain unopened. Calls are not answered. They do not want—or consent to— this kind of approach, particularly now they can do their own research without having to speak to sales.

For both the sake of regulation, and the changing nature of today’s buyers, marketers need to change the way they work. They now need to drive engagement with a high-value offer that makes prospects want to opt in, share their details and join a two-way conversation. Acting as a human will help you gain and keep consent; the organisations that can use technology to do this at scale will be the ones that achieve the greatest success.

Fortunately, there is a technology platform that enables marketers to deliver a personal touch at volume. That technology is the webinar.

As data from the likes of SiriusDecisions shows, webinars represent the best method in achieving this goal. And as this guide will show, webinars not only allow live, interactive and two-way experiences in a way that other formats such as static PDFs do not, they also create the opportunity to achieve consent by design. This allows the collection of rich data that highlights to both marketing and sales which prospects are engaged and will convert, leading to a better experience for everyone.

This guide will help support you with the foundations for compliant marketing, while driving the engagement that will encourage your prospects to opt-in and start talking with you.

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Setting the foundation for engaging webinars under GDPR

Achieving the greatest degree of success from your webinar campaigns relies on careful planning and preparation, effective promotion, an engaging delivery and timely and relevant follow up.

During the planning stage you will need to define your target audience and who you will be reaching out to. Part of this target audience will come from your existing databases, but if you want to comply with GDPR you will need to make sure you have documented permission or a legitimate interest to contact them. You will also want to know how comfortable your company is with promoting and running a webinar. For highly-regulated industries, there may be a desire to get a higher degree of approval based on internal policies.

Following this, you will want to set goals based on gaining consent (e.g. opted-in contacts) and driving engagement. This will help you structure your efforts in the right direction. You will also want to ensure your systems record compliance and collect the data you need.

Finally, you will want to make sure your webinar is set up to be a great experience for the

attendees. The quality of the session will be the deciding factor in how engaged your prospects become.

Analyse the current state of your consent data

First off, have a look at the consent data you already have. Your company may very likely already be working on obtaining consent data. This record should include who consented, when they consented, what they were told at the time and how they consented—and also if they have withdrawn consent. If you are lacking these data points, you may need to work on engineering consent into your webinar.

The good news is that a webinar provides an excellent opportunity to obtain all of these data points (with the exception of withdrawing consent, which is usually easily managed through most email platforms or marketing automation systems). Furthermore, a recorded video provides more evidence that can be used in addition to other processes. The next section will provide some actionable steps to do this.

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Understand your company’s perspective on legal compliance

Knowing your company’s stance on compliance under GDPR is wise. If you are unaware of your company’s compliance policy or if the policy seems ambiguous, you may want to set up a consultation with your company’s legal department for clarification.

What is helpful to know is how strictly the regulations are being interpreted at a company policy level. Your company may have chosen to obtain the bare minimum evidence, or it may be doing all it can to follow GDPR to the letter. One other possibility is that your company operates under even stricter data collection and usage rules, particularly if it is in a heavily regulated industry such as finance or healthcare. In this case, you may wish to prepare a session that is pre-recorded to gain sign-off from your internal teams, but still incorporates opportunities for live discussion.

Establish your consent and engagement goals

When planning your webinars to gain consent and drive engagement, you should specify exactly what that means in terms of goals so you can design your delivery specifically around those points.

Previously, your goal may have been as simple as registrations (those that filled in a lead generation form) and attendees (those that watch the webinar). However, an engagement-driven approach which also obtains consent from those registrants and attendees will have other more detailed goals and metrics.

Did you know?ON24’s Simulive offers the flexibility to pre-record a webinar and run it as a live scheduled event. A simulive event boasts the same interactive tools for audience members as a traditional live webcast, and allows presenters or moderators to verbally answer questions in real time during the event via the Q&A text widget.

Presenters can also choose to roll over to live audio after the pre-recorded portion of the webinar is complete, enabling them to answer questions live.

If you need your webinars to be pre-approved, this can help reduce barriers to getting sign-off.

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For example, some of the metrics you might consider are around the number or percentage of prospects who:

• Consent to receiving further information

• Ask a question during the session which requires later follow up

• Register for another webinar

• Download additional content

• Book a one-on-one meeting

• Take out a free trial or demo

Using these kinds of metrics and goals for your session will lead you away from simply driving attendee numbers and towards increasing the number of opted-in, engaged prospects. It places a renewed emphasis on the quality of the session itself and should drive you towards creating more impactful webinars that attendees want to watch and engage with—and ultimately, become better leads for sales.

Did you know?ON24’s Advanced Analytics provides in-depth insights on audience engagement and behaviour on all content from any source, including viewing time, interactions and channel sources. This data is available in real time on ON24’s Intelligence dashboard and can be integrated with CRM and marketing automation systems.

Get your systems ready to record compliance

Receiving all that consent data from your webinar is useless if your CRM system is not set up for it. Webinar platforms like ON24’s collect engagement information and can add that data into your CRM and marketing automation platforms. With GDPR, this is particularly important because that data is also recorded consent. It serves as a backup on the occasion where consent may be disputed.

Did you know?ON24’s Connect Integration allows for data from ON24 to be pushed to your marketing automation platform, including HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, etc. as well as your CRM.

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Delivery is key: find your evangelist

There is an aspect of staging a webinar that you might have not considered: who will lead the discussion. If your goal is to have a webinar that drives engagement and active opt-in then having one or two presenters who can evangelise your product is a plus.

Avoid the temptation to settle for using one of your colleagues who may be good at their job but might not have the ability to keep an audience riveted. Someone who is dull and does not exhibit enthusiasm does not inspire engagement. Also, remember that the opposite type of personality can have negative effects on engagement. Someone who is overly assertive and ‘gung-ho’ can appear insincere and put off an audience, whereas an authentic and open presenter is more likely to encourage the audience be part of the conversation.

Look for that person who can get up in front of an audience and get your information across in a conversational and friendly manner, addressing the audience as if they are having a face-to-face conversation with each and every one of them. You may already have a colleague that speaks frequently at conferences and is happy to act as an ambassador of the brand. Someone who is keen to help your audience will make them comfortable with opting-in to content and hearing more.

Focus on the experience

Once you have done all the above there is one last thing you need to consider—your attendees’ experience. As such, you should look to move away from a simple ‘talking PowerPoint’ to a webinar that incorporates opportunities for attendees to engage directly. As well as slide decks, look to incorporate Q&As, polls, survey questions and links to other content that you can refer to during your session. Video can also be highly effective and can range from live studio feeds through to screenshares and integrated clips.

Engagement metrics such as those listed earlier will provide you with a benchmark with which to improve the quality of the session. Aim to deliver a session that is both visually appealing and incorporates two-way methods of communication.

Did you know?ON24’s webinar console can be completely customised to fit your brand and include several multimedia elements.

Making an effort in how your webinar console looks improves the experience for your attendees.

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Be ready to test, learn and experiment

Creating great webinars is a learning experience and takes time to perfect. But they don’t need to be perfect the first time round, especially as a benefit of webinars is that they can be rerun and improved at a later stage.

One brand that has evolved its approach to webinars is AutoTrader. Its first attempts at producing webinars only involved recording with a cheap webcam bought from Amazon in any available space. The results of incorporating live video were successful enough to make a strong business case to improve. Now they have a dedicated studio space with high-definition broadcasting and run sessions every week. Without their initial experiments, this wouldn’t have happened.

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How to plan and deliver an engaging webinar under GDPR

With the foundation now in place, the next stage is to promote, design and deliver the webinar in a way that will help you achieve your goals.

A large part of making your webinar as effective as possible will come down to how you engineer the opportunities to drive engagement and obtain consent. Planned properly, this will mean not only will the delivery come across in a welcoming and natural way, but also that your audience will take the actions you need.

Market the webinar in a compliant fashion

A successful webinar starts well before the webinar broadcasts. You need to get the word out and get your audience ‘in the room’. Getting the word out is not as simple as it was before GDPR. Sending out mass email invitations to everyone in your database is no longer feasible or suggested unless you are absolutely sure you are fully compliant with GDPR. The way you reach out to potential attendees must adhere to current regulations or you could run into problems.

You can also try partner marketing. Sharing the webinar or webinar series with another organisation not only adds value and insight to the webinar but also gives you access to a larger audience and more consensual contacts.

Talk to your sales team. Get a list of people they have been having conversations with who would have a legitimate interest in hearing more. Legitimate means that there has been contact on both sides, as opposed to someone who has received several emails but not replied. Adding the people who have already been engaged in conversations with your sales people not only falls within GDPR compliance but are likely to be further along in their buyer journey.

No matter who you contact, it is important that you focus on the high-value offer of your webinar. Your target audience needs a reason to attend. This is particularly meaningful if you are practising account-based marketing. If you are presenting a webinar series for a specific account or target sector, the basis for getting in touch is increased because it passes the legitimate interest test.

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Eight steps to engineer consent and engagement

Hosting a webinar presents multiple opportunities for your prospects to offer their consent and provide you with data that allows you to understand their digital body language. By engineering your webinar in such a way that engagement is high, consent will be granted naturally. The below list will help obtain that.

1. Ask for an opt-in on the webinar registration form

While GDPR does not permit ‘pre-ticked’ boxes to obtain consent, you should use the opportunity at registration to get your registrants to opt-in and hear more. Even though they might not say yes on the first occasion, they may choose to do so on further webinars.

2. Ask directly for email opt-in during the session

One such way is to ask upfront. A simple suggestion such is to ask “If you’d like to hear more, you can sign up to our mailing list within the webinar console—make sure you tick the box and opt-in when prompted!”.

The delivery of this request will have a large impact on how successful you are in generating a response, so aim to ask in a natural and friendly manner.

3. Use polls and survey questions to gain data and opt-ins

Besides asking outright, making use of engagement tools such as surveys and polls, as discussed earlier, is another way you can collect data during your webinar session. Add a legitimate reason to the equation and attendees will want to provide their information.

For example, if you want to gain information on your audience’s industry, you can work that into the discussion and turn it into a poll or survey question. “We’d love to know who our audience is. Have a look at the survey question on your screen. If you are okay with giving us some information about your company, please tell us what industry you are in.”

Furthermore, you can use a poll or survey question to ask if they want to be added to a mailing list—and in a recent webinar held by Mark Bornstein, this method received an astounding 86% opt-in rate.

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4. Use Q&As to start a conversation and obtain a legitimate interest for follow up

Another way you can use the engagement features in order to gain consent is with Q&As. If your webinar is engaging and the subject matter is relevant and insightful, you are bound to receive plenty of questions from your audience. The problem (or benefit in this case) is that you won’t be able to answer them all.

In this case, let the audience know that while you cannot answer every question in the time allotted, they are welcome to leave their questions in the comment section and someone will happily contact them soon after the webinar is completed.

5. Use prominent calls to action for your key conversion events

A designed webinar console has the potential for presenting lots of content and calls to action. As such you should use this opportunity to prominently feature offers such as registering for additional webinars or taking out a free trial.

As an example, Atlassian features a free trial prominently within its webinar interface, allowing viewers to convert directly as they watch the session.

6. Promote the next webinar for another opportunity to drive engagement and opt-in

Webinars should not be ‘random acts of marketing’ but are best delivered as a programme of engaging events. As such, you should tell attendees to sign up to upcoming sessions or access content on demand.

As you will likely have a registration form on these webinars as well, this provides not only the opportunity to increase the content your prospect consumes, but also another chance to ask for opt-in consent on the registration form.

7. Link and refer to gated content with multiple opt-in opportunities

An engaging session will likely make use and reference to other content and data that provides the foundation for the webinar content you are planning. As well these click-throughs being an excellent source of engagement data, any gated content outside of the platform provides yet another opportunity to ask for an opt-in as well as collecting data based on the consumption of that content.

8. Put a meeting booking link in the console to delight your sales team

Another excellent opportunity that webinars offer is the ability to provide direct links for meeting bookings and demos straight from the console. If this is a key conversion event for you, webinars can help reduce the time required to generate an MQL by having your prospect book a session directly with sales.

These are just a few ways to build consent into your webinar. Remember that the more opportunities you give your audience to consensually provide information, the more data you can use. Making sure that your audience feel they are part of the conversation and letting them interact throughout your webinar provides those opportunities.

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Use the data to improve your follow up content

So, you’ve held your webinar. It was a great success. And, because you were engaging and used a conversational approach along with all the tools available to you on the webinar platform, you now have opted-in data that you would have had difficulty acquiring otherwise. Now what do you do?

The next step is to take all that data that is now sitting in your CRM or marketing automation system and use audience segmentation to deliver content based on your prospects’ interests and motivations. As marketing begins to move away from the demand generation methods and more towards an account-based model, it’s vital to have access to consent data that makes incorporating a personalised approach throughout your marketing activities possible.

Keep the engagement going—build webinar programming

Once you have delivered a webinar that is engaging and gains consent from its attendees, the most significant dividends will only come once you apply this approach consistently over time. Just because you have delivered one great session it doesn’t mean all attendees will have been converted.

Use the approach you have developed to run future sessions. For those that aren’t ready to buy having watched your first webinar, the others will provide an opportunity to progress their buying journey—particularly if you create others that cater to different parts of the buying cycle. At the same time, these new webinars will build engagement and obtain consent from new prospects, while helping you build a body

of content that facilitates ‘content bingeing’ on demand. This body of content will also help establish your company as a trusted authority in the space, meaning they will come back again and again.

For those that have qualified and are passed to sales, use the intelligence you would have gathered (such as questions asked, polls answered and content downloaded) to help drive more engaged conversations. These should be used as conversation starters so that sales has a reason to get in touch and can offer valuable insight.

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Checklist for success

Set the foundation

☐ Assess the current state of your consent data.

☐ Understand your company’s perspective on legal compliance.

☐ Identify your consent and engagement goals.

☐ See that your CRM and marketing automation platforms are ready to record compliance.

☐ Identify a valuable and relevant topic that people will want to watch.

☐ Identify your evangelist who can engage your audience and get them to opt-in.

☐ Brand your webinar console and incorporate multimedia elements.

☐ Be willing to test and learn.

Market the webinar in a compliant fashion

☐ Ask your sales team for legitimate prospects to market to.

☐ Invite prospects who have already consented.

☐ Consider partner marketing if they have an opted-in list.

☐ Make sure you have a high-value offer and a reason to attend.

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Engineer for engagement and consent

☐ Ask for an opt-in on the registration page.

☐ Provide an opportunity to sign up to your mailing list.

☐ Use polls and survey questions to gain data and opt-ins.

☐ Use Q&As to start a conversation and obtain a legitimate interest in following up.

☐ Use prominent calls to action for key conversion events.

☐ Promote the next webinar for another opportunity to drive engagement and opt-ins.

☐ Link and refer to gated content with multiple opt-in opportunities.

☐ Put a meeting booking link in the console to delight your sales team.

After the webinar

☐ Use data collected from the webinar to create personalised campaigns and messaging.

☐ Encourage sales teams to use engagement data (such as poll and survey responses) for higher quality follow up conversations.

☐ Plan webinars as programming to keep engagement going and establish your company as a trusted authority.

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INSIDE ON24

ON24® is on a mission to redefine how organizations engage with their audiences, powering interactive, data-rich webinars and content experiences that help people connect on a more human level and make smarter business decisions.

Through the ON24 Platform, marketers can create live, always-on and personalized digital experiences, understand audience behavior and turn that intelligence into action. Informed by more than a billion engagement minutes— including 12 million polls, 1.3 million surveys, 1.5 million conversations, and conversion of over 17 million resources—marketers drive more revenue from ON24 webinars than any other digital channel. Headquartered in San Francisco, ON24 has a wide global footprint with eight offices in key regions, including London, Munich, Singapore, Stockholm and Sydney.

Disclaimer

This whitepaper is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as legal advice or to determine how GDPR might apply to you and your organization. We encourage you to work with a legally qualified professional to discuss GDPR, how it applies specifically to your organization, and how best to ensure compliance.

ON24 MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS WHITEPAPER. This whitepaper is provided “as-is.” Information and views expressed in this whitepaper, including URL and other internet website references, may change without notice.

Published May 2019

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