From livestreams and webinars to meetings and roundtables, online events are a powerful way to inexpensively connect with customers and make more sales. For many marketers, online events are a great way to establish trust with your audience. Organizing a fun and informative event can be a memorable first step in a marketing funnel leading to long-term relationships with customers.
While online meeting platforms such as Zoom have a number of ways to collect registrant information, they fall short in a variety of ways. Marketers are limited in segmenting their audience, limited in the number of emails you can send via those platforms, and every email looks like everyone else’s Zoom emails.
At Ninja Forms, we have a better way. What if you could collect online registrants on your site, enter them as registrants to Zoom as well as into your email list, automatically without any further steps from you or your registrants?
All of this is possible with Ninja Forms and some powerful add-ons.
Why you should collect event registrations on your own site with Ninja Forms
Every time your customer interacts with your marketing, keeping them on your site is best. Sending your customer off to complete an important task on another site risks losing the conversion, losing audience interest, and losing the ability to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Ninja Forms solves this problem. By using Ninja Forms to collect registrations, you retain the control of the experience for your site visitors. And with the use of Ninja Forms powerful add-ons, you can still ensure that registrations are entered into your webinar platform of choice as well as into your email platform.
This cohesive experience, from a user’s perspective, supports your brand and your marketing efforts.
Collecting Zoom webinar registrations and Mailchimp subscriptions
For the purpose of this demonstration, we’ll be using Zoom and Mailchimp to show how an online event registration form with Ninja Forms works. We’ll also review some best practices for collecting registrations for an online webinar that will have a follow up marketing campaign.
Setup your Zoom, Zapier and Mailchimp accounts
To use Zoom, Zapier and Mailchimp, you’ll need to have an account for each platform. We’ll assume you already have these set up, but if not, they are a requirement. For Zoom, you will need a paid account to ensure this integration works, even if you’re just using it to set up a meeting.
For Mailchimp, you can still use the free version, and Zapier will work with the free version for this particular instance. If you want to add additional steps to the Zap such as adding registrants to a Google sheet, you’d need a paid plan for the extra step.
If you’re using an email service provider (ESP) other than Mailchimp, you can still perform many of these same actions, except your mailing list may use slightly different terminology than what we’ll see with Mailchimp.
Setup your meeting or webinar in Zoom
To make setting up our integration as seamless as possible, set up your webinar first. You’ll need to ensure our webinar is available in your Zoom account for Zapier to see prior to starting or your Zap will fail to connect. Head to your Zoom account and set up your webinar.
You can also use this same integration to set up a meeting in Zoom if desired, but ensure that you enable registration for your meeting. If you don’t enable registration, your Zap will fail.
Setup a tag in Mailchimp
We want to ensure that everyone that registers for our Zoom webinar is also identified in our email list as an attendee. This will allow us to market to them after the event, or to segment them into particular communication opportunities going forward. To make this as easy as possible, let’s set up a tag in Mailchimp that identifies everyone who completes this form as someone who signed up to attend our event.
Install and activate Ninja Form add-ons plugins
You need two powerful Ninja Forms add-ons: the Zapier add-on and the Mailchimp add-on. If you don’t have these installed already and you’re using the Agency or Professional plans, you can easily find them available in the downloads area of your Ninja Forms account. Make sure that you activate your add-on licenses for both plugins, and get your Mailchimp API key entered into the settings in your Ninja Forms plugin. The documentation for the Mailchimp add-on can help.
Setup your form
For our example, we will be using the Ninja Forms “Event Registration” template with some modifications. We’ll remove the options for meals, as our online attendees will have to bring their own snacks. We’re also going to add some details in the top HTML of our form to explain when the event occurs and tell our site visitors what benefit they receive by attending. We’re also going to change the call to action on our form to “Save My Seat” just to make our appeal to attend a little more enticing.
Add a thank you page
Set up a thank you confirmation page by setting up a Ninja Forms redirect. You can also add this as a goal in Google Analytics so you can measure the effectiveness of your campaigns that are driving webinar registrations. You can find instructions for doing so on our previous post on setting up thank you page redirects.
Setup our form actions for Zapier to save registrants to Zoom
Once we have our form setup, we need to add our connections to Zapier and also Zoom. This is rather easy to do in Zapier as it will walk you through each step. Here’s how it works.
- Head to Zapier first to set up your Zapier Ninja Forms webhook. Once you begin the setup, Zapier will show you a webhook URL. Take this URL and copy it.
- Next, go to “Emails & Actions” in your Ninja Forms event registration form we’ve got set up.
- Click the big blue circle on the lower right, and find the action for Zapier. Click that, and you’ll see the place where we want to save the webhook that Zapier provided.
- Save your form. We’ll need to test the Zapier trigger before going forward.
- Add your form to a private page.
- Complete the form as a test.
- Test the trigger. Zapier will prompt you now to ensure your form is working. Click continue, and Zapier will check to see if they received your test submission. Did it work? Great! On to adding our Zoom connection.
- Within your Zapier account, we’ll next connect our Zoom account to Zapier. Zapier has secure authorization connections available to Zoom, so this connection will happen automatically.
- Next, find the webinar you created previously in the drop down.
- Map the fields from your test submission to the fields Zoom expects. You’ll want to make sure that email, first name, and last name match up.
- For our case, we’re going to set “Confirmation Email” to false, because we won’t be using Zoom’s emails as we want to send our own through Mailchimp.
- Test the connection again. Success? You’re ready to go.
- Turn on your Zap!
Test your connections
As with any integration, you’ll want to test in multiple ways. Test by using improper email addresses, test with form fields not completed, and test with wrong data entered to ensure everything is working the way you expect.
Add the tested form to your landing page
Once you’ve got everything tested, it’s time to add your supercharged form to your landing page. One of the great things about Ninja Forms is that you can easily develop and test your forms on a private page prior to going live. Simply add the finalized form to your live page using the Ninja Form block, or by using shortcodes if you’re using the Classic Editor plugin.
Using our connections to create a branded, streamlined experience
Now that you have your connections established, there are unlimited opportunities to forge deeper connections with customers. Your registration form looks like it’s customized for your brand. Your Zoom registrants will be registered. And your Mailchimp mailing list will be populated with new registrants that are tagged with our chosen Mailchimp tag.
Instead of letting Zoom send generic reminder emails, you can now take advantage of some of the more powerful things that Mailchimp, or any other ESP, can provides.
Here are some ideas.
- Brand your meeting reminders. All of the power of your email service provider now applies to your webinar reminder and follow up emails. Remember to turn off any Zoom reminder emails and ensure your customers get the full flavor of your brand in their inbox.
- Send an automated thank you message immediately on registration. Complement your confirmation thank you page with an email that is triggered by Mailchimp once a new subscriber is added with the tag you’ve selected.
- Customize your follow up emails. Follow up when we know it’s best for our customers, rather than when Zoom decides it is best.
- Survey your attendees. How did they experience your event? Did they learn what they wanted? Is there something else they wanted to learn? You can use Ninja Forms to do this market research. That feedback loop will help you create better events going forward or create testimonials for future events.
- Exclusive discounts or offers. Your audience members attended an event and learned more about your products or services, so reward them for their time with a discount. You can even give them an exclusive offer such as a download or access to exclusive content.
- Access to replays. If your event is recorded, give your attendees access to the recorded content.
- Access to future events. Tailor a future event specific to attendees of this event. For example, if this event is something that helps people get started with your product, invite attendees to another event that goes a little deeper sometime in the future.
Conclusion
Online events are an amazing way to show off your product, your people, and your brand. Using generic sign up forms from webinar providers often highlight the platform’s brand more than your own and interfere with your ability to measure and customize your user’s experience. Ninja Forms add-ons provide the tools needed to make event registration more professional and functional.
