How One Webinar Campaign Delivered the Best Response Rates in the Past Two Years

The Situation

A project management firm with almost 15 years of history was feeling the effects of the economy and a changing industry. Decision makers were no longer interested in speaking with the firm until it was "time to make a decision," leaving the business development team scratching their heads…

How could they develop relationships early enough so they could educate the market and influence the buying process?

With a heavy focus on content marketing, the project management firm published a monthly e-newsletter, produced research and white papers, and had published a series of books. Yet the firm was struggling to leverage this thought leadership in a way that could get them in front of buyers.

Simply put, they were having trouble developing new relationships. Response rates to the static content were low and it was difficult to set initial meetings with content downloaders. Seeking new interactive channels to engage prospects, the firm turned to Rally Point to help address this challenge.

The Campaign

Rally Point worked with the firm to deliver webinars that would:

• Generate new leads
• Strengthen relationships
• Establish greater trust
• Nurture existing leads (secondary objective)

The firm was founded by a prominent name in the project management industry who was a natural speaker. It made perfect sense to base the first webinar in the series with the founder as the headline speaker.

To focus on lead generation, the firm conducted four separate campaigns. The first was focused on the general house list built over the years. Campaigns two through four focused on three distinct metro areas, totaling 1,300 prospects, as part of a larger, multi-year initiative.

Each campaign sent two eBlasts and every prospect in the targeted metro areas received a coordinated, timed voicemail supporting the eBlasts. Lastly, the firm further layered the campaigns by integrating social media and blog assets to support the webinar.

The firm stressed their desire to have relevant attendees and focused more on the total qualified prospects rather than just the number of registrations. Therefore, the prospects who received the voicemail were prescreened to be decision makers within ideal organizations.

The Results

Integrating campaign source codes with the registration and event portal, the firm identified which campaign drove each individual registration.

All four campaigns exceeded expectations:

With 395 registrations, hundreds of qualified leads were generated from the campaigns.

More impressive was that the campaign delivered significantly higher response rates than any previous marketing campaign in the last two years. Previous campaigns delivered to the targeted metro areas delivered response rates between .25% and 1.25%.

Based on the registration, event execution, and the progress towards generating pipeline opportunities, the project management firm has committed to delivering additional webinars with Rally Point.

Other Numbers

• Just over 50% of those who registered attended the live event.
• Over 90% of webinar attendees viewed the entire webinar.
• 5% of attendees proactively requested to be contacted by the firm's sales team.
• It can take up to 4,000 dials to follow up with every registrant of a webinar this size. The client did identify one area for improvement when delivering future webinars: coordinating its business development resources to immediately follow-up with attendees within two-business days after the event.