Zoom makes it easy to set up a webinar and sign up attendees. However, Zoom doesn’t provide all the reminders and nurturing to ensure you maximize your webinar attendance. In this article we’ll detail how to automate a Zoom webinar.
At DailyStory, we use Zoom for all our webinars and rely on our Zoom integration to manage all of the notifications, reminders, and follow-ups.
Let’s take a look at how to automate Zoom webinar.
Automate Zoom webinar: Before it starts
You’ve put all the hard work into prepping for a great webinar about your product, service, or offering. And, you are ready to sign up webinar attendees.
While most teams do a great job at marketing their event, they struggle with maximizing event attendance. They typically rely on the attendee to remember the event or add it to his or her calendar.
At DailyStory, we manage our entire pre-webinar attendee reminder notifications using automations to create email drip campaigns.
If you don’t already have a DailyStory account, you can create a free account and follow along step-by-step.
Add the Zoom app to DailyStory
To begin with, you’ll need to add the Zoom app to DailyStory. Once added, DailyStory uses native Zoom APIs to integrate with your upcoming webinars.
Next, create a campaign in DailyStory. For example, we have a “Webinars” campaign. The campaign is where you will create all the emails, text messages, forms, and automations related to the campaign.
Create a sign-up web form for your Zoom webinar
Within your webinar-related campaign, create a new web form to collect some basic information about your webinar attendees. Zoom requires a name and email to register someone for a webinar, so at a minimum, your form should look something like this:
We’ll use the WordPress integration with DailyStory to insert this form into a WordPress page. So, a simple, minimalist form is perfect.
Create emails for your Zoom webinar automation
You can create as many emails as you want for your post sign-up drip campaign, but we recommend three at a minimum:
Email #1: Sign-up confirmation
The first email you should create for your Zoom webinar automation is the sign-up confirmation email. This email should go out immediately after you’ve successfully registered the attendee.
This email should:
- Thank the recipient for signing up.
- Remind the recipient of the webinar topic and the date and time of the webinar.
- Tell the recipient that he or she will receive several more emails reminding them of the webinar.
Ideally, this email is plain text and simple.
Email #2: The Day-before webinar reminder email
The second email you should create for your Zoom webinar automation is the day-before reminder email. This email should go out the day before the webinar is set to start.
This email should:
- Remind the recipient about tomorrow’s webinar topic and time.
- Include the link to join the webinar.
- Tell the recipient that he or she will receive another email tomorrow an hour before the webinar starts.
Email #3: An Hour-before webinar reminder email
The third email you should create for your Zoom webinar automation is the hour-before reminder email. This email should go out an hour before the webinar is set to start.
This email should:
- Remind the recipient about the upcoming webinar.
- Include the link to join the webinar.
Now that we’ve created all the assets for the drip campaign. Let’s assemble them.
Create a Zoom webinar sign-up drip automation
You can name the automation whatever you like, but in this example, we’ve used the name “Zoom Webinar Sign-up Drip.”
For the purpose of this article, we’re keeping the automation simple. We’re not using any conditional logic in the automation.
This automation is also available for you to download and install in your DailyStory account.
Start the Zoom Webinar Automation using a ‘Web Form submit’ trigger
The automation is started by a trigger. In this case, we’ll use the “Web Form submitted” trigger for the sign-up web form we created.
Next, we’ll add the “Add to Zoom Webinar” action to use the data from the submitted form to enroll the contact into the Zoom webinar.
Then, we’ll run the drip campaign. We’ll immediately send the “sign up confirmation” email and a Slack notification to the team.
Next, we’ll use a delay (On a Specific Date and Time) in the automation to wait until the day before the webinar. For example, if the Zoom webinar takes place on September 20, 2023, at 12:00 PM, we’ll pause the automation until September 19, 2023, 12:00 PM.
Then, we’ll send “The day before reminder” email.
Finally, we’ll pause the automation again until September 20, 2023, at 11:00 AM, an hour before the webinar starts. We’ll send “An hour before reminder” email.
In conclusion
That’s it! A simple but effective way to use automation to ensure you tell your webinar attendees about the webinar and maximize attendance.
Up next, we’ll take a look at post-webinar activities: segmenting out people who participated and those who didn’t show up. And, we’ll run conditional messaging to each group automatically.
