Mailing through your autoresponder

Both WebinarJam and EverWebinar allow you to send the webinar email reminders to your registrants via any of your integrated autoresponder platforms. The benefit is that you have far more control over the email branding, styling and scheduling that if you simply use our built-in notification system.

 

Setting it all up

At the configuration wizard, step “Notifications”, choose “Your own autoresponder”. Note that this option will only be available if you have, at least, one autoresponder already integrated. Furthermore, you will see below the list of autoresponder you’ve integrated so far.

• • NOTE: Due to the limitations in their APIs, autoresponders Maropost and Constant Contact are not supported for this feature.

 

 

The next step is to hover your mouse over your autoresponder and select “Custom Fields”.

 

That will pop the actual Custom Field configuration window:

In this window, you will need to bind each parameter used by WebinarJam/EverWebinar to one unique Custom Field in your autoresponder platform. Via those dropdown selectors, you will need to assign a unique Custom Field to each parameter.

 

How do Custom Fields work?

Custom Fields are unique fields you create inside your autoresponder in order to assign custom values to your contacts. Every autoresponder comes, by default, with the usual suspects: first name, email address, phone number, etc. However, sometimes you might need something outside that standard list, such as “shoe size”, and that’s what you’d create Custom Fields for.

Well, you’re going to need a few of those Custom Fields created inside your autoresponder before you can bind them to the WJ/EW parameters are explained above.

More specifically, WJ/EW needs you to create 6 Custom Fields:

• Live_Room_Link
• Replay_Room_Link
• Webinar_Date
• Webinar_Time
• User_Timezone (mostly for EverWebinar, if configured as “User’s own time zone“)
• Room_Password (only required if the webinar room is password protected)

If you’re running multiple webinars simultaneously, you might want to create a different set of Custom Fields for each webinar:

• Live_Room_Link_1
• Live_Room_Link_2
• Replay_Room_Link_1
• Replay_Room_Link_2
• Etc, you get the idea.

If you only run one webinar at a time, you don’t need to create multiple sets for each webinar. Instead, if one of your repeat users re-subscribe to another webinar, the Custom Fields values will simply be overwritten with the information from the newest webinar.

• NOTE: when you create the Custom Fields in your autoresponder of choice, make sure they’re created as plain TEXT input fields. Don’t give them any special format such as dropdown, check boxes, or date, or anything like that. Just plain text input fields 🙂

 

Anyway, now that you have created your Custom Fields inside your autoresponder account, you may now bind each WJ/EW parameter to each specific Custom Field. See screenshot below:

That’s it! Your webinar parameters and your autoresponder Custom Fields are now linked!

IMPORTANT NOTE: It’s crucial that, once you have linked the webinar parameters to your Custom Fields, you keep those Custom Fields operational at all times. That means that if you delete a Custom Field inside your autoresponder, or you change its name, or you make any other modification, you must go back to the webinar configuration wizard and update the integration. Otherwise, the link will be broken and the whole thing will fall apart.

 

As your users register for the webinars, WJ/EW will pass the corresponding information to their user profile inside your autoresponder. Here’s how those Custom Fields would look like in Kartra:

 

Mailing the webinar links to your users

The first thing is to make sure that your users are indeed passed to your autoresponder upon registering to your webinar.

In order to do that, at the “Integrations” tab of the configuration wizard, set up a simple automation rule based on webinar registration. For example: IF they register to the webinar, THEN subscribe them to my mailing list.

See screenshot below:

 

Now that your registrants are passed to your autoresponder and they’re fed with all the necessary Custom Fields, you can finally send them email notifications related to your webinar straight from your autoresponder.

Here below is how it’d look like in Kartra, but every autoresponder would be similar:

Your autoresponder will dynamically switch each tag code for the appropriate value, and your users will have all the information they need.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that, since you’re now sending all email reminders through your own autoresponder, there’s no need to configure any email notification inside the WJ/EW configuration wizard.

 

Design your own webinar funnel!

A cool byproduct of using your autoresponder to send the webinar links to your users via Custom Fields is that you will be free to design and code your own custom webinar funnel from start to end:

• Custom registration page
• Custom registration form
• Custom thank you page (finally!)
• Custom email notifications
• Etc

Now, you don’t need to use WJ/EW’s default registration forms or Thank You pages anymore! Instead, if you have the design and technical chops, you can customize the entire registration funnel, add them to your autoresponder of choice, and simply send them their unique links to the webinar room via your own autoresponder.

Effectively, this allows you to bypass pretty much the entire WJ/EW default setup except, obviously, the actual live/replay rooms. For anything else… well, the world is your (and your web designer’s) oyster!