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Writer's pictureAna Laura Zain

How to Connect Crowdcast with Pardot: Create Custom Automations for Webinar Follow Up (2020)

Having your webinar tool integrated with marketing automation is key for your business. Doing so removes the manual work and the need to import and export your lists to send follow up emails. But also, it allows you to easily segment attendees and score leads based on engagement, and personalize the way you communicate with them.


Sending Crowdcast data to Pardot is quite simple if you use Zapier. The integration requires absolutely zero coding experience, however, if you need your webinar attendance information for building nurturing programs and sending follow up emails to registrants, you might need to do a bit more work than just creating a Zap.


The Zapier integration allows Crowdcast to send the following data to Pardot, including these triggers:



So for instance, you can have a prospect created in Pardot and added to a specific list, every time someone registers to your webinar.


The webinar name, date and language are not directly being pushed to Pardot. So if you want to have more information available you need to add a few more steps to your integration process.


That’s why we came up with the following guide that will walk you through this integration so you can send a customized message to your webinar attendees and registrants depending on the webinar they have attended, the topic, and the language. 

In this post we will review the entire process, including these steps:

  1. Send Crowdcast data to Pardot with Zapier

  2. Create Custom Fields in Pardot and Match them with Crowdcast Fields

  3. Create Custom Nurturing Flows in Engagement Studio


#1 Send Crowdcast Data to Pardot with Zapier


The first step on the integration is the easiest one: using Zapier to connect both tools. I will have three lists created in Pardot where I will have registrants, attendees, and non-attendees added. 



Therefore you will have them added in three static lists in Pardot, as the example below:


#2 Create Custom Fields in Pardot and Match them to Crowdcast Fields


So, how do you keep track of the webinars that a prospect has attended to, at a contact level record in Pardot? By creating custom fields in Pardot that collect the event details.


In Pardot, create the following three custom fields:


  • Crowdcast_Event_Time

  • Crowdcast_Event_Title

  • Crowdcast_Event_Code


Once created, go to Zapier and select the following option to update the prospect fields in Pardot, once a new live attendance occurs. 




The three Pardot custom fields you have created will appear listed, make sure you have them matching the Crowdcast fields like shown in the example below:




Now that you are all set, make sure you test webinars, register and attend so that you can check that all the information is being sent and appears at a prospect level in Pardot. 


#3 Create Custom Nurturing Flows in Engagement Studio


The final step, and most important one, is to be able to process all this information and have it automated, in one single place, so that you don’t need to do any manual follow-ups.


For this process, we will create two separate engagement studio workflows. One for attendees, and the other one for non-attendees.


In this example, we will review the attendee follow up email, but the non-attendee follow up is almost the same, the main difference is the list we select at the start of the program, which will be “non-attendees” for the latter.


Start the process by adding the attendees from the static list you’ve created in step #1.


Also, make sure that the prospects have attended a webinar less than one day ago. We added this step because we created the static lists weeks before we created the Engagement Studios, and we wanted to make sure we didn’t send follow up emails to people that attended a webinar weeks ago.


As you can see we are using the static list we have created in step #1 and the custom field Event Date that we have created in step #2




Now here is the part of the process where we customize the communication.


My goal is to send three different emails based on the language of the webinar. For each of my webinars in Crowdcast, either the word English, Spanish or Portuguese is part of the title.



So, when building the Engagement Studio workflow, I used the custom field we have created in step #2 called “Event Name” and check if that prospect custom field contains “English” in the title.


Please note that ( ) can’t be used in Engagement studio when searching for characters at a prospect field level. So you can just use “English”, “Portuguese”, and “Spanish”, having three branches of communications.


The other custom element we want to add is the webinar name in the communication so that the person knows which webinar we are referring to. Therefore we will use the custom field Event Name as well here, but as a merge field on the content of the email. See the example below:




In order to do that, we have created a final step to remove them from the attendee list once they receive the follow-up email. The will be eligible to re-enter the workflow the following day. That’s the limitation of this set up, if the company runs more than one webinar per day or a person joins more than 2 webinars per day, then they might not receive one of the email follow ups.


Most probably, people that join one of your webinars, will join another one in the future. So you need to make sure these prospects are able to re-enter the workflow. 


If a prospect enters the flow every time they attend a webinar and are added to the Atendee list, then you need to make sure these prospects leave the workflow and are re-added to that list when they join another webinar in the future. 


In order to do that, we have created a final step to remove them from the attendee list once they receive the follow-up email. They will be eligible to re-enter the workflow the following day. That’s the limitation of this set up, if the company runs more than one webinar per day or a person joins more than 2 webinars per day, then they might not receive one of the email follow ups.


This is how the final Engagement studio workflow looks like:




Interested in learning more? Book a free consultation with us today.


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