Multi-Session Webinars in Marketo — You Might Be Doing It Wrong

At times you have to set up webinars with multiple sessions — sometimes to cover multiple time zones, sometimes to give users the flexibility to join on different dates and times.

How do you do this in Marketo when you have the same topic, same speakers, but multiple sessions of the same webinar? Take a pause and think…

Common practices

1. Creating a Parent event program and then creating multiple event programs for each webinar session.
2. Creating a parent Engagement program with nested event programs, one for each session.

If you are doing any of the above, you are doing more harm than adding value.

Why?

With approach #1, registration coming through a form (a child asset of the parent program) means Marketo by default considers the registrant a member of the parent program as well. Issues:

• The lead registers for one webinar but gets membership in two webinar-type programs.
• It might create an extra interesting moment and add double lead score (depending on setup).
• Wrong lead score can trigger false MQLs.
• Attribution of the program to revenue gets divided into this extra program, which is wrong.

With approach #2, engagement programs are meant for drip/nurture campaigns, not as folders. Issues:

• There is a limit of 100 active engagement programs — you'd waste that capacity.
• It confuses new Marketo users about which is your real engagement program.
• It clutters reports and hurts productivity in smart lists and analysis.

The Best Approach

We need a parent program just to avoid asset duplication and ease organization — to handle the operational side. It doesn't need to be an event program. Create a Default program on an "Operational" channel. Operational channels:

• Are excluded from syncing to RCA.
• Can be suppressed easily with a channel filter in program performance reporting.
• Let you exclude these programs from smart lists/campaigns by channel.
• Avoid additional scores and interesting moments from this program's membership.
• Make it crystal clear which programs are used for what purpose.

So use an "Operational" program as the parent and then create session-specific Event programs under it.