Plan Webinars like an Expert with Mautic & GoToWebinar

Webinars are an important tool for buyer education and lead generation in every B2B marketer’s arsenal. There’s nothing like having a subject matter expert (SME), who could be a product manager or pre-sales engineer, share their insights with an interactive presentation and/or live demo with your prospects. For a long time, GoToWebinar has been the industry standard for hosting webinars. It’s a Citrix product with a track record for reliable, high quality streaming and compatibility across a variety of platforms. The GoToWebinar meeting client is compatible with all major platforms including Windows 7 – 10, Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) to 10.14 (Mojave), iOS 10 to 12, and Android 5 (Lollipop) – 9 (Pie). Attendees can join a GoToMeeting webinar from their Chrome or Firefox browser, or using a desktop app.

As anybody who has planned a GoToWebinar event before would know, GoToWebinar has the basic functionality for inviting attendees by email, hosting a signup form, and reminding registered attendees prior to the webinar. Using GoToWebinar as a standalone is app is probably sufficient for an internal event, but falls far short of what most marketers want to accomplish. Segmenting registered attendees who attended, and those who missed the webinar for follow-up has always been a “pain point” for GoToWebinar users. You can always export a CSV file from GoToWebinar and manually import it into your email marketing software, but with the Mautic GoToWebinar integration you can streamline your process. Furthermore, the customization of the system emails (registration confirmation, reminders, follow-ups) and sign-up forms generated by GoToWebinar is limited to the logo, colors, and a custom message. Many marketers wish they can leverage their marketing automation platform for webinar-related communications, so they can use their own custom email templates and messaging. With Mautic & GoToWebinar, it is perfectly possible.

Mautic GoToWebinar Integration Setup

If you don’t have a GoToWebinar account yet, you can sign up for a 7-day free trial at https://www.gotomeeting.com/webinar/try that supports up to 100 attendees – equivalent to the Starter plan which retails for $89/month (paid annually). You will need both a GoToWebinar account and Mautic instance to complete this integration.

To setup, sign in to your GoToWebinar account and visit the Citrix Developer Center https://goto-developer.logmeininc.com/user in a new tab of the same browser where you signed in. If asked to authorize access to your GoToWebinar account, click Allow.

Now you will create an API key which will allow Mautic to exchange information with GoToWebinar, for example push registered attendees to GoToWebinar, and pull the status of attendees (e.g. attended, missed) from GoToWebinar. Click the Create New App button to continue.

Give the app a name and description which will be used to identify the API key internally. Check GoToWebinar as the app which this API key should have access to. Finally, copy the callback URL from the Mautic plugin settings window, and paste it in the Application URL textbox, then click Create App to save the settings.

GoTo Developer - Create New App

In the Configuration > Plugins section of the Mautic dashboard, make sure the GoToWebinar plugin is set to Yes for Published.

Enter the Consumer Key provided by Citrix in the Client ID field, and the Consumer Secret in the Client Secret field. Then, click the Authorize App button to establish the connection from Mautic to GoToWebinar. If a pop-up window appears confirming that the authorization was successful, you can click Save & Close to close the plugin settings modal window.

GoToWebinar Mautic Integration Settings

Finally, to complete the setup of the GoToWebinar integration with Mautic, add the Citrix sync cron job to your Mautic instance.

/15 * * * * php /path/to/mautic/app/console mautic:citrix:sync --product=webinar

You can test that the integration is working, by running the sync command at the command line – like so:

Manually run mautic:citrix:sync cron job

Mautic GoToWebinar Integration Features

Once GoToWebinar is connected to Mautic, you’ll have the capability to define Mautic segments with filters based on contacts who registered for, attended, or missed a specific webinar. Also, you can create forms and landing pages with an action that pushes webinar registrations to GoToWebinar. Using the Mautic campaign builder, you can automate actions such as sending a reminder email to attendees, at specified intervals prior to the webinar. If you integrated a CRM with Mautic such as Salesforce, you can also assign webinar registrants to a Salesforce campaign and contact status.

A “Join Webinar” button linking to the unique GoToWebinar link for a contact can be embedded into a segment email using the {webinar_button} token. As per the Mautic Citrix plugin documentation, the email type must be Segment Email, and the email must be assigned to a segment that has the filter Webinar (registered) for a specific webinar that’s scheduled in GoToWebinar. This allows Mautic to identify for which webinar the “join” button should be linked to.

Also, don’t forget to the leverage the Webinar (did not attend) and Webinar (attended) segment filters to create follow-up campaigns to make the most of your webinar marketing efforts. For example, you could send a replay link, and answers to any audience questions to those who attended, and a “sorry we missed you” email to those who registered, but did not attend the webinar. Other actions you could automate using Mautic campaigns include: adding/subtracting points from a contact based on webinar registration and attendance, pushing contacts who attended to a CRM, and sending follow-up email sequences to engage further with webinar leads.

Here are two useful resources from Mautic’s documentation that detail best practices for using the Mautic GoToWebinar plugin.

If you would like the help of our Mautic consultants in configuring the GoToWebinar plugin, troubleshooting any issues, and using it to its fullest potential, get in touch.