During the past few years, my team has had the opportunity to work with one of our clients on managing their nation-wide seminar series. Within that role, it was our duty to select and implement technology that would be used for registration, check-in, and overall marketing attribution reporting.
Since our client was already using HubSpot for their marketing automation, we quickly decided on Eventbrite because of its integration with HubSpot.
However, we realized early on that there wasn’t much written on event campaigns best practices for this integration. I’ll be sharing how we managed to make the integration work seamlessly.
By utilizing the simple steps below, we were able to create a seminar series that provided a seamless user experience between the website and Eventbrite registration page, collect and share valuable contact information between the two tools, immediately improve attendance rates, and provide infinitely more detailed marketing attribution that helped our team better understand what was and wasn’t working both from the HubSpot and Eventbrite side of things. Ultimately, this integration paired with a sound marketing strategy has helped us drive record-breaking growth for our client. Now it’s your turn.
One of the first things every marketer should do when presented with a technology solution that may work for them is to verify that it will do everything that they need. Ask yourself these questions:
Many marketers and businesses in general want to be able to control as much of the registration process as possible for their events. If that’s you, then you may want to seriously consider how Eventbrite might fit into your plans. Don’t write Eventbrite off just yet though. While a majority of people simply utilize the registration pages housed on Eventbrite, the platform also allows you to embed an iframe of the page onto your own website. If you do this, just keep in mind to consider the mobile experience of your registrants.
As a free, third party application, Eventbrite partially relies on its branding to bring in new business. With that in mind, it makes sense that you’re limited to what you can change within the design of your registration page, including the Eventbrite logo. Without a premium version of the application where you can pay to whitelabel the registration experience, you’ll have to share some of the glory with Eventbrite.
With the way Eventbrite is set up, money generated from ticket sales aren’t actually released to the event organizer until after the event is over. Eventbrite’s reasoning is that this allows them to more easily refund ticket purchases to registrants before events without being put in any financial risk. With that said, you can request an advanced payout from Eventbrite but depending on the amount you’re looking to receive, it may or may not need fit within Eventbrite’s limits.
While the other questions here help you better understand whether or not Eventbrite will work for you and your event, this question is more meant to help you understand how to set everything up in a clear and organized fashion. If you have multiple events that you want to house in Eventbrite, you’ll want to figure out how much data you’d like to collect for individual events. Eventbrite allows you to either group multiple events under one registration page or create separate pages for each event. The latter allows for greater amounts of more detailed data (traffic, registrant, attendance, etc).
By now, you might’ve decided that Eventbrite is the tool for you. But before you integrate it with HubSpot, you’ll want to focus on a few things within Eventbrite that will help you better drive and see results later on.
When setting up an event on Eventbrite as a company, you’ll want to make sure that your public-facing account and profile is set up so that when registrants look at the “Organizer Profile” information, you are able to provide a brand-consistent experience. Below are a number of items that should be considered when optimizing your account:
When it comes to actually building out the registration page inside of Eventbrite, there are a number of things that you’ll need to take into consideration no matter if it’s for a single event or a dozen. This section will focus on the backend set-up of your event which will allow for the right amount of reporting and visibility that a digital marketer requires. By checking off all bullets listed out below, you will have successfully built out your initial page with all elements meant to help optimize user experience and reporting.
Now that you’ve set up your Eventbrite portal, you can start integrating it with HubSpot. Next, it’s time to focus on the things that must be considered that will ultimately help with campaign execution, tracking, and attribution.
Creating a campaign inside of HubSpot that connects all pages, emails, tracking links, social posts, and other promotional elements in one place will provide you a quick and easy way to track progress and overall success of your event.
Similar to Eventbrite’s tracking links covered in the previous section, you’ll want to be able to properly track and attribute promotional items that point people back to your website before then going to Eventbrite. Outside of the different types of links covered in the previous section, you’ll also want to create tracking links for any promotion that points people back to your event’s splash page housed in HubSpot.
While the integration between HubSpot and Eventbrite allows you to send over registrant information for the basic contact fields, any sort of custom Eventbrite form field created will not map over to HubSpot through the native integration. Fortunately though, you can use Zapier to map these fields over to custom form fields in your HubSpot portal.
One of the most important areas of your reporting comes from lists created within HubSpot. Not only will this help you showcase registrants, attendees, and no-shows for each event within your HubSpot database but it will also help you segment for specific pre and post-event automation. Consider the following lists to build out:
As stated, the lists above help for you to automate a number of different activities within your event campaign. Consider the following HubSpot workflows to create for your event:
Based off your choice for housing Eventbrite registration pages on the platform or in iframes on your website, you may or may not have a limited number of pages to consider creating within your HubSpot portal. One of those is an event splash page meant to house a list of all events that you’re hosting along with their links (tracking links) to their registration pages. The other would be a simple landing page that would house an iframe for your Eventbrite registration process.
With both platforms integrated and ready to go live, you’ll want to make sure that you’re proactively planning for how you will gather, sort through, and report on all of the metrics that you’ve set yourself up to collect. Consider the following items to help you not only track the success of your entire event but also the different areas that make up your promotional efforts.
Registrant information
And there you have it! Now you have all you need to be able to accurately track promotion and event results and drive improved event metrics through a more connected campaign. All you need is HubSpot, Eventbrite, Zapier, and the steps above.
Originally published Dec 11, 2017 8:00:00 AM, updated July 12 2019