ON24 is a cloud-based digital experience platform that enables users to create digital events such as webinars. With its advanced technology, ON24 ranks highly on “Platform Popularity” in G2’s Webinar Software category, and is among the top ten for “Satisfaction” and “G2 Score”.
Integrating ON24 with Account Engagement (Pardot) or Salesforce may be beneficial for organizations using both platforms. In this article, I will discuss the pros and cons of each integration, and provide guidance to help you make the best decision for your business needs.
The ON24 + Account Engagement Integration
The ON24 + Account Engagement (Pardot) integration uses the “Tibco Scribe platform to make API calls out to Account Engagement and interact with Prospects”, creating and updating these records according to their webinar activity.
Users are required to create three fields to capture multiple event IDs on the prospect record. These fields enable reporting on prospect webinar activity using multiple dynamic lists.
Below is what a prospect record will look like if they’ve attended multiple webinars. Each number represents a different event.
Pros:
- Registrations sync: You have the ability to capture registrations using Account Engagement (Pardot) forms, preserving your brand and form structure, and automatically creating/updating prospects.
- Consent: If your consent process only lives in Account Engagement, you can continue capturing opt-ins without bringing the consent process into Salesforce.
- Scoring: If your scoring model lives exclusively in Account Engagement, you can easily score as you capture registrants.
- Comms strategy: All registrants are available in Account Engagement as they’re captured through forms, therefore your comms strategy stays consistent.
Cons:
- Additional custom fields required: This solution requires additional custom fields which are populated as multiple responses. It can be extremely challenging when it comes to reporting or if you’re running a multi-ID event. For example, if your event comprises multiple webinars, each event may use a separate ID which will populate the three fields according to the prospects’ activity.
- Dynamic lists for reporting: Reporting can only be done using dynamic lists, and you might need multiple lists to cover activities and criteria, such as country, industry etc.
- Automation rules needed for campaigns: If you want to add these prospects to a campaign as they attend, a set of automation rules needs to be put in place. The campaign membership can be triggered by a completion action on the form but future interactions will require automation in Account Engagement (Pardot).
The ON24 + Salesforce Integration
The ON24 Salesforce integration does one simple thing: it adds registrants to the Salesforce campaign you specify. Once the event has taken place, it automatically changes the status of the campaign members that have attended to “Attended”. Easy!
According to the ON24 documentation, the integration does the following using Tibco Scribe:
- ‘Update or create campaign records
- Create net new lead if no contact or lead is found
- Create campaign member records for contacts and leads’
There is some set-up to be done in ON24, such as mapping fields and setting up Tibco, but that is true also for the Account Engagement (Pardot) integration.
Pros:
- Ease of use: This integration is easier than the Account Engagement integration, both to setup and use in the long run.
- Send emails: The ON24 platform provides its users with an “Email Notification” section, including a number of emails that can be automatically sent based on the prospect activity and webinar date. Although some might consider this a disadvantage, the comms section of the webcast means that, although you’ll be sending emails from ON24 (they will come from an ON24 email address), you can drop your HTML into the email section and still use your fully branded email. However, you won’t get the same insights from sending it from Account Engagement unless you use custom redirects.
- Activity tracking: Custom fields can be added to the Campaign Member record, to resurface some of the webinar-related activities These activities include, minutes duration, engagement score and user questions among others.
- Comms: Account Engagement can still be used to drive some of the comms, depending on your needs, based on CRM campaign membership. However, if the consent process is not available in Salesforce, additional set-up might be required.
Cons:
- Form: The registration form is hosted in ON24, and branding customisation is limited.
- Additional setup for scoring: If your business relies on a scoring model that lives exclusively in Account Engagement, additional set-up might be required.
- Opt-ins: If your consent process lives exclusively in Account Engagement, to seamlessly capture opt-ins on ON24 forms the consent checkbox might need resurfacing in Salesforce (it can be removed from page layouts to avoid issues).
Final Thoughts
While both the Account Engagement (Pardot) and Salesforce ON24 integrations are sound, and I have used both, personally, I would favor the Salesforce integration. This is because it relies on campaign membership, which is easier to work with and report on.
However, the Account Engagement (Pardot) integration still offers significant benefits, particularly regarding the consent process, but as mentioned above, reporting capabilities are limited and maintenance might be more complex in the long run.
