Frequent Webinars with Minimal Effort:
WACUL Achieves a 28% Reduction in Workload and Soars to 8 Unique Webinars per Month

Challenges Faced Conducting Webinars

• Participants complained about streaming issues and image quality with Zoom
• Inability to collect lead information and conduct surveys with YouTube
• Workload burden of conducting each webinar made increasing webinar frequency difficult

Benefits Achieved with EventHub

• Workload reduced by 28%, and person-hours reduced from seven hours to only five hours per webinar
• Survey average response rate increased from 46% to 65%
• Increased webinar frequency to eight per month with only 2.5 person people

WACUL is a marketing automation company that provides digital marketing lead-generation solutions. They have been conducting seminars for a long time as part of their own marketing to promote these solutions. Initially, these started out as in-person seminars, but they were forced to move to online webinars as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. They initially attempted to use tools such as Zoom meetings and YouTube videos. However, they encountered numerous issues, such as streaming problems, poor image quality, and difficulty in the acquisition of lead information. This led to increased complaints from their customers and prospects.

After moving to the EventHub platform, which “unified the entire process” for conducting webinars, WACUL significantly improved the efficiency and outcomes of this marketing channel. They have significantly increased the frequency to “eight webinars per month with an overall team of only 2.5 people” and have “increased the survey response rate from 46% to 65%.” 

To better understand the results and efficiencies achieved by the implementation of EventHub, we spoke to Kensaku Ando, the CMO of WACUL.

※ This case study is based on the webinar presentation held on March 15, 2023, “How to Maximize Lead Generation through Email Marketing and Nurture Leads to Opportunities and Closed-Won Business”

Why WACUL Hosts Frequent Webinars and How They Do It

Run a variety of webinars to better nurture in-house leads into opportunities

First, could you tell us why WACUL decided to start holding webinars?

Our company regularly shares updates and information through email newsletters, but holding periodic webinars with our existing customers is also an essential practice. These webinars serve two purposes. One is to “keep in touch with our existing customers,” and the other is to “generate in-house leads through co-sponsored webinars.”

Although we regularly convey information about WACUL’s many services through our newsletters, it may not coincide with when the customer is actually looking for the information.  

To generate opportunities, it is necessary to convey information that meets the customer’s needs at the right time. By holding multiple types of webinars, we can better communicate “information that is relevant to customers who may have differing levels of maturity and requirements.” This enables us to better nurture our in-house leads from newsletters to webinars and ultimately to qualified business opportunities.

WACUL’s webinar process and target audience

Could you please tell us about the process WACUL uses to execute webinars?

<Joint webinar: Kensaku Ando from WACUL and Yuichi Suzuki from EventHub>

Typically we run about six WACUL-led and two co-hosted webinars per month. Regarding our operational structure, we have one team member responsible for the planning and operational aspects and 1.5 members accountable for the actual execution on the day of the webinar.

Our primary target audiences are marketing professionals and managers facing challenges in improving web marketing conversion rates and increasing lead generation, challenges that WACUL can solve. Webinar attendance typically ranges from 50 to as large as 150 attendees.

Executing eight events per month with only 1.5 team members. Impressive!

Use Webinars to Nurture Leads into Opportunities and Successful Business

Leverage surveys to assess next-step strategies and priorities

I’ve heard that WACUL places great importance on surveys to generate opportunities from seminars. What kind of responses do you focus on?

Immediately after a webinar, our inside sales team reviews the survey responses to prioritize and create a follow-up strategy for each lead. Specifically, the most important criteria we look at is “the timeline of adoption.”

Customers who plan to adopt a service within one to three months are given the highest priority. However, if a customer’s timeline is farther out, it doesn’t mean an opportunity is unlikely. Based on our experience, we believe that as long as there is an intent to adopt a solution sometime in the future, then there is still a good chance to generate an opportunity, even if the timeline is farther out into the future.

After confirming the planned time frame for adoption, our inside sales team determines the sales strategy and pursues the prospect. Nurturing them into opportunities and closed-won business.

<From the Presentation slides>

Why webinars are prioritized over other lead generation channels

Why did WACUL choose to focus on webinars over other marketing channels (digital advertising, commercials, etc.)?

Sometimes we can generate opportunities from newsletters, but we would have to catch the prospect when they are currently wrestling with a problem we solve, align with their budgeting cycle, or reach them when they have spare time to acquire new information. However, this is hard to gauge. In addition, when the need for a solution arises, customers will typically turn to online searches to research information rather than look back at previously sent newsletters.  

For our webinars, we offer a variety of subjects focusing on different problems that WACUL solves and then let our prospects decide what they are interested in. Statistically, on average, audiences only spend a few minutes reading a newsletter and one minute on a vendor’s website. Compared to this, the average time audiences engage in webinars is over 30 minutes.

Webinars provide a chance to get significantly longer attention from customers, allowing them to understand our services better and make it easier to convert leads into opportunities and successful business.

Challenges Encountered Prior to EventHub

Started by using Zoom for live webinars and YouTube for pre-recorded webinars, but numerous challenges were encountered.

Before adopting EventHub, what kind of challenges did you face?

WACUL has been hosting seminars as part of our marketing strategy for a long time, but the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to transition from in-person to a virtual format literally overnight. We initially attempted to use Zoom.

We used Zoom to conduct live webinars, but since it didn’t support streaming of pre-recorded webinars, we also added YouTube to our workflow. However, as we started to run webinars with these tools, we encountered several challenges. These are summarized below.

<Zoom>

• Risk of unexpected problems when live-streaming
• Poor video and image quality when sharing content
• Need for someone to constantly operate Zoom, even when using pre-recorded content

<YouTube>

• Lead information of viewers cannot be acquired
• Surveys cannot be conducted
• No branding control – competitor ads appearing throughout our webinar
• Viewers can skip through the video, resulting in key information being missed
• Viewership analytics are limited

We started receiving complaints from customers due to these issues. In addition, we found that our workload grew significantly as we increased the number of webinars performed. When customers take valuable time out of their day to attend our webinars, it is important for us to provide an informative and smooth experience. We started to feel that we were unable to deliver that.

Using additional tools like Google Forms and marketing automation software, along with Zoom and YouTube, added to the complexity.

Were there any specific challenges or difficulties you encountered since you needed to use several tools besides Zoom and YouTube?

<From the Presentation slides>

Yes, there were challenges. In our case, we used various tools in conjunction with Zoom and YouTube, such as marketing automation (MA) software for registration and Google Forms for surveys. As a result, the post-webinar data compilation and analysis were troublesome.

In addition, with Zoom, our staff had to constantly supervise the event, even if pre-recorded content was used. It took a lot of work to conduct the event and complete the post-event analysis. As we increased the frequency of events, the time and burden on staff grew proportionally.

Why EventHub

Run successful simu-live events autonomously.

<WACUL’s webinar event 2022/10/25>

Why did WACUL decide to adopt EventHub?

As mentioned, the “poor image and video quality when sharing content” and the “need for someone to constantly operate Zoom, even when using pre-recorded content” were two significant challenges we faced. However, with EventHub, the video quality was maintained when sharing content, and no streaming errors occurred, resulting in zero complaints from attendees. In addition, successfully running simu-live webinars without staff has been helpful.

Since adopting EventHub, we have received no complaints about the event experience in our post-event surveys.

All issues resolved: Survey response rate, lead info acquisition, post-event analysis, and more

Moreover, with YouTube, there were various challenges related to lead info acquisition, surveys, branding, and viewership analytics. EventHub successfully resolved all of these issues.

EventHub allows us to manage all aspects of webinars from a single interface. It is an “all-in-one” solution which has been very helpful to us.

Benefits of Adopting EventHub

Workload reduction of 28%, allowing 2.5 staff to conduct eight webinars per month, and survey response rate increased from 46% to 65%.

How has the adoption of EventHub helped WACUL?

After adopting EventHub, our issues related to poor video resolution and streaming lag are fully resolved. Furthermore, the fact that we can complete all aspects of the webinar from a single “all-in-one” platform, including lead info acquisition and surveys, has dramatically reduced our workload.

<From the Presentation Slides>

The overall time required for each webinar has reduced from seven to five hours, resulting in a 28% reduction in workload. Moreover, the survey response rate, which was 46% with YouTube and Zoom, increased to 65% with EventHub. This exceeds our target of 60%. 

Thank you EventHub!

<From the Presentation Slides>

The reduced workload has allowed us to increase the frequency of our webinars.

Thanks to EventHub, the operational effort needed to execute webinars has significantly decreased, allowing us to increase the frequency of our webinars. Before EventHub, we hosted around six webinars per month with 2.5 team members. With EventHub, we can regularly host eight webinars per month with the same staff. Approximately 50-100 attendees participate in each session, so having two extra webinars allows us to reach more customers. We are thrilled about this.

Thank you for your feedback!

Speakers

	WACUL CMO Kensaku Ando
	After graduating from Waseda University, Kensaku worked at Marui. In 2006 he joined Rakus, where he established the Customer Support organization and became the Marketing Manager. In 2016, he took on the role of Business Manager for the email marketing service, “HaiHai Mail.” He also co-authored “Practical Insights into BtoB Marketing” (published by MyNavi). In July 2022, he joined WACUL.

EventHub Marketing and PR Manager Yuichi Suzuki

Yuichi graduated from Sophia University Graduate School in 2010. He started his career at an IT venture, followed by the web services planning department at En Japan. After this, he moved to Kaonavi Inc., a leading talent management system provider, to establish a B2B marketing organization, of which he was the fifth member. Yuichi later worked for OLTA, a FinTech startup company, and joined EventHub as a Marketing Manager in May 2022.