Minding the marketing gap: ON24 and Act-On partner to bridge top of funnel and sales gap

ON24 and Act-On are partnering to deliver webinar engagement data to the marketing automation platform. The goal? Helping marketers more effectively nurture qualified leads.

Marketers use webinars at the top and in the middle of the sales funnel. As one of those platforms, ON24 provides metrics about engagement, like whether registrants actually show up, whether they participate in polls, or ask questions. Yet that rich interest data doesn’t always go to good use.

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In fact, it often skips marketing altogether and goes straight to sales via CRM or, heaven-forbid, a spreadsheet. Leads can go stale this way. Sales normally can’t act on all the attendance and participation data anyway, so most of it is wasted.

Until now.

ON24 will pass 25 types of metrics that it collects on to Act-On. Among those metrics, this includes an engagement score — a single numeric score between on and ten — that is designed to work with a lead score.

What this means is that organizations can pass those scores into their marketing automation systems, and then nurture leads automatically and appropriately … only passing along the best leads to sales. Other audience segments may not be far enough along in the buying cycle.

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For instance, an attendee who stayed for only two minutes should be treated differently than one who stayed throughout and asked questions. Both actions might trigger followups in marketing automation, but the former might be to re-register for another webinar. The latter might be to download a related whitepaper.

The key here is that marketing automation helps bridge the gap between lead generation and sales.

Marketing automation is rules-based, so the more data it can use to take actions on, the more effective it can be. For this reason, marketing automation platforms are becoming the hub for driving marketing technology and engagement overall, and we can expect the number of data partnerships to grow.

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ON24 was founded in 1998 and launched its Webcast Center platform in 2002. The company raised $8 Million in 2008 in its only round of funding.

Act-On was founded in 2008 and has received $72.5 Million in five rounds of funding.

The two companies have the same primary audience of mid-market SMBs.