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You don't really need to *Wait* for {{Member.Webinar URL}}

By Sanford Whiteman Tags: webinar, tokens, agical, JS

Isn't it annoying to add a Wait step before sending a registration confirmation, crossing your fingers that the provider has phoned home with the {{Member.Webinar URL}} token?

I've always hated this step. Not only because of the experience for the end user, who might think you've forgotten about them, but on a pure technical level. Techies hate arbitrary timers that are “probably sufficient.” We want tools that are predictable, not best-case guesses with fatal downsides. Not only might a 15 minute Wait not be sufficient under load, there's no Wait that will fix a major problem with the integration, so users will eventually get an email with a big blank in the middle anyway.

What if I told you you don't need to hold off on such emails at all?

Instead, set up an LP in the webinar program that redirects to the {{Member.Webinar URL}}. Send them a link to that LP with no delay. Unless it's very close to the webinar's start time, people aren't going to click a Join Webinar link right away, so you've got lots of breathing room for the API to sync up the {{Member.}} token.

When they do click the email, you'll be ready for them and will immediately bounce them over to the webinar, hands-free. If it does happen that the URL isn't yet ready when they click, well, you weren't going to get it to them any quicker with an arbitrary delay! You can give them a countdown timer and reload the page in 30 seconds, and you can send them a follow-up email since you know they're eager (that second email might as well have a Wait step).

Here's the briefest possible copypasta to set up that LP:

<style type="text/css">
.webinar-pending-note { 
  display: none; 
}
[data-url-ready-state="pending"] .webinar-pending-note { 
  display: block; 
}
</style>
<script>
var memberWebinarURL = "{{Member.Webinar URL}}";
if ( memberWebinarURL ) {
  document.location.href = memberWebinarURL;
  // just for completeness
  document.documentElement.setAttribute("data-url-ready-state","ready"); 
} else {
  document.documentElement.setAttribute("data-url-ready-state","pending");
}
</script>
<div class="webinar-pending-note">
Your customized webinar URL is still being assembled. 
Please refresh this page or re-click the email link in a few minutes!
</div>

More ideas

Once the LP is in place, you can extend the user experience in several ways:

  1. As noted above, you can add a periodic document.location.reload(true) in case they did hit the page before the API phoned home.
  2. You can adapt some of my Redirector Page JS to add a progress indicator before reloading. Note sending leads to the Webinar Redirector LP also enables Munchkin tracking, which is a benefit in its own right.
  3. You can add Agical Add to Calendar links to the page, referencing the {{Member.Webinar URL}} using the alternate separator syntax originally designed for this very case.
  4. If you want to send the lead an Add to Calendar link that works from the start, then reference the Redirector LP's URL in your .ICS file or Agical link, not the {{Member.Webinar URL}}.
  5. You can retarget the lead with rich contextual content if they land on the page after the webinar is over (check another {{my.}} token that stores the event date) or well before it begins, instead of taking them to this beautiful page:☺

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