The webinar has finished, the slides are closed, and the follow-up email is probably already scheduled. But some of the most valuable marketing work is only just beginning.
Every event gives you more than a registration list. It gives you signals about what your audience is interested in, who is engaging with you and where there could be an opportunity to continue the conversation.
When you bring those signals together with the customer and prospect information already held in Microsoft Dynamics 365, you can start to build a much more useful picture. The opportunity is then to use what happened to decide what you do next.
It’s natural to measure an event by its headline figures. How many people registered? How many actually attended?
Those are useful questions, but they shouldn’t be the last ones you ask. You might also want to understand who registered but didn’t attend, which contacts keep coming back to your events, which topics are generating repeat interest, or whether several people from the same organisation are engaging with you. That’s where event data starts becoming more interesting.
If you’ve worked with CRM data, you’ll probably recognise the routine. You know what you want to find out, but first you need to identify the right records, filters and reports, and perhaps export the information into Excel before you can make sense of it.
Copilot offers marketers a different starting point. Depending on the data, permissions, configuration and Copilot capabilities available within your Dynamics 365 environment, you can begin with the business question you want to answer. As a marketer, I have previously spent much of my time working out how I can “Build a report to show me this”, rather than, “What do I actually want to know?”.
That might mean asking which contacts registered for an event but didn’t attend, looking for people who have engaged with multiple events, or comparing registrations and attendance across a webinar series. The important shift is that you’re spending less time thinking about where the information lives and more time considering what it means for your marketing.
Imagine two people register for your webinar. Alex attends, while Sam registers but doesn’t make the live session.
Should they both receive exactly the same follow-up? Probably not.
Alex has spent time engaging with your event, so additional resources that build on the session might be useful. Sam demonstrated interest by registering, but their experience was different, so an on-demand recording or another opportunity to engage may be more relevant.
It’s a simple example, but it illustrates what good personalisation can look like. You’re not personalising an email just because you know someone’s first name; you’re changing the experience because you understand something about their behaviour.
Looking at a single webinar tells you what happened on one occasion. Looking across several events can start to reveal patterns in engagement.
Imagine someone registers for one webinar about AI. That’s interesting. If that same person subsequently engages with several events covering AI, automation and Microsoft Copilot, you have more context around the subjects they’re interested in. The same principle can be considered at an account level. If several contacts from the same organisation engage with related events, that activity can be viewed alongside the other customer and prospect information your team already holds.
That doesn’t mean every pattern automatically becomes a sales opportunity. It simply gives your marketing team more context, and better context can lead to more relevant decisions about the next message, campaign, event or piece of content.
The challenge is that event information doesn’t always start inside your CRM. You might run a webinar through Microsoft Teams or another event platform, whilst your customer records and marketing activity live within Dynamics 365. When those systems are disconnected, your team can end up doing the connecting manually. Download an attendee list, find the corresponding CRM records, clean the data, create the segment, and finally begin the follow-up.
A more connected approach allows event activity to become part of the wider customer picture. Instead of treating a webinar registration as an isolated piece of information, you can consider it alongside other relevant customer interactions and information. The event stops being another spreadsheet to manage and becomes another signal that can help inform the customer journey.
Whenever AI enters the conversation, there’s a temptation to focus on what it can automate or take over. For event marketing, there’s another way to think about it.
The interesting opportunity is shortening the distance between having information and being able to do something useful with it.
You can think of the journey in four stages: connect the relevant event and customer information, explore it through the questions that matter to your marketing team, decide which audiences or opportunities matter and then act on those insights through your next marketing activity.
The decision stage remains particularly important. Copilot doesn’t replace your understanding of your audience, your brand or your marketing strategy. Your team still needs to determine whether an engagement signal matters and decide on the most appropriate next action.
After your next webinar, try not to stop once you’ve seen the registration and attendance numbers. Keep asking questions. Who was interested enough to register but couldn’t attend? Who keeps engaging with a particular subject? Which contacts are returning to your events? Are multiple people from the same organisation showing interest? And, most importantly, what would be a genuinely useful next interaction for each of those audiences?
The bigger opportunity is in changing how you think about the event data you already generate. Your webinar doesn’t just produce a list to file away once the event is over; it creates another layer of insight that can help inform what your marketing team does next.
The best measure of useful event data is whether or not that data helps you to make better marketing decisions. Bringing event activity together with Dynamics 365 gives you the opportunity to understand it within the wider customer relationship. Copilot can then provide another way to explore that information, helping marketers get closer to the questions they actually want to answer.
That means less focus on simply collecting event data and more emphasis on using it to create relevant next steps. Because when the final attendee clicks Leave, your event might be finished, but the next marketing opportunity isn’t.
If your marketing tools, event platforms and CRM feel like separate pieces of the customer journey, Cloud9 can help you explore how a more connected Dynamics 365 environment could bring that information together.
