High Email Engagement but Low Registration Conversion Six Weeks Out
A B2B SaaS company is marketing its annual user conference with a target of 2,000 registrants. At week 6 of 12, 820 are registered. Email performs well on opens (48%) but only 2.1% click through to the registration page; the page converts 14% of visitors against a 22% internal benchmark. LinkedIn cost per click is $18.40 and cost per registration is $310, versus a $180 target. A six-webinar series produced 1,100 registrants, but only 340 also registered for the conference; tracking shows 62% of webinar attendees come from accounts already in the pipeline. Early-bird pricing ends in 10 days. The registration page has 11 form fields, is not mobile-optimized, and mobile accounts for 54% of traffic but converts at 8%. Sales wants more marketing-qualified leads; marketing is measured on registrations. $95,000 of budget remains.
1. Diagnose the funnel and prioritize interventions for the next 10 days.
Read the worked answer
The constraint is not awareness; it is the transition from interest to registration. A 48% open rate with 2.1% click-through suggests the email offer is vague or the landing page does not match the promise. The 14% page conversion against the 22% benchmark, combined with 8% mobile conversion, points to form friction: 11 fields on an unoptimized mobile page is the highest-leverage fix. Do this first: cut to four fields (name, work email, company, role), enable autofill, and defer firmographic enrichment to post-registration. Moving mobile from 8% to 15% at current traffic adds roughly 90-110 registrations in 10 days. Second, tighten email calls to action to one early-bird benefit and use a two-step registration: email capture, then profile completion. Third, do not chase LinkedIn at $310 CPA; reallocate. Fourth, make the early-bird deadline a real event, not a reminder, with a 48-hour extension for webinar attendees.
2. How would you allocate the remaining $95,000 across channels, and what would you stop funding?
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Allocate roughly $25,000 to landing-page rebuild and A/B testing, including development time; $30,000 to retargeting and lookalike audiences built from the 1,100 webinar registrants, who have high intent and low waste; $20,000 to partner co-marketing with three ecosystem vendors for registration swaps; $10,000 to sales-assist outbound to pipeline accounts; and $10,000 as contingency. Pause broad LinkedIn prospecting until CPA falls below $220. Do not spend on new top-of-funnel: the audience exists, and the bottleneck is conversion. Hold a daily 15-minute funnel stand-up for the 10 days to catch page regressions and reallocate within the budget.
3. How would you align sales and marketing measurement so webinar leads are not double-counted?
Read the worked answer
Separate event registration from MQL in the CRM campaign member status. Define a webinar engagement score (attended live equals 3, on-demand equals 2, registered only equals 1) and count only conference registration as the conversion event. Report sourced pipeline versus influenced pipeline, and give sales a list of accounts with two or more engaged contacts rather than raw leads. Agree on a single dashboard before the next campaign, with definitions signed off by sales operations. This prevents the 62% of webinar attendees who are already in pipeline from being presented as new demand and rebuilds trust in the registration number.