B2B marketers are rethinking event strategies & budgets. 🤔 Fuel ROI with webinars in 2025. Read the Forrester report

Optum | Case Study | ON24

B2B marketers are rethinking event strategies & budgets. 🤔 Fuel ROI with webinars in 2025. Read the Forrester report

ON24 tech stack integration boosts Optum’s MQLS by 300%

  • 300%

    Lift in MQLs through webinar channel

  • 200+

    Global webinars hosted per year

  • 180

    Average number of attendees

Capabilities

Use Cases

Number of Employees

  • 10,000+

About

Optum is a leading information and technology-enabled health services business dedicated to helping make the health system work better for everyone. With more than 165,000 people worldwide, Optum delivers intelligent, integrated solutions that help to modernize the health system and improve overall population health. Optum is part of UnitedHealth Group (NYSE:UNH).

Introduction

Optum, one of the largest health services companies in the world, works with providers, employers, insurers, life sciences and government organizations to streamline healthcare services and help provide a high- quality healthcare experience.

As a consequence, Optum creates a wealth of information for professionals and individuals to consume. But to create a more intimate content experience at scale, Optum turns to webinars. With webinars, the company can arrange a human-to-human connection for both prospects and clients while crafting a community with its brand.

But to optimize its content experiences, Optum needed to collect, analyze and act on data generated within each webinar. It needed to be able to integrate its webinar solution with its tech stack and automate data transfers from each event to its chosen CRM and MAP. Doing so could empower the company to streamline its processes, increase leads within sales pipeline and better align marketing and sales teams.

Problem

Optum’s previous webinar provider was limited, providing only data from registration information. It was also a stand-alone application and did not allow for any tech integrations, leaving Optum with a siloed webinar program and manual processes for sharing leads. As a large global brand, the baseline capabilities it was dealing with created a poor user experience—both internally and externally. Optum needed to overcome:

  • Dual Registration Process—Due to lack of integration between Optum’s webinar provider and its MAP and CRM, webinar registrants were required to register twice—once at initial interest and then again on the day of the webinar.
  • Manual Reporting—Because of dual registration, all customer information and webinar activity was manually inputted and categorized.
  • Clunky Sales Process—All manual reporting was captured in Excel documents which made data difficult for sales teams to digest. Optum wasn’t leveraging information related to broader buyer activities in order to determine sales readiness and knowing when someone was even ready to go to sales was not quantifiable.
  • Limited On-Demand Capability—Customer access to on-demand webinars was highly limited. Internally, Optum was not able to see who was watching on-demand events, let alone calculate that activity and use it for lead scoring.
  • Technical Failures—On average, 10-15% of Optum’s webinar audience had to call technical support to gain access to its webinar. This meant big webinars required all hands on deck and overuse of resources to simply make sure attendees could participate.

Solution

Optum decided to ditch its previous webinar provider and turn to the ON24 platform instead. With ON24, the company could easily integrate its webinar program into is MAP and CRM. It also benefited from:

  • Integration into Lead Scoring Models—Post webinar, ON24 provides data directly back to Optum’s MAP (Eloqua). Data includes attendance records, which promotional channels drove the most registration, engagement level during the webinar and polling data. These activities are tabulated and added into the existing lead scoring model. This automated process triggers follow up emails via Eloqua or ON24 to seamlessly filter the customer through the sales funnel.
  • One-Click Dashboard Reporting—In addition to the many integrations that ON24 allows, this out-of-the-box solution lets Optum move beyond its cumbersome excel sheets. All data appears in a simple link that makes it easy to digest the data and create better outcomes from each webinar.
  • Extended Content Lifecycle—Optum previously was not able to capture on-demand attendees. With ON24, Optum can repurpose and archive webinar content through its on-demand library and continuously capture data from on-demand views.
  • Modern User Experience—ON24 allows Optum to customize the branding of its webinar consoles for all of its different brand categories. This includes custom widgets and images to make the user experience looks and feels like the Optum brand.
  • Single Integrated Registration—Once a customer registers for a webinar, their contact details are pushed into Eloqua. This data is then pushed to ON24 so that the registrant can instantly access the webinar with just a link, thus eliminating the dual registration process.

Results

Since working with ON24, Optum has expanded its webinar program and now hosts 200+ global webinars per year. Through this expanded program, Optum has better insight into customer journey, improved handoffs to sales and a more actionable approach to the customer journey. Additionally, by implementing on-demand, Optum regained 35% of its audience that it was previously not able to access and now sees 20% of MQLs from on-demand webinars. Coupled with its live audience, Optum also has seen an overall 300% lift in MQLs through its webinar channel alone.

"We came to ON24 with the problem of scaling our digital campaigns, lead scoring and integrating our tech stack. Since then, it has very much been a partnership between Optum and ON24. Working together has been easy and now we are seeing the results come to fruition."

Alena Larson, Sr. Director of Demand Generation

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