Leaving website potential on the table.
Formstack is in the business of automating manual workflows to recapture the workday’s productivity. As a company that understands the power of accelerating tasks, they knew that they could do the same for their very own website by accelerating their path to revenue.
That’s why they implemented Drift’s revenue acceleration platform on their website, starting with conversational marketing (chat).
Chat is a smart place to start, as it’s one of the most effective methods of converting website visitors. It’s like being able to help a customer that appears to be struggling in a retail store, instead of leaving them and hoping they’ll bounce around the store to find the solution to their problem.
However, like many companies that implement chat, Formstack’s sales team had not fully bought into the opportunity as they had limited resources and expertise in that area. So, they started off small - implementing Drift on the pricing page and form pages which accounted for just 6% of their website traffic.
Formstack was reluctant to open up Drift to the wider site traffic as they didn’t want to overwhelm their sales team with non-sales conversations without knowing that there was a predictable upside. This would only lead to frustration and lost productivity - the very things their business aims to solve.
The problem was, they knew they were leaving revenue potential on the table this way. This is true for most companies that install Drift and other conversational marketing platforms.
How Lift AI’s machine-learning came to the rescue.
Formstack saw an opportunity to uncover more results, and engaged the Lift AI team (a certified Drift partner) to extract maximum value from their Drift implementation.
The hook? Being able to see the real-time buying intent of every single visitor.
Lift AI is the only anonymous buyer intent solution that combines breakthrough AI technology with best-in-class conversational marketing expertise to help Drift customers convert more visitors into revenue “in the moment”, before visitors leave the site and are lost.
Lift AI develops playbooks, chat engagement strategies, and custom service offerings with a data-driven, scientific approach — tapping into their machine-learning model that determines the buyer intent of every website visitor in real-time — even if those visitors are completely anonymous.
Lift AI has helped customers like Okta, Nitro and PointClickCare increase conversions from conversational marketing through Drift by anywhere from 2-10x.
The secret behind Lift AI’s model is its data, which was forged from the hard earned experience of having profiled over 1 Billion website visitors, and engaging in over 14 Million live sales engagements, serving global brands with a live sales chat function for over 15 years.
Using Lift AI, Formstack can now see and engage with their most promising (high intent) visitors immediately before they leave the site, while lower intent visitors can be nurtured through Drift’s chatbots.
This results in more chat coverage across the site, more productive BDRs, and ultimately more Drift conversions. Lift AI is like the ultimate fish finder, while Drift is the best fishing line — ready to catch the best fish before they swim away.
"We are so grateful for you and the Lift AI team!! Onward!! 🚀"
Abigail Stearns, Manager of Business Development at Formstack
Uncovering Formstack’s website visitors.
After Lift AI was installed, some interesting insights were found about Formstack’s visitors and how they were being engaged:
- High Intent visitors made up 7.1% of Formstack’s overall website traffic, but they were only engaging with 37.3% of that traffic using their page-based strategy.
- Similarly, Mid Intent visitors made up 19.6% of their website traffic, but they were only engaging with 31.1% of that traffic.
- This meant that 26.7% of their site was ripe for a sales conversation (high + medium intent visitors) but many of those visitors were being missed because Formstack was not able to get Drift in front of them using a page-based approach.
With this buyer intent data in hand, Lift AI provided Formstack with a detailed forecast and plan to engage the different buyer intent segments using customized personalization, playbook design, and routing.
"Incredibly proud to partner every day with the Lift AI team. This is just a small sample of the incredible results they've been able to drive customers."
Michele Albanese - Partner Programs Manager at Drift
Exactly how it was done.
Step 1: High Intent Playbook
In April 2021, Lift AI launched their optimized Drift implementation with Formstack, starting with a targeting strategy for High Intent visitors across the full website (rather than a focus on individual pricing and form pages).
This immediately increased Drift coverage from an average of 6% in the previous quarter to 28%, and increased opportunities created by 58%.
On the backend, this was a simple matter of Lift AI adjusting Drift to be shown to all visitors with a certain buyer intent score threshold and above (shown below).
On top of this, Lift AI ensured that the right playbooks were being deployed. Formstack’s management team started to see buy-in from the sales team quickly as they closed 100% more opportunities from Drift in the first 2 weeks of deployment compared to the previous two weeks.
Step 2: Medium Intent & Offline Playbooks
By May, Lift AI had launched an additional playbook for Medium Intent visitors, and two more to account for High and Medium Intent visitors when the sales team is offline. The separation of online and offline allowed further optimization to the wider implementation, ensuring the customer experience was still excellent if the sales team were not there.
These playbook changes improved Drift coverage to 47% and new opportunities by a further 30%.
Step 3: Support Deflection
Nearing the start of June, Lift AI focused on hook testing in order to engage the right visitors in each buyer intent cohort, including a way to deflect support requests by reviewing all support-based questions being asked in conversation and aligning with Formstack to build self-help playbooks for that cohort. This results in a smoother, faster experience for the visitors while ensuring a more efficient BDR team. In fact, the number of ‘opportunities’ decreased for BDRs because of the support deflection, which meant BDRs were spending time with the right visitors - ultimately leading to an increase in pipeline revenue by 88% in the 10 weeks since launching.
Step 4: Low Intent Playbooks
In June, Lift AI launched Low Buyer Intent playbooks for both online and offline flows. This was possible due to the support flow optimization earlier in the month, ensuring that customers with low buyer intent could receive an optimized customer experience for either support or further nurturing. Lift AI continued to qualify minimal sales opportunities from the low intent flows, adding 7% more pipeline and increasing coverage to 93% across the website.
During the changes made in May and June, Formstack saw rapid improvement and added seats and resources to the BDR teams to cover the now highly-accepted, high ROI traffic that Lift AI and Drift were able to target and engage.
Even with all of this optimization and dramatic results, Lift AI is able to do more. In the future, Lift AI will further personalize the targeting for sub-segments of the wider buyer intent cohorts, including leveraging 6sense data to enable buyer intent plus ABM account playbooks.
88% increased pipeline from Drift (and more).
The combination of Drift and Lift AI allowed Formstack to target and personalize their visitor experience by their buyer intent.
In the first quarter post launch, Formstack saw:
⦁ Increase in site coverage from 6% to 93%
⦁ Increase in conversations by 207%
⦁ Increase in opportunities by 68%
⦁ Increase in pipeline created by 88%
"Can't say enough good things about the team at Lift AI! Super fun/smart group of people to work with and have made our Drift lives so much better!"
Tyler Hinkle, Director of Marketing Operations at Formstack
These results not only convinced Formstack of the value of Drift, but completely exceeded what they thought was possible with conversational marketing and Lift AI’s buyer intent data. The project helped the team at Lift AI see just how viable this coupling is — the fish finder and fishing rod for website visitors.
"Leads captured through our Lift AI powered Drift playbooks consistently drive better pipeline and revenue per lead vs. all of our other lead capture tactics."
Bill MacKay, Manager, Digital Performance Marketing at Formstack
