About Loopio: Loopio is an RFP automation software that helps you respond to RFPs faster than ever, using a clever combination of response libraries with categories and tags, a smart search feature, duplication monitoring, and automated review cycles.
The Challenge - Spreading Too Thin, And Being Too Specific
Being an expert in automation, Loopio installed Drift Conversational Marketing on their website so they could engage visitors while they were shopping the site and convert them into meetings booked, using a combination of sales agents and automated chatbot experiences to scale that engagement.
This was a great step forward for their website, however there was a challenge…
Like many chat implementations, Loopio was targeting visitors based on two common “playbooks”, each with their own potential weaknesses:
- Engage All Playbook - This is when the chat tool is configured to target all visitors across the entire website based on a few simple parameters. The problem with this is that sales agents can’t possibly engage all visitors, and the generic messaging applied via chatbots doesn’t resonate as a catch-all for visitors. This is “spreading too thin”.
- Page-Based Playbook - On the other end of the scale is targeting too specifically, such as only targeting visitors who are on certain pages (e.g. the Pricing page). The problem with this approach is that not all visitors on those pages were prospects (in fact, 80% of your ready-to-buy visitors are not on your pricing page), meaning good prospects were being missed. It can also result in tens or hundreds of custom journeys being mapped into playbooks, each of which requiring upkeep and changes - creating an administrative burden.
The net result of these two common approaches is that the sales team spends too much time caught in conversations with non-buying visitors, resulting in lower than expected metrics, and less buy-in from the sales team to use and scale the tool.
The Solution - Targeting Buyers Only. But How?
Loopio saw the problem quickly. In fact, members of the team at Loopio had encountered this problem before, and knew exactly how to fix it and turn their website and Drift into a more powerful revenue channel.
Instead of trying to engage all visitors, or engaging visitors who are only on certain pages, Loopio targeted visitors who were demonstrating a strong buyer intent based on their real-time behavior.
This is something that only one tool can do - Lift AI.
That’s because Lift AI can predict a “buyer intent score” for every visitor as they navigate through a website, and these scores are accurate more than 85% of the time.
The artificial intelligence model was pre-trained on billions of data points to learn what a true buyer looks like, and what one doesn’t look like based solely on their behaviour - similar to how an experienced salesperson at a retail store can tell which customers are likely to buy based on their nuanced behavior.
When a visitor has a high buyer intent score, marketing and sales teams can take advantage by triggering the right engagements, at the right time.
Critically, Lift AI works with 100% of your website traffic including completely anonymous visitors, unlike other intent tools which use less accurate measures and only work for “known” (ID revealed) visitors, which typically represent only 30% of your traffic.
The Step-by-Step Guide - Playbooks by Intent
Once Loopio installed Lift AI on their website and began to score the real-time buyer intent of every visitor in real-time, they were equipped to level up their Drift implementation.
1. Set up High Intent playbooks in Drift to target buyers
- This involved going into Drift, setting up a new playbook, and enabling the targeting criteria to be Lift AI scores between 65-100.
- The logic was set up so that this playbook would connect visitors directly to live sales agents during business hours, who have the strongest possible chance of converting a visitor (more so than an automated chatbot)
- Any visitor who reached that score threshold while navigating through the site (no matter what page they’re on) would automatically deploy the playbook
- This playbook doesn’t just stop with the targeting logic - it also involves writing good hooks and creating clear and simple messaging trees for common questions and concerns
2. Set up medium and low intent playbooks in Drift to deflect non-buyers and nurture them
Similar to the High Intent playbook, Lift AI also tells you which visitors have a medium or low intent to buy. With that information, you can deflect and nurture:
- Any visitor with a score range between 0-35 and 35-65 were considered low and medium intent, and set up in Drift’s playbook targeting
- Medium intent visitors are connected to automated chatbot playbooks which aim to escalate visitors to sales agents if they were further qualified, or nurtured into future sales by sending them specific resources (e.g blog articles)
- Low intent visitors were also connected to automated chatbot playbooks, with a focus on delivering support-related content and early stage resources
The beauty of medium and low intent playbooks is not only in their ability to nurture future sales, but in deflecting them away from live sales agents so that those agents only spent their time connecting with ready-to-buy visitors.
Figure 1.0: List of Lift AI intent-based playbooks set up in Drift
Over time, the Lift AI team helped Loopio extract more performance out of their new playbooks, running optimizations such as:
- Hook testing to optimize messaging based on intent and engagement
- Analysis and updates to ensure the right content was being shared where applicable
- Improve messaging and overall flow to help improve drop off rates.
The Results - 733% More Meetings Booked + A Transformed Sales Team
Loopio switched their engagement strategy from an “engage all” approach which is spread too thin, or a “page-based approach” which is too specific, to a Lift AI intent-based approach.
Within one week of installing Lift AI and the high intent playbook, Loopio saw a 400% increase in meetings booked.
- By one month of installing Lift AI, Loopio saw 733% more meetings booked via Drift
- This also created 251% more revenue from 800% more possible opportunities via Drift
Over time, these game-changing results started to exhaust the potential of Loopio’s website traffic. So, what happens next?
The Future - Flipping the Funnel to Exhaust Conversions First, Scale Marketing Second
What do you do when you’ve fully optimized and exhausted your website conversions by focusing on capturing demand and buyers first? You turn the tap on at the top of the funnel. In other words, you start to spend more on advertising and demand generation.
In fact, this is the most logical way for any marketing and sales team to look at their funnel going forward. Instead of spending significant budget on top-of-funnel activity, you should allocate some of that budget to finding the buyers already at the bottom of your funnel and invest in converting them.
That’s exactly what Loopio did. They found all of their buyers using Lift AI and created an optimized funnel to convert them.
Now Loopio is in a unique position to extract more performance by investing more in demand generation at the top of their funnel by way of advertising spend. They can also layer Lift AI’s data on top of their other toolsets, such as their ABM tool to determine which identified accounts on their website are also likely to buy, helping them prioritize which accounts to engage and follow-up with first.
If you want to fully optimize the demand capture potential of your website, you need to use Lift AI. No other tool can see the real-time buyer intent of every visitor based on their unique behavior. You can see for yourself by signing up for a free trial - no credit card required.
