Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post from Drift customer NAVEX Global. Interested in contributing content to the Drift blog? Email Molly Sloan at msloan@drift.com.
Hey there, I’m Jessi and I’m the Manager of Marketing Operations at NAVEX Global ?
Every B2B marketing team is on the hunt for better lead nurturing strategies. We all want to streamline the process while capturing maximum potential business – all without overtaxing our resources (which are often limited).
We’re no different at NAVEX Global, and with the help of a Drift Email Bot we’ve taken our programs to another level. We use Email Bots to effectively manage what we call the “good” problem of having too many leads to manage.
Here’s the story. Our team’s bandwidth was fully tapped just processing the “hottest” leads. We knew that there were additional sales and marketing opportunities with other prospects who didn’t score quite as high, but we weren’t able to get to them in a timely way, so prospects were moving through the process too slowly. Or worse, not moving at all.
In addition, we’d recently launched a new lead-scoring model that included some new demographic information. We needed a solution that would help us surface all these valuable second-tier leads and get them into our pipeline in an efficient way. That is, some method that didn’t further tax our already super-busy team.
Handle More Leads Than You Think Possible
Early in our lead nurturing flow, we’d have territory development representatives (TDRs) follow up with prospects who connected with us in some way – attended a webinar, visited our booth at a conference, downloaded a whitepaper etc. The TDRs work to set up appointments for our sales execs.
The challenge was the number of incoming leads. We have a scoring model that prioritizes incoming leads and lets us identify the best prospects, which in turn become the ones TDRs focus on. But their bandwidth ran out before they could do any prospecting on leads that scored below the highest value. (Yeah, we generate a lot of leads!) Our goal for the implementation of Drift’s Email Bots was to encourage prospects to self-identify readiness to talk to sales, without the TDRs having to reach out to every single person.
How We Used Drift’s Email Bots To Engage More Leads
We’ve been Drift Email users for more than two years. And of all the tools in our marketing tech stack, Drift Email just might be my favorite one of all. It saves us from doing tons of work, and now it saves our TDRs hours of time as well.
We use Drift Email’s reply management features to automate the processing of replies – something I’d been doing manually before. We also use it to help append prospect profiles with information collected by Drift Email from auto-responders.
Then in December 2018, we were introduced to Email Bots. Email Bots integrate with Marketo so we didn’t have to send emails from somewhere new and could update Marketo lists and set values using an email bot. We started out pretty slow, initially sending maybe ten or so emails a day. We did this in part because we were validating the new lead-scoring model, but also because we wanted to be extra careful to avoid messaging an existing customer or violating General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). Even with that low volume, we quickly saw promising response rates.
Based on our initial tests, we felt confident enough to take things to the next level with a larger audience. In February of this year, we let our Email Bot run with full automation.
A few months later, our marketing ops analyst did a deep dive on how different kinds of messaging was performing and whether the thresholds we had set were appropriate and optimized. We looked at things like fluctuations in unsubscribes and meetings booked in the context of how different messages might have influenced outcomes.
Based on our findings, we rewrote our messaging and split it to create two new lead-score thresholds. The lower threshold captures prospects who have registered for a webinar, visited our website a few times, or maybe downloaded a couple content assets. The higher threshold is built to capture prospects who have been more frequently and more deeply engaged with us.
Happier Marketing Team, Happier Prospects, Healthier Business
Now that we’re a few more months into our implementation, I can confidently say it has elevated us to a whole new level of engagement and lead nurturing.
We are now so much more efficient at mining the “gold” we know is in our lead database than we ever would have been trying to do it all manually.
We call our Drift Email Bot Amina. And with Amina’s help, we’ve moved the needle in really meaningful ways. Key stats from the 4,200 emails we’ve sent so far include:
- About 5% conversion rate
- Surfaced 16 high-value leads
- Booked 9 meetings
All of which we consider incremental to the totals we would have generated without Drift Email.
And there’s one more thing – our TDRs love Amina. We were concerned that they might feel threatened. But it didn’t take them long to realize that the Drift Email Bot is a tool that makes their job easier too.
Looking ahead, we’re excited to see what else we can do with Amina. New use cases we’re exploring include driving webinar registration, following up after content downloads, making connections at events, and facilitating cross-selling via our customer marketing manager.
We’ve just scratched the surface and are ready to keep scaling ?
