“Can we reduce friction on our site?”
☝️That’s the question Ben Battaglia, Director of Marketing at Lessonly, has asked himself since he joined the training software provider almost three years ago. And Drift helped do just that.
But getting there was a long and winding road. As Ben grew through the ranks at Lessonly, starting on content and moving to demand gen, Lessonly’s need for conversational marketing grew as well. While Intercom had provided a tool support could use, “In terms of what we needed to do for demand gen, it just really wasn’t keeping pace or a great fit for our team,” said Ben.
So after championing Drift for months, the marketing team finally switched.
For Ben and the marketing org at Lessonly, “the bot functionality, targeting, and the creativity that Drift allows make the product more unique than any other tool out there in the market.”
And not just the platform itself, but the concept of conversational marketing itself.
“Conversational marketing as an idea was something I felt passionate about bringing to the Lessonly team,” said Ben, “the Lessonly voice could shine through conversational marketing in a way that it hadn’t before – and it could shine through Drift.”
Reducing Friction In The Buyer Journey
For the Lessonly marketing team, their ultimate goal with Drift was to reduce the friction site visitors experienced.
“It used to take a lot of steps to talk to a human, or it was clunky – your experience of talking to or scheduling time with a human was less than ideal. With Drift, we sought to streamline and remove friction from the buying experience so that a site visitor could talk to a human and get what they needed faster.”
After this initial success, Lessonly expanded their use of Drift beyond inbound marketing to their outbound commercial and enterprise SDR teams. And it’s here that Drift’s ABM capabilities really set the platform apart.
“It’s been really exciting for sales from an ABM standpoint to have their target accounts actually talking to them when they hit the site,” Ben said. “In addition to inbound meetings doubling, we’ve seen success at outbound meetings coming back and converting on the site because their SDR is waiting for them on the site to chat.”
Driving Success With Conversational Marketing
When Lessonly first started with Drift, Ben and team set up playbooks to run on their top-tier pages – those that got the most traffic. Think their homepage, demo page and main product page. From there, they set up unique messaging across the site based on where they expected a visitor to be in the buying journey.
“We also set up ABM messages for people who already had a sales rep,” said Ben. “So, if Joe from Lessonly has been emailing you for a while, then you land on Joe.”
Now the marketing team is rolling out Conversational Landing Pages, moving all of Lessonly’s content to this interactive format. The move to CLPs also enabled Lessonly to better leverage their ungated content. So even though they’re giving away their content for free, Drift and CLPs are enabling the Lessonly team to have conversations with buyers once they’ve accessed the desired material.
“Now we’re getting about 20% to 30% more leads from content that was previously totally inaccessible to us by just linking to a PDF. That’s phenomenal.”
Creating A Wonderful Customer Experience
Conversational marketing has brought so much more than an increase in leads. Drift has provided a better experience for prospects and the entire marketing team at Lessonly.
“The marketing team at Lessonly loves Drift. It’s created so many more opportunities and options for us to create wonderful experiences for customers,” added Ben. “Marketing ops is really excited about all the opportunities and the way that we can streamline lead flow, and content is excited to have new ways to start conversations about content or recommend content to prospects.”
Lessonly’s sales reps are just as passionate.
“SDRs are loving Drift. They love when a target account comes in. They get the notification, and can chat right away with custom outreach,” said Ben. “Not only is that exciting to instantly see who’s on our site and start a conversation, but it’s leading to more conversion. That’s one of my favorite things – to receive a Slack message from an excited teammate who says, “This meeting was set via Drift.””
But the Lessonly team isn’t just content to let Drift start conversations. They’re always thinking about new ways to use Drift to drive interactions, especially since Ben became certified in conversational marketing.
Take the Lessonly blog for instance.
“So, old way was a general, “Hey, welcome to the blog. What can we point you towards?” message,” said Ben. “The site visitor went through a bot tree to figure out what kind of content they wanted, and so we could direct them to that place.”
But now the team is moving to use Drift on their blog based on use case.
“If you land on, say, a customer service blog, we’re going to lead you down the funnel towards other customer service pieces or towards a conversation. So, we’re really getting more targeted about use case – the goal is helping people get to the content they want faster so they can do their jobs better.”
A New Way To Think About The Sales-Marketing Partnership
Drift has done so much more than just drive leads to conversion points and conversations. It’s changed the way marketing and sales work with one another.
“Drift has shaped how we think about the sales-marketing partnership,” added Ben. “SDRs became part of marketing about a year ago, and Drift has been a perfect tool to help us unify the two teams so that we can tie together what we’re doing with the SDRs using Drift. It’s brand new that all SDRs are using a chat tool, and so we’re excited about the impact it can have.”
To help ease this transition, Lessonly turned to Drift for implementation support and training.
“The Drift team and our Drift customer success manager were very helpful in implementing Drift across our organization,” said Ben. “Both Lauren and Kelsey spent time with our team, first with me and some of the key stakeholders, helping us become experts at Drift and thinking through our blueprint, exactly how we led people through bots, and how we targeted people. Then they also were willing to meet with the broader team to help train them on how to use Drift. They’ve been amazingly available for any question we have, small or large, to help us solve a problem.”
Building A More Thoughtful Customer Journey
At the end of the day, the switch to Drift has enabled Lessonly’s marketing team to drive a more thoughtful experience.
“Experience is paramount, and Drift is helping us build a significantly more thoughtful digital customer journey throughout the entire buying process. The idea of conversational marketing has certainly helped our funnel, but I think it’s also helped us become better marketers in general.”
“We’re more conversational in all aspects of our marketing, from email to the copy we put on our website to the direct mail we send,” Ben added. “We’re realizing the importance and value of conversations and that’s helping us grow and become a better team.”
