How Algolia Drove 23% of Their MQLs with Drift

23%

of MQLs driven by Drift this fiscal year

24.6x

ROI in the first half of this fiscal year

100%

increase in pipeline YoY

60%

MQL to SAL acceptance rate

About Algolia

Algolia is the world’s only end-to-end AI search and discovery platform that combines vector-based natural language processing and keyword matching in a single API. Algolia powers over 1.75 trillion search requests a year, enabling more than 17,000 customers in 150+ countries to build blazing-fast, relevant search and discovery experiences.

The Challenge

Algolia has a robust digital marketing strategy that spans multiple channels, including display advertising, paid social, paid search, as well as SEO programs. The company was looking for additional ways to improve engagement with these key audience segments on the website and ultimately convert them into MQLs for their sales team to pursue.

In short, Algolia was on the hunt for a solution that would support their inbound motions and increase conversion rates on their website — and that led them to Drift.

The Solution

As Algolia adopted Drift, it proved to be an effective engine for driving MQLs, as well as a powerful tool for enhancing the company’s engagement strategy on the website.

Highly Personalized Visitor Experiences

Currently, Algolia has implemented Drift on a number of their English, French, and German web pages. Additionally, their playbooks are set up to capture three distinct audience segments:

  • Visitors on lead generation pages and campaign landing pages signaling high-intent
  • ICP and ABM accounts
  • Visitors demonstrating specific behaviors – such as returning to the website

By implementing multi-language playbooks on their site, Algolia has not only created a personalized experience for their visitors across various geographies but also accelerated time-to-opportunity by engaging them in the language that they may be more comfortable with. In fact, Algolia’s French and German playbooks achieved email capture rates of 43% and 19% respectively during Q2 of 2023.

Account-based engagement

Beyond localized playbooks, Algolia has used the Drift and Demandbase integration to roll out an effective inbound ABM strategy that captures some of their most sought-after leads. Using the integration, Algolia targets website visitors demonstrating high-intent signals, like searching for a specific keyword, and then rolls out the red carpet by delivering highly personalized messaging that is relevant to visitors’ intent, tech stack, and opportunity status.

With these ABM experiences, Algolia’s digital team has been able to drive higher engagement from the accounts that matter most — to the tune of more and better pipeline.

“Our sales teams say that the leads they get from Drift generally tend to be of higher quality compared to other channels. This has helped in winning over internal sales stakeholders and increasing our overall pipeline contribution,” Meredith Brandt-Lew, Senior Marketing Manager at Algolia said.

ACCELERATED PIPELINE

When it comes to driving leads from their website, one of Algolia’s most successful initiatives has been the implementation of Fastlane.

By deploying Fastlane, Algolia has enabled buyers to skip the form queue by qualifying them in real time. “We use Fastlane on our demo request and search audit landing pages so that people filling a form can instantly book a meeting with the right sales rep,” Meredith explained. “Through Fastlane, we can accelerate time-to-sales, especially during periods of time when the sales team is experiencing a high volume of customer interest or is low on bandwidth.”

Fastlane has been so successful for Algolia, that it makes up two-thirds of their total live chat-generated pipeline.

Even beyond Fastlane, by having reps available for real-time engagement with website visitors, Algolia has been able to convert a greater number of visitors, more easily. As Meredith explained, “While we pride ourselves on the level of detail and transparency that we put into our pricing structure and web pages, there will always be questions that are unique to each customer’s business use case. Having a sales rep answer those questions in real time can be a game-changer in helping us turn that lead into an opportunity.”

The Results

With Drift, Algolia has seen some great results — and the numbers back it up:

%
of MQLs driven by Drift this fiscal year
x
ROI in the first half of this fiscal year
%
increase in pipeline YoY
%
MQL to SAL acceptance rate

The Future

With the results they’ve already seen, the Algolia team is excited to continue collaborating with Drift to add more value to their website customer experience.

There is immense potential for us to grow our partnership with Drift. By using additional capabilities like Drift Conversational AI, we can continue to build on our stellar customer experience and unlock more high-converting conversations with customers and prospects globally.

Meredith Brandt-Lew

Senior Marketing Manager, Algolia

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