How Formstack Achieved 88% More Pipeline With Drift and Lift AI
About Formstack
Founded in 2006, Formstack is a secure workplace productivity platform built to automate manual workflows to recapture the workday’s productivity.
The Challenge
As a company that understands the power of expediting tasks, they knew that they could do the same for their very own website by accelerating their path to revenue. That’s why the Formstack team implemented Drift to power their conversational marketing strategy in 2018.
Formstack started off small, implementing Drift on their pricing and form pages, which accounted for just 6% of their website traffic. But 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.
They knew they were leaving revenue potential on the table and saw an opportunity to uncover more results.
The Solution
Soon after, Formstack engaged Lift AI, 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 combines breakthrough AI technology with best-in-class conversational marketing expertise to help Drift customers convert more visitors into revenue in the moment before they leave the site.
Today, Drift and Lift AI have partnered to offer a brand-new solution, Drift Engage, which instantly scores the real-time intent of every website visitor, even those who are 100% anonymous. Based on the level of intent, Drift Engage automatically surfaces the most relevant chatbot experience to your visitors, while enhancing your team’s visibility into intent-based web traffic. No other solution can automatically serve up relevant chat experiences based on real-time intent scoring for both known and anonymous site visitors.
Bill MacKay
Using Lift AI, Formstack can now see and engage with their most high-intent visitors immediately before they leave the site, while lower-intent visitors can be nurtured through Drift.
This results in more chat coverage across the site, more productive BDRs, and ultimately, more Drift conversions. Lift AI locates the fish, while Drift is the fishing line — ready to catch the best fish before they swim away.
The Results
INCREASING OPPORTUNITIES USING AN INTENT-BASED STRATEGY
Lift AI’s first analysis of Formstack’s website traffic uncovered major areas of opportunity:
- High-intent visitors made up 7.1% of Formstack’s overall website traffic, but they were only engaging with 37.3% of that traffic
- 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, but many of those visitors were being missed using Formstack’s page-based approach to Drift. 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.
On the backend, this was as simple as adjusting their Drift playbooks to target all visitors who met their buyer intent score threshold.
With an intent-based strategy in place, the Formstack team closed 100% more opportunities from Drift in the first two weeks of deployment compared to the previous two weeks and immediately saw buy-in from the sales team.
A BETTER SALES AND CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
In addition to targeting visitors based on intent, Lift AI reviewed all the support-based questions Formstack received through chat and developed self-service playbooks for that cohort.
This created a smoother, faster experience for visitors while ensuring BDRs remained efficient. Better support deflection meant that BDRs were spending time with the right visitors, ultimately leading to an increase in pipeline revenue by 88% in the 10 weeks after launch.
For visitors seeking sales engagement while the team is offline, Formstack implemented offline playbooks, ensuring an excellent customer experience even if the sales team wasn’t available to chat.
A PATH TO NURTURE FOR LOW-INTENT VISITORS
Following the deflection playbooks, Lift AI launched low-intent playbooks for both online and offline flows, 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.
With these changes in place, 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.
With Drift and Lift AI working together to target and personalize their visitor experience, Formstack has seen incredible results. In the first quarter post-launch alone, Formstack saw:
- 87% increase in site coverage
- 207% increase in conversations
- 68% increase in opportunities
- 88% increase in pipeline
These results exceeded what Formstack thought was possible with Drift and Lift AI’s buyer intent data.
Elle Woulfe
