Branch Boosts Customer Experience and Conversion with Drift

The Challenge

Low Page Conversion Rates and Complex Qualification Criteria

Branch provides the industry’s leading mobile linking and measurement platforms, offering solutions that unify user experience and attribution across devices and channels. In today’s mobile world with shrinking attention spans and marketing budgets, Branch is a key tool in marketers’ toolboxes. While Branch does experience healthy organic traffic and has a number of mature website pages, the team had some important problems to solve.

Not all of Branch’s site pages were optimized to convert traffic to leads.

“The challenge wasn’t getting prospects to our site, it was encouraging them to take the next step,” says Dan Ahmadi, VP of International Marketing and Demand Generation. Like any smart business, the team at Branch wanted to turn this website traffic into conversions, but before they could do that, they needed to ensure that every page could convert.

Branch needed a tool to help automate their qualification process. “We have really specific qualification criteria for our enterprise product and we really wanted to leverage the logic and filtering criteria within Drift to be able to simplify the qualification process for our prospects.” The Branch team knew they had a number of important qualification criteria, but wanted qualification to happen automatically, before they suggested a conversation about an enterprise plan.

Drift wasn’t just in the consideration set, it was the only solution Branch entertained. It was a perfect match from the start, with a solution tailor-made for everything Branch needed.

Dan Ahmadi had a fairly simple initial goal with Drift: to have more meetings. “My goal was 22 incremental meetings per month after implementation, and we’re hitting that goal now every month,” says Ahmadi. “As we scale Sales Development, we find that once we enable the SDRs on Drift, they start to get meetings booked for them automatically, helping them ramp and providing a steady stream of opportunities from our website.” And with more opportunities comes more conversions, and more revenue.

A Better Buying Experience.

Branch has a technical product, and implementation is not one-size-fits all, so prospects often want to hop on the phone rather than having a back-and-forth over chat — which Drift can easily make happen. “Drift has changed the buyer experience to cater to each prospect’s preferences. If they prefer a form, we have that. If they prefer to chat live, we have that as well. We can provide instant resources,” says Ahmadi. This improved buyer experience means a more seamless process from end-to-end, and happier customers along the way.

Prospects shouldn’t have to jump through hoops or do business on someone else’s terms, it should be easy for them to connect with your business and get what they’re looking for. In the past, Branch used demo forms with many unnecessary steps that tied up their prospects, and added barriers to getting a meeting on the books. Now with Drift, when prospects land on Branch’s site and are ready to book a meeting, they can do so on their own — sometimes even for later in the very same day. This new quick and streamlined process is one of Dan Ahmadi’s favorite parts of Drift — “We can move as fast as our prospects want us to by providing Drift’s calendaring functionality directly to them.”

Using Drift Identity to Create Additional Opportunities with Current Customers.

Branch also experienced great success using Drift Identify to target logged-in customers. The team leveraged this solution to offer personalized experiences that guided customers to their support portal, and could even upsell and cross-sell visitors. Rather than unnecessarily tying up resources, Branch uses Drift to send customers that need help to the support portal — where they can access support resources, or have the option to talk to someone in Sales.

Looking Toward the Future

Dan sees a bright future with Branch and Drift. When it comes to using Drift to its fullest, he offers the following advice: “Iteration is key. Get something up and running, then start experimenting with how that conversation should develop. Consistently roll out new tests and variations. We’re probably on version 40 of our playbooks today — by simply making slight tweaks, we keep getting better and better at converting visitors.”

Branch is growing quickly, and Drift will be an integral part of their journey to provide frictionless experiences for customers and prospects for years to come.