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Tactics used:
Social proof is one of the most powerful tactics in any marketer's toolkit. Humans validate their own actions based on the behaviors of others — it's why we stand in lines at crowded restaurants, buy the same items as our friends, and value the opinions of others. You've likely seen the widespread deployment of social proof online as you’ve booked a hotel room or a flight.
This tactic is proven to work amazingly in the travel industry, and now it’s also very incredibly effective for B2B marketing.
Below the "Get started" button on BuildFire's homepage, we embedded social proof that increase with each new account created in real-time.
As a result of implementing in-line social proof using Experiences on Buildfire's homepage, 48% more people clicked the “Get started” button.
We hypothesize the audience who was served with "🔥 8664 companies got started with BuildFire in the past month" had more trust in BuildFire’s services and were consequently more likely to convert.
On the next page in BuildFire’s funnel, 70% more people clicked "Let BuildFire Build It" (even though the Experiences team did not change any on-page elements).
What this shows is that social proof is a very persuasive strategy that builds confidence throughout the funnel.
Before using Experiences, BuildFire collected emails in a form at the end of this signup flow. In order to personalize the rest of the signup flow, we moved the email field to the first step of the signup flow to allow Proof to call Clearbit’s API to find out a person's identify if Experiences doesn't already know.
Using the autofill feature, if a visitor has already opted-in elsewhere on the site, a form will auto-fill known fields and hide the email field to reduce the length of the form.
Because BuildFire was already storing their customer data in Segment, they were able to quickly integrate Segment data with Proof Experiences with a few clicks through our Segment Destination integration.
Fields in their signup funnel are pre-filled with known data from 3 warehouses:
One of the most important questions in BuildFire’s signup flow is the question, "What type of app are you looking to build?"
This qualifies a lead based on an Industry's unique use case. Based on what a visitor chooses in this dropdown, Experiences builds a custom audience to target a personalized experience in future interactions.
Finally, we implemented the in-line social proof playbook at the bottom of the form to add even more confidence for visitors signing up.
Since an email address is now collected on the first step of the signup flow, Experiences instantly searches Clearbit and Segment's databases to find a contact match and auto-fill the second page of the signup form with this information.
Using Experiences, the headline has been dynamically updated to reflect a visitor’s response to the first question, "What type of app are you looking to build?"
In the screenshot below, you can see the headline now reads, "Is this corporate mobile app for an existing business?"
The last step of BuildFire's lead funnel is a simple contact form. Using the email collected in the first form field — a user’s First Name, Last Name, Email, and Phone Number are auto-filled if the data is found in Clearbit and Segment. Then the visitor confirms that the data is correct rather than having to provide the data — reducing yet another point of friction.
Once the visitors has completed the lead capture flow, they are encouraged to schedule a time to talk with a BuildFire consultant to chat about their app project.
The Calendly fields are autofilled from a visitor’s signup flow data.
In addition to auto-filling the form fields, Experiences has personalized the headline to reflect the answer from the question, "What type of app are you looking to build?" In the screenshot below, you can see the headline now says "Almost done! Schedule a time with a Corporate App Consultant."
"We already had our customer data in Segment, which made it incredibly easy to pull into Proof using their Segment integration. Combining that with Clearbit data allowed us to create personalized inline social proof, fill forms, and change the text on the funnel to give a more relevant experience at each step." - Ian Blair, Founder & CEO of BuildFire.
BuildFire is an extremely data-driven SaaS company, so they wanted to be absolutely sure personalization was positively affecting their KPIs before fully committing their traffic to the experiment. Using Experiences’ built-in A/B testing feature, they were able to show a personalized experience to half of their visitors and a default experience for the other half.
After 10 days, the experiment reached a 95% statistical significance. The marketing team still wanted to run the test for an additional 2 week period to account for any fluctuations in data.
Once that two week window passed, it was very clear that personalization had a big impact. And as a result of implementing Experiences, BuildFire achieved:
Now that Experiences proved to increase conversions, they concluded the A/B test and transitioned 100% of their traffic to the personalized signup flow powered by Proof Experiences.
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