The Challenge

‍Bitly’s website visitors include both enterprise buyers who are looking to purchase Bitly’s top-tier plan, as well as individuals looking to use their lower-tier link shortening service. 

Two big questions drove them towards the conversational marketing model: 

1. How do we cut through the noise of our website traffic and connect our sales team with our real enterprise buyers? 
2. Are website forms the most effective way to capture leads and drive sales pipeline? 
   

The Solution

Bitly chose Qualified’s conversational marketing platform to zero in on enterprise buyers and instantly engage them in sales conversations. This new investment would help them achieve “Speed to Lead,” a critical motion to optimize website conversions. 

The Use Case

Bitly chose to serve conversational marketing experiences on their high-value, high-converting website pages in an effort to fast track serious buyers to live sales conversations. Here's an overview of their strategy: 

Connect with visitors who are in research phase: Select pages, including their features pages, solutions pages, and “why bitly” pages, are typically explored by buyers who are considering purchasing Bitly's enterprise plan. Bitly stood Qualified up on these pages as these folks are digging into their offering and feature-set and are prime candidates for sales engagement. 

Give visitors the opportunity to “Skip the Line” and bypass forms: Bitly’s get a quote page is their primary call to action across their site and their standard lead capture form. With Qualified, Bitly can provide an instant, personalized offer: an invitation to speak with sales. 

Have high-fidelity pricing conversations: Bitly invites buyers who are browsing their pricing page to chat with sales, so that they can provide guidance on the plan that’s best for them. Their pricing page receives over 3 million monthly visitors, and this experience is their runner-up in terms of sales conversations and leads via Qualified.

Engage marketing-driven traffic: Bitly’s demand gen team has dozens of marketing campaigns in market, from advertisements on software comparison sites, to email nurture series. When a buyer clicks through a marketing campaign and arrives on their site, Bitly offers a personalized greeting to provide a seamless experience and optimize for conversion. 

Throughout every experience, Bitly relies on chatbots to do some initial discovery and qualification. They ask about things like company size, role, and business email. Then they route buyers who meet their qualification criteria to their team of Sales Development Reps (SDRs). This bot strategy allows their sales team to have conversations with fully qualified buyers. 

And what’s the value of conversational marketing if it’s not tightly aligned with your CRM and Marketing Automation platforms?

By connecting Qualified with their CRM, Bitly’s sales team can see a clear picture of their website visitors, including any relevant Lead, Contact, Account, or Opportunity data. Once a conversation has happened, they can quickly and easily create or update Lead records without having to do any manual data entry. In addition, connecting to their marketing automation platform gives reps insight into the visitors’ engagement with Bitly to-date. These integrations better position Bitly to engage buyers and progress them through the sales cycle. 

The Result

Since launching Qualified’s conversational marketing platform on their site, Bitly has seen a direct business impact. They are having hundreds more sales conversations per month, and have increased marketing qualified leads by 2X and pipeline by 6X on the pages where Qualified is running. 

Want to hear more about Bitly's conversational marketing strategy? Head on over to the blog and see snippets from our interviews with their marketing rockstars Matt St. Peter (Sr. Manager, Digital Marketing and Web) and Michael Miyasaki (Marketing Operations Manager).