How Reply Helped The App Solutions Automate Lead Activation

The Client

One of the leading mobile app development companies, The App Solutions offer a comprehensive service to their clients in the B2B market. The specialize in the development of iPhone, Android, Windows and Web applications, and help turn their clients ideas into powerful solutions across a wide range of industries.

The Challenge

To drive leads for their sales team, the company use a wide mix of marketing channels. One of their largest channels is PPC marketing, including adwords, retargeting, facebook ads etc. These were the top of their sales funnel, leading to one of many query-specific landing pages designed to convert that incoming traffic into solid leads.

The system worked, but not without its problems. As many B2B marketers would appreciate, most of the form submissions were poor quality, with incomplete fields. In many cases the leads would not respond to the initial sales emails. This meant the sales managers had to schedule a lot of emails for each potential client via their CRM, then type yet more emails when it was time for a ping update.

Initially this was all done by manually, which was both time and labor intensive. In addition, their sales managers were very uncomfortable with the workflow, due to the massive volume of leads they were having to process. This prompted the company to look for a solution to automate the lead activation process.

The Solution

After researching the various options, they discovered Reply. There were five specific features that stood out:

• Email replies were able to be delivered directly to the sales manager’s inbox. This was far more convenient than their previous system, and saved a lot of time.
• Speed of campaign configuration. A campaign for the whole team could be set up from scratch in as little as 30 minutes.
• Comprehensive analytics. The company found it valuable to be able to see the overall performance of their email campaigns at a glance, and easily run A/B tests.
• The ability to stop recipients from receiving emails after their reply. When working with large amounts of leads and prospects, this small feature was a deal breaker.
• Straightforward integration of workflows with Zapier.

The Result

The integration with Zapier was an essential component for creating efficient workflows. One of the key objectives for the new system was to automate the lead generation process, right up to the point when the lead responds to the initial email from the sales manager. The aim was to make the whole process easier and more comfortable, for both parties. Their lead forms are integrated with Mailchimp, so when a person submits a request, his data gets securely stored in the Mailchimp list relevant to the landing page.

They then created a simple Zapier recipe that takes that data from the new mailchimp list entry and transfers it into the relevant campaign in Reply. The person submitting the form would then usually receive the first email from a sales manager within about 20-30 minutes.

The best part is that as soon as the person responds to the email, their account is automatically transferred to the CRM with a specified status and assigned to the relevant sales manager, which also speeds up the process. Everything is seamless for both the prospect and the sales manager. After that, the process returns to manual mode and the rest of the sales process begins.

The App Solutions don’t use cold emails in most cases, but have found that the key to a successful cold email is to make it as personal as possible. This takes careful work when generating the email lists, to make sure they don’t end up unwittingly spamming prospects. As a result, they’ve found that making initial contact on a social network, such as Linkedin or Facebook, can result in future emails being much more effective:

The results from using Reply for their email automation have had a positive effect on all aspects of the company’s sales process.