Community and Customers, we're here for you.

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To Our Drift Community and Customers,

We've had a lot of conversations this week with customers about change and uncertainty.

We're starting this thread in hopes of helping connect this community of amazing Marketers to share what they've been doing, so we can learn from and lean on each other. Here are the 2 questions we're hearing most frequently from customers:

1. How are you augmenting your demand strategy?
2. Are you running virtual events? If so, what is your playbook?

What else? How can we help? We are all ears, and have our entire team on standby to help answer your questions!

Stay healthy & safe -

Julie Hogan - VP, Customer Experience

[email protected]

Hey everyone! Sammi from the Drift team here :)

As Julie mentioned, many companies are having to augment their event/demand gen strategy and moving to hosting digital events. Here are a few ways you can use playbooks to continue to have conversations with site visitors you were going to talk with at in person events.

Situation: You were going to be at an in person event another company was hosting, that now has been moved or cancelled. If you have the list of leads/registrants, upload that to Drift and greet them with messaging such as:

Hey [company name] Sorry we won’t get to meet in person at [event name], but want to get connected virtually to us now?

Situation: You were going to hold an event, but have moved that to being a virtual summit. Put Drift on your reg sign up or virtual summit landing page with messaging such as:

“Hey [company name] Thanks for checking out our virtual summit. Our team is available to meet with you now - want to get connected?”

Situation: You were going to hold an event, but have postponed or cancelled it. Use Drift Bot as an FAQ to keep questions about this away from your sales reps. You can add this to your catchall playbooks with a button response like: “I have a question about [event name]”

In email outreach - Use Drift Video to send a video message with chat on the side. Reps can leverage video to send messages of what they would have chatted about in person and then get the conversation rolling virtually!

Pat Timmons

this is amazing Julie and Sammi.

as I help promote our upcoming virtual event RevGrowth, I am making sure to highlight the value the event will bring to those who choose to attend. we are ensuring that the quality of the event is as much like an in person event as possible. although times are hard, we cannot sacrifice coming together, learning, and collaborating.

Gail Axelrod

We put together a post on how to optimize your playbooks for right now here: https://www.drift.com/blog/drift-playbook-optimiziation/ and will be publishing more content with actionable steps in the coming days.

Tyler Stahle

As so many events are now going digital, what tools do you recommend or use for virtual events? I know Drift does a great job of this with your webinars and the upcoming Rev Summit. What tools or resources do you recommend for virtual events to still bring a sense of community and togetherness?

[email protected]

Good question, @[email protected]!

Leveraging bots from a registration perspective has helped us increase total registrants and generate qualified leads in the process.

We use Drift bots to register interested people and lead to new conversations. When a visitor clicks the "Register" button on our website, a Driftbot is triggered in the bottom right corner and guides the visitor through a quick registration flow. The visitor agrees to sign up, pops in their email, and then receives an email confirmation and some other content to check out in the meantime.

At the end, our CDR's are routed into the conversation by our bot to continue engaging. Typically, the CDR will thank the visitor for signing up and attempt drive a sales conversation if the timing is right. This often leads to productive sales conversations and new qualified opportunities.

Some other folks from our team will be able to speak to the tools we use from an organizational perspective, but leveraging our bots and live chat for sign-ups is one element that works really well! It's quick and easy for the registrant, and empowers our sales team to connect with potential buyers while intent is high.

Sarah Frazier

@[email protected] thanks for reaching out! Tate totally nailed it. @Matilda Miglio also just published an article on demand gen tactics during this difficult time: https://www.drift.com/blog/digital-marketing-strategy/

Here's a few of the ideas she sourced for virtual events:

• Create and open Slack communities pre-, during and post-event. Slack communities have made me a better marketer. There are so many awesome ones out there too. Why not create ones around your event?
• Organize or encourage launch parties. Google I/O, which is an in-person conference for developers (though, like other recent events got moved online this year), did something pretty clever to get more engagement from those streaming their conference from around the world: they organized launch parties. This is a great way to add a level of networking to your event. Plus, you can ship these parties swag so they feel even more connected.
• Add games, trivia and Q&As to presentations. One way to keep people engaged during your event is to add elements that require some type of back and forth. There are some really cool programs out there like Kahoot where you create live trivia games to bolster audience participation.
• To get people moving, bring in some hobby-based live elements. Yoga classes, skill development, etc. There are a ton of cool and interesting ways to get people off the couch and moving during events like these. Think of these like coffee breaks you would have during your own in-person conferences. Plus, you can bring on speakers and experts in areas that a lot of people otherwise wouldn’t see. Give people new hobbies to rave about!

That last one is my personal favorite for bringing something new and interesting to a virtual event. It also adds that level of togetherness you mentioned.