How RelateIQ Used Twitter to Save 66% on Their Cost Per Lead

Tim: There are some marketing channels that get a bad rap when it comes to direct response. The perfect example of this is to what my good friend Billy Redface called the Twitter. Most of the time, brands use Twitter for engagement and brand awareness period but the days gas found that if used properly, it could become a massive lead gen source. In fact the company, RelateIQ now calls Twitter one of its top three lead sources. That’s pretty powerful for a company owned by Salesforce. You’re really going to enjoy chat with Elise Bergeron from relate IQ so let’s get into it. I’m Tim Page, the conversion educator here at LeadPages and this is ConversionCast.

Welcome to ConversionCast, the only podcast that gets to the heart of the metrics. Now here’s another data driven case study.

Hey, marketer. The episode is coming right up but first don’t forget to join me for this Thursday’s LeadPages webinar. This is an all-new webinar for 2015 that’s going to show you how to turn your site into an evergreen lead generation machine without spending all of your time on marketing. It includes our four top list-building strategies for the New Year. All you need to do to join is text LeadPages all one word to 38470. Again text LeadPages, that’s L-E-A-D-P-A-G-E-S all in one word to 38470 and you’ll be registered for the webinar. Oh, and if you’re outside the US, don’t worry, you can still join the webinar. Just go to ConversionCast.com/webinar. We’ll see you there and now here’s today’s guest.

Hi Elise, welcome to ConversionCast.

Elise: Thank you. It’s nice to be here.

Tim: Yeah thanks for coming on and I’m excited about what we’re going to talk about today and I’m almost a little bit more excited to hear about the results because were just chatting a little bit and it’s pretty exciting for a company of your size. So I would love to hear what results you’re been able to get from today’s tactic?

Elise: Absolutely. So we’re going to talk today about using Twitter advertising as a source for direct response or lead generation. And when we started testing into this we [[0:01:57]] [indiscernible]  from a place where Twitter is a great place we were using to kind of engage our customers, engage our community but really was not a meaningful source of new leads or new customers to now you know eight months or so later, it’s one of our top three lead sources and we managed to bring down our cost per lead in this channel by 2/3 through kind of successive testing and iteration.

Tim: That’s amazing. It’s so amazing because you know on the show, we’ve had people talking about Twitter and using it to you know, increase brand loyalty and —

Elise: Uh-hum.

Tim: -increase just general reach and awareness and that’s great. But you know, I think there is so much to be said specifically for direct response marketing and I think a lot of people maybe don’t believe that Twitter can be used for that. So I’m excited to kind of combat that mindset a little bit. But before we do that, I would love to hear a little bit about what RelateIQ is all about and what your role is there?

Elise: Absolutely. So relate IQ is an intelligent CRM and we’re really focused on helping small businesses sell smarter. SO we were required by SalesForce back in August, which has been a really exciting time for us to kind of broaden the reach of our story and tell more people about the really awesome product that we have.

And a couple of the really cool parts of RelateIQ are that one we capture all your customer communication automatically and can organize it all for you so that your sales team is not spending time manually logging interactions and data and can kind of focus on what they love doing , which is actually selling. And then in addition to capturing all this data, we layer intelligence features on top of that data. So we make sense of it for you. We service insights to you before you know you need them so you close more deals.

And then all of this is kind of bundled together in a really intuitive product. You can set it up in minutes you don’t need a system admin. It’s a really kind of easy to use beautiful product that we’re really proud of, we love to use internally and we have a ton of small business customers who say the same.

Tim: Yeah that’s great. I mean as an old sales guy myself you know that is always one of the most tedious things in you know, just let your sales people sell. Having the opportunity to do that is great.

Elise: Absolutely and in my role [[0:04:03]] [indiscernible]  I’m the VP of marketing here at Relate IQ. So responsible for demand generation, product marketing and brand awareness.

Tim: Perfect. Exactly who we want to talk to. Okay, so with that said, why don’t you kind of dive into this? Like I mean how have you been able to get such incredible results with Twitter?

Elise: Sure. So I think that similar to most companies and in particular in B2B, the place we started on Twitter was building and engaging a community. So it’s about establishing that really authentic voice speaking to our customers, kind of telling our story. But we weren’t necessarily expecting leads from it. We weren’t really measuring it rigorously. It’s about kind of building that right tone and engagement.

But we took that really seriously. We made sure that we  responded to every single tweet positive or negative and we took that as an opportunity to get to know our customers. And in think one of the things that we learned as we did that is we started to really understand what our customers cared about, who they listened to, who they looked to for advice. And I think that’s one of the really powerful parts of Twitter is the ability to target based on who people care about and what’s going to influence their buying decision.

[0:05:08]

So we started testing some paid advertising and we were really rigorous about the way we set up these tests and we segmented our audience really carefully. So we said okay if we’re going to go after SNBs, who do they listen to, who do they care about hearing from and let’s target those at handles. We did other key word targeting, we did lookalike audiences. We actually uploaded our customer base and then targeted again so you know people who share a similar profile.

We started to kind of see things click and so we were disciplined in terms of defining our target audience, structured tests carefully, implanted conversion tracking and I think that’s kind of one of the key things. If you’re going to really use Twitter for direct response you have to measure through the conversion and make sure that you’re then able to analyze the results and iterate and take that next step. And then we also did a couple of things that I think are a little bit more unusual. So first of all we actually leaned on our customers to be the voice of our brand. So we started by testing a bunch of tweets in the RelateIQ voice and those performed well and we did a lot of creative iterations.

But the thing that really kind of blew the results out for us was when we had key customers who were advocating for us in the market and we noticed they were doing this on their own. We asked them if we could promote their tweets and put some budget behind them. We saw in those actually 10x conversion rates.

Tim: Wow.

Elise: I’m sorry click through rate of what we would expect from the normal tweet In the RelateIQ voice. So that was kind of a huge multiplier from us that we didn’t anticipate that. But when you form that authentic connection with your customers and they trust you and believe in your brand, you can do really powerful things with it.

Tim: It’s kind of like a really you know, no pun intended but it’s kind of like a really relatable version of you know, kind of how you’ll see a lot of brands tweet like celebrity endorsements.

Elise: Yeah yeah.

Tim: But in this case it’s users and it’s just you know, small business owners. These are you know, regular people using the product that maybe have some reach and using that as a way to almost you know, market the social proof in a smart way.

Elise: Absolutely and I think that particularly for a small business audience, celebrities don’t always resonate because people look at things that celebrities are talking about and they say oh you know, that’s great but that’s not for us.

Tim: Right.

Elise: And we’re using real customers, real people who are getting value and love our product. I think a lot of the people that we’re marketing to see themselves in those people and say oh you know, I want to be like that business. They are getting a ton of value about RelateIQ, why don’t I try it.

Tim: Right yeah that’s exactly right. I mean one of the issues that came up a lot for us especially kind of in webinars and in some of our live interactions when we would use a testimonial, a lot of times we would use testimonials from you know, the big marketers. You know I guess celebrity marketers in a sense and that —

Elise: Yup.

Tim: The response would always be well do you have any testimonials from people that are like where I am, you know, maybe a six figure business or something like that. And it’s interesting, people even kind of ask for that kind of social proof. So if you can get it, and then provide it especially I mean driving promoted traffic to it is great as well, that seems like it would be a really effective way and I could really see where that would work well.

Elise: Yup.

Tim: One thing I’m curious about is why the focus on Twitter maybe over Facebook?

Elise: Yeah I think that’s a great question. and you know, we use Facebook advertising as well. My background actually came from Facebook on the advertising side of the business so I’m a big believer in Facebook as well I think the thing is though people are in kind of a different state of mind when they’re on Facebook versus when they’re on Twitter. I think on Twitter people are in like very active mode of kind of discovering new content, looking for information from people outside of their personal circle of friends and therefore you know they’re already looking to influencers in their industry. They’re looking potentially for products that could solve the problem from the pain points that they have. And so to me it feels like a little bit of a better fit with that particular kind of part of the conversation. I think on the Facebook side, again we’ve seen good results, there, in particular some of the targeting capabilities on Facebook are incredibly powerful.

But there is a little bit more of a tendency I think on Facebook to look for information from the people you already know and your friends and so it’s a little bit of a different kind of consumption experience versus Twitter. So we had found that Twitter platform a bit of a better fit with people who are  and they’re actually ready to engage with our product and our conversation.

Tim: That is so interesting and it’s funny because I think you hear it going both ways. You hear a lot of people saying well Twitter users are just kind of passive and jumping on reading a short tweet and then moving but you’ve had ad different experience and that’s why I love this kind of case study so much.

Elise: Yes.

Tim: Because it really is unique and you know I’ve shown that it works. So I guess my question is if somebody wants to do this, what are the keys that you’ve found that makes this work? I mean we’ve heard that you shared or that you’ve promoted tweets where people have you know, spoken positively of you but you know, are there any kind of other elements that have made this work?

[0:10:05]

Elise: Yeah I think you know, the audience segmentation and being really thoughtful about your targeting is key. Thinking creatively about how you can use your customer’s own words is key. I think the other thing that we haven’t talked about is making sure that the interaction that you’re asking of the prospect is really lightweight. As you said people are consuming bite sizes of information on twitter right. By definition it’s a short format and so you need to figure out a way that your content feels like a welcome addition to that conversation versus a distraction. So for example we ask people when they click through a Twitter ad on mobile to just fill out one field. Fill out your email address. We’ll get back in touch with you with more information and that makes it so that it doesn’t really break up the flow. It’s a very low hurdle for people to enter their email address and we used to have a form [[0:10:51]] [indiscernible]  four fields going from four down to one. Tripled our completion rate of that form.

Tim: Yeah.

Elise: So these very minor tweaks to try to make your advertising really fit with the consumption experience on the platform can have a really meaningful difference. And then the last thing you just have to test and iterate. It’s like any direct response platform every business is a little bit different. Every set of tactics — you know if it works for one company, it may not work for another, but if you have a structured test planning you kind of iterate through your hypothesis you’ll see just better and better performance over time.

Tim: Yeah that makes perfect sense. You need to remember the platform you are on, speak to that platform, speak to where somebody is at in their life and in their mindset when they’re using that platform and you know, I’m assuming the content that you’re putting out is still – it’s still valuable content but it’s just tailored to that audience.

Elise: Absolutely.

Tim: I love it. Well this has been awesome. I mean what a great way to use a platform that I honestly believe that most marketers are failing to use effectively in terms of direct response. This is a great way to give that a shot. So thanks so much for being willing to share this with us and I hope that we can talk again soon.

Elise: Sounds great. Thanks so much for the time.

Tim: Thanks for listening to this episode of ConversionCast. If you liked what you heard here today, we have something awesome that we want to send you. Our amazing team has created a free reference guide for you with every single split test and piece of conversion data that we have access to here at ConversionCast. This free booklet is packed with incredible case studies and real metrics from real people to show you what’s really working across multiple industries right now. This is the kind of information you won’t find anywhere else. As one of our listeners, we want to give you a copy of this book absolutely free. You can get your copy right now by going to ConversionCastGift.com. Again that’s ConversionCastGift.com. Go there now and pick up your copy and we’ll see you next time.