With a small staff and limited marketing budget, officials at online video hosting company Wistia were looking for automated ways to nurture their leads.
“We have been around for six years and have a small sales and support team, so we have always been exceptionally low touch,” said Ezra Fishman, Director of Marketing for Wistia. The company offers a free model – where users can store five videos for free – and a tiered paid model approach in which users are charged for additional video storage and bandwidth.
Since installing ExactTarget‘s Pardot marketing automation system in October 2012, Wistia has been able to increase its conversion rate from free to paid model by 30% and double its customer base.
Wistia creates, deploys and manages its online lead nurturing campaigns using the marketing automation system, capturing the leads for tracking and lead nurturing. With insight into the prospect, the company sends targeted emails, depending on how far along they are in the sales cycle.
“Before working with Pardot, we didn’t have a systematic way to capture leads,” Fishman said. “Working with Pardot, we are able to market to prospects and existing customers, by automating the lead tracking and nurturing process, resulting in strong business results.”
Marketing automation provides Wistia with a sophisticated lead nurturing tool that does not require a great deal of hands-on intervention, Fishman explained. “We are able to engage those free trial prospects and bring them into the buying funnel and convert them into paying customers in an automated way,” he said.
Emails are triggered by the actions, or non-actions, of customers. If, for example, a user signs up but does not upload a video in a specified amount of time, the system sends them an email with a link to a video with instructions on how to upload a video.
“This really provides us with an opportunity to do much more targeted messaging,” Fishman explained. “We can create an action-based series of messages based on what users do and don’t do. This is really where we have seen our conversion rates go up.”
“Sending exactly the right message at just the right moment can really impact conversions, and marketing automation takes the hassle out of that process,” said Adam Blitzer, ExactTarget’s VP of B2B Marketing Automation and Pardot Co-Founder. “Wistia’s campaigns help the online video host market broadly to prospects and customers while providing personalized communications to advance the sales cycle.”