A guest post by Dave Gerhardt, Director of Marketing @ Drift

Live chat is a fantastic way to engage your site's visitors and can have a huge impact on increasing your conversion rates. However, live chat also has its downsides.

Unqualified sales conversations and increased support requests, all that need to be responded to in real time, can be a huge drain on any team.

The new Clearbit Reveal and Drift Messaging integration now allows you to proactively target your site visitors and only show live chat to qualified prospects.

Using this approach the marketing teams from our beta have been able to double the number of qualified opportunities they are generating from chat!

Segment’s VP of Growth Guillaume Cabane set up personalized campaigns for anonymous visitors and saw a 5x increase in engagement and 2x increase in conversion, and as a result, messaging has become one of Segment’s top sources of qualified opportunities.

How it works

Here are four ways your marketing team can start using the new integration.

1. Target based on industry and company size.

Clearbit company tags let you target companies based on high level industry categorization like Software or Banking. There are also tags for company business model, SAAS, Enterprise, Marketplace, etc.

To give you one example: at Drift our sweet spot is B2B SaaS companies, so we have a personalized message that only shows up when someone from a B2B SaaS company hits our website:

You can also target messages by employee size -- so here we’re targeting B2B SaaS companies with more than 50 employees:

Then a personalized message can be displayed to any website visitors that match that criteria, like this:

Not a B2B SaaS company with more than 50 employees? You’ll see a different message -- or nothing at all.

2. Target based on technology

In addition to targeting based on company tags, you can also send messages based on the technology that their company uses.

So let’s say you want to target B2B SaaS companies with more than 50 employees that are also using Salesforce, the rules look like this:

3. Send personalized messages to each website visitor

Here’s where this starts to get really cool.

If I go and visit the Segment website while I’m in the office at Drift, I see this personalized message “We have advice for Drift”:

How the heck did they know!?

Well, Segment is using Drift and Clearbit Reveal to serve up personalized messages for every website visitor in their target industries. Just like you’d personalize an email in other marketing automation products, with Drift you can personalize messages on your website.

But to take it a step further, with Clearbit Reveal you can deliver personalized messages to anonymous website visitors – it’s like magic. All you need to do is include the Clearbit company name tag when you’re creating a campaign in Drift:

4. Route the best conversations to your sales team

Lastly you can also use the data to determine which visitors your sales team is asked to engage with, so that their time is only spent with the best possible prospects. To do so, you can build routing on top of the firmographic data within Drift, such as company size:

Or industry (in addition to routing conversations based on technologies used and the amount of funding raised):

And here's the best part: all of this can happen before a website visitor has to fill out a form.

Imagine if your sales team is only asked to chat with the high-value accounts or specific target accounts you've hand-picked as part of an ABM strategy. This is exactly the reason why the Segment sales team loves this new approach to B2B marketing.

Instead of forcing people to fill out long forms and then waiting to hear back, they are having highly targeted conversations in real-time—and reps now know ahead of time what companies people work at, since all of the information from Clearbit gets displayed right inside of Drift as well:

With Clearbit and Drift, not only will you know when your best leads are live on your website - but you'll have everything you need to be able to reach out in real-time to give them the VIP treatment and take the fast lane right to your sales team.