• by Jess Nelson , August 19, 2016

Business intelligence platform CrunchBase is offering a new Autopilot messaging application that the company says boosts performance.

Autopilot is a marketing automation software company that includes Proactive Headsup among its product offerings. Headsup is an in-app and on site messaging application that provides more personalized communication through an intelligent chat box feature, turning anonymous Web visitors into qualified leads for marketing outreach.

Autopilot also provide built-in integrations with a number of sales and marketing applications, including Salesforce, Twilio and Slack, to help unify siloed data and provide consistent messaging across email, SMS and physical mail.

Since applying Proactive Headsup, CrunchBase has increased email subscription numbers by 20%.

CrunchBase uses Proactive Heads Up on the sales and marketing pages for its enterprise tools. When an anonymous visitor visits the page, a chat box with a company representative’s name and picture pops up, asking a question. With a response, CrunchBase can match a name and email to the anonymous web visitor.

Alex Mack, Director of Marketing at CrunchBase, discussed how her company utilized Proactive Heads Up in a conversation with Email Marketing Daily. CrunchBase was a Beta customer of Autopilot’s Proactive Headsup. 

Mack says the Headsup application was quick and easy to set up, and that her team finds it fun to have more visibility into where their leads are coming from, adding that Autopilot helps them qualify and quantify leads.

“We use it primarily as an acquisition tool to capture people coming to our page who are looking for more technical products, but don’t know where to go from there,” says Mack.

The chat box only appears to unknown visitors, so CrunchBase customers don’t experience any unnecessary or spammy communication while visiting the company’s Web site. Mack says that the chat application has also helped the company convert leads they would have otherwise lost.

“One of the things we learned, and quite unexpectedly, was that were keeping customers that would have left otherwise,” says Mack.

Cunchbase’s Headsup message appears on the pricing page before a form customers need to fill out for additional information. The company discovered that the traffic bouncing off of that form was still using the messaging application, meaning Crunchbase was continuing to engage with customers who would have disappeared otherwise.

“Live chats are really great if you have a large organization with a lot of resources,” says Mike Sharkey, chief executive officer of Autopilot. “The problem is that most mid-market customers don’t have the resources to man these live chats.”

Likewise, pop-up advertisements or chat boxes are also not a solution according to Sharkey. 

“You’d get these horrible pop-ups and on a mobile device it would take up your entire screen,” says Sharkey. “This is why people adopted ad block, because the experience just sucked.”