Roberto Popolizio interviewed Vlad Gozman, CEO at Involve.me, a no-code customer engagement platform that helps marketers build entire funnels using a simple drag & drop interface.
We looked at their start, growth over the years, and how they compete with the
top funnel builders on the market.
Please Present Involve.Me To Our Audience. What’s Your Story? What Sparked The Idea, And How Has It Evolved So Far?
We started off with a completely different product, trying to develop a VR content management system back in 2016. To fund development of an MVP we started doing agency work and landed a few international brands as big ticket customers, such as Universal Pictures.
They wanted us to develop interactive landing pages with quiz functionality for each movie launch. And even though the look and feel of each page was different, in accordance with every movie, in essence they always ran quiz-based giveaways with the goal of gathering contacts for their prospecting database.
As we wanted to grow efficiency and lower development costs, we started automating parts of this process internally, because when you strip the frontend design, the barebones are the same (database setup, content elements, forms, functionality, etc.).
This helped us increase our output and margin, so it got us thinking there might be a product there. We had several customer development sessions where we basically questioned why they don’t use off-the-shelf tools for this. We found out that these brands hadn’t found one to fulfill the taxing design and functionality requirements they had.
This validation was enough to get us to whip up an MVP and test the waters. We set it up as a freemium offering and put up a Google ads campaign. When we saw that the tool started to generate revenue in its first month, we decided to pivot from the VR CMS and dedicate ourselves fully to this new direction. We’ve officially launched involve.me in April 2019 and never looked back.
What Is Your Mission?
We enable marketing and sales teams from SMBs and Enterprise companies to improve customer experience and gather better customer data. With involve.me they can easily create landing pages, embeddable widgets and pop-ups for the entire customer journey per drag & drop with our no-code funnel builder by using customizable form, survey, calculator and quiz elements.
How Does Your Funnel Builder Differ From The Competition?
involve.me’s USPs are both functional, as well as visual. It’s basically the only tool you need to cover all touchpoints in the customer journey.
On the design front, we offer deep customization from overall project design down to customizing the look & feel of each individual content element. Thus, when integrating involve.me funnels into a website or web app, they don’t look like third party tools, but rather blend in seamlessly.
On the functionality side our no-code builder offers an agnostic project type, meaning that you’re not confined to any kind of use case. You can start with a quiz template and transform it into an NPS survey, for example. The multi-page, multi-outcome layout enables our customers to control the customer journey to the extent that they can flexibly configure the segmentation by defining a custom conditional logic for outcomes. It’s as close you can get to scripting your own funnel outcomes.
involve.me also comes with a function-rich formula builder for creating online calculators with use cases such as offering automatic price quotes, ROI calculators, Net Promoter Score, mortgage calculators and more.
The funnels can be standalone landing pages, embedded widgets or pop-ups with custom triggering options. Customers can also invite users to funnels by email and send follow-up conditional emails on completion, all within involve.me.
Data quality is also a clear differentiator as we offer built-in form field validation and several checks for emails and phone numbers. And once you have quality customer data stored in involve.me you can tag contacts and enrich their profiles, so you have a complete view of your customer base.
Last but not least, we offer over 40 native integrations to third party apps, everything ranging from marketing and sales automation, CRMs, tracking, up to payment processors, allowing our customers to accept payments right within their involve.me forms.
Who Are Your Typical Customers’ And What Are The Pain Points That You Help Them Solve?
Our customers range from SMBs to Enterprise, as we cater horizontally to a broad market. Notable customer verticals are
e-commerce, where we help increase online sales through product recommendations and review funnels,
software companies, where we’re used for onboarding and feedback funnels,
agencies, which use involve.me primarily for lead generation and qualification, and
publishers, who need to gather better audience insights and increase engagement.
As mentioned, it’s a large surface area, with the common denominator that involve.me helps them create a better customer experience regardless where they are in their journey. And the more touch points they use it on, the better the picture they’ll have about their customer profile.
Also as cookies are being phased out we see businesses increasingly valuing zero-party data. involve.me helps them gather and own zero-party data so they can profit from this shift and create personalized experiences for their customers.
What Other Tools Would You Add To Yours In A Marketer Toolstack, And Why?
involve.me is used by businesses to create the frontend of the customer journey and plugs extremely well into any marketing stack. From CRMs like Hubspot, Salesforce or Pipedrive, and tracking tools like Analytics or GTM, to marketing automation tools like ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo or Sendinblue, as well as internal communication tools like Google Sheets or Slack.
Our customers can choose from 40+ apps to integrate natively (or use Zapier and webhooks for others) and set up a seamless data flow with custom mapping of data on a granular level per funnel.
What are the best ways right now to make a high converting funnel?
There are several best practices businesses can follow to improve the conversion chances of their funnels, ranging from including a strong value prop wrapped up in a compelling story to optimizing for conversions and being mobile-first.
One mistake I often see is not having a clearly defined target audience before building a funnel. Businesses should have a good understanding of their target audience and their need to create messaging and offers that will resonate with them. Otherwise engagement and conversions will be hard to reach.
Data from over 100.000 funnels built on our platform also shows that multi-page funnels with a step-by-step flow tend to outperform crowded one pagers by a margin. Furthermore, including interactive elements with instant rewards such as outcomes, product recommendations or calculation results will convert 40% clicks, whereas standard forms will get you to about 10%.
Last but not least, I’d say personalization is Queen. One way to personalize your funnel is by using dynamic content that changes based on users’ answers. For example, you can gather users’ names in a first step and address them by their name in the follow-up steps. You can show different pages to different users according to their answers and profile by using conditional logic. You can also use personalization in your invite or follow-up emails by addressing the recipient by name, or tailoring the content of the email based on their answers and data they shared in your funnel.
You can take another approach by segmenting your audience into a first funnel. This involves creating various outcomes and then establishing separate funnels tailored to different segments of your audience, each equipped with its unique set of messaging, offers, and calls-to-action. For instance, consider creating distinct funnels for new visitors as opposed to returning customers, or for individuals at various stages of the buyer’s journey.
We develop involve.me with exactly these capabilities and goals in mind, so that companies have all the tools they need to set up a complex funnel quickly and without coding. Work that would have previously required custom development.
What Trends Are Going To Shape The Future Of Your Industry?
I’d say democratization of digital content creation is definitely one. We see a huge adoption of no-code tools within many levels of business and the need for ever-more sophistication in terms of the content produced.
Additionally I strongly believe this new wave of generative AI will get deeply integrated in tools such as ours and ease the knowledge work involved in both creating content and interpreting the data gathered.
Lastly, Any Exciting News Or Developments That You Would Like To Share About Involve.Me?
On that last note, there are some exciting product developments lined up for the near future. But until then, I’d rather keep this top secret!
