Sales Development

Emotive Case Study

About Emotive

Emotive is a text message marketing platform for eCommerce brands. It uses human-assisted artificial intelligence to deliver text messages that replicate genuine human conversation. What sets Emotive apart from the competition is that instead of one-way marketing blasts, it uses two-way automated SMS messaging that feels genuine and authentic. These conversational messages allow customers to ask questions, receive personalized product recommendations, and participate in interactive quizzes. 

Emotive’s revolutionary technology leverages the power of text-message automation to create personalized shopping experiences. This human-to-human marketing enables e-commerce merchants to scale one-on-one relationships with customers more effectively. Emotive’s SMS messaging is fully integrated with leading e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce. Emotive also guarantees a 5X ROI for its services and products. 

Since its founding in 2018 in Los Angeles, California, Emotive has expanded its operations around the world and gone on to become one of the fastest-growing start-ups in the human-to-human marketing space. In 2021, Emotive raised $50 million in Series B funding. 

Vince Velasco

Head of Customer Experience

Industry

Computer Software

Website

emotive.io

The Story of Emotive

Emotive has always been a firm believer in sales specialization. Since its inception, Emotive has outsourced lead generation to third parties, using sales development representatives (SDRs) to generate interest and build the top of the sales funnel. However, its outbound strategy included sending out thousands of similar messages to as many people as possible. 

For a while, this method worked reasonably well for Emotive. However, over time, it started to generate some undesirable results. Because all of the emails lacked any customization, Google’s algorithm started blocking them, causing a significant drop in the email deliverability rate and lowering Emotive’s domain rating. These factors disrupted Emotive’s organic traffic flows, which then had an adverse effect on their sales conversions and visibility in the marketplace.

Since receiving the Series B funding, Emotive was determined to aggressively grow its business by dramatically scaling outbound marketing. To achieve their ambitious business goals, Emotive first needed a more accurate dataset about its outbound performance. 

By collecting and analyzing information on which outreach channels were more efficient, which industries its product resonates with, and which conversions yielded the best results, Emotive would be able to scale its business at a faster pace.

Emotive realized that if it did not define its weak points and vulnerabilities in its lead generation strategy, the deliverability and domain rating problems it had previously faced would only be exacerbated. That’s why it was crucial for Emotive to gather better data on their industry and outbound performance.

Emotive knew that it eventually wanted to hire a larger internal SDR team that could conduct highly targeted outbound outreach. However, Emotive also knew that internal hiring takes considerably longer to ramp up. Wanting to expand its outbound team as quickly as possible, Emotive looked to partner with CIENCE.

Challenges & Scope

Although a highly targeted outbound strategy could deliver much greater results and opportunities, there were still obstacles that Emotive needed to overcome, including generating interest in its SMS messaging platform and improving its market position. 

Challenges

In the e-commerce marketing sphere, Emotive’s two-way SMS messaging automation was cutting edge. This meant that other companies would be looking to imitate and improve on Emotive’s technology. It was vitally important that Emotive cement its place in the industry and make the most of its competitive advantage. 

Emotive’s main challenge would be generating maximum interest in its product and winning new clients as quickly and aggressively as possible. A highly targeted omnichannel campaign could ensure every interaction with prospects had the greatest possible chance of succeeding.

Need

To solve the problems with email deliverability and to protect its domain rating, Emotive needed a customized outreach strategy that could connect it with the right people at the right time.

This would create a stronger and more predictable sales pipeline that could help Emotive to fulfill its expansive business goals, solidify its market position, improve market visibility, and increase profit margins.

Opportunity

By adjusting its lead generation methodology with the help of CIENCE, Emotive could nurture and engage prospects on a more meaningful level and increase sales opportunities on an ongoing basis. This was a chance for Emotive to lock in long-lasting business relationships, promote greater awareness of its brand, and generate a greater ROI.

Why CIENCE?

CIENCE’s omnichannel approach to lead generation was exactly what Emotive needed. During this campaign, CIENCE’s SDRs used phone calls, emails, LinkedIn messaging, banner advertisements, and a landing page to reach out to potential prospects. 

“This five-channel approach really allows us to be very persistent and touch individuals’ between ten and fifteen times,” said Ian Palin, sales executive at CIENCE. “But it comes off as a very polite persistence because it’s spread over multiple channels and we’re customizing all of these messages.” 

Personalized messaging was also a big selling point. To ensure that outbound messages were as relevant as possible, SDRs conducted in-depth data research into every lead to customize outreach. In addition, CIENCE experts used A/B testing—along with metrics such as page visits and email response rates—to find out what worked best so they could replicate it across the campaign. 

With extensive experience in orchestrated multichannel outbound, CIENCE was able to utilize over a hundred SDRs—supported by strategists, customer success experts, landing page specialists, an account manager, and a project manager—to build a successful campaign for Emotive. 

CIENCE’s SDRs started by heavily emphasizing Emotive’s 5X ROI guarantee; however, they soon discovered that prospects resonated most enthusiastically with different messaging. 

“We’ve started to put a greater emphasis on the human side of Emotive’s technology,” said Daria Danska, project manager at CIENCE. “We discovered that prospects responded to Emotive’s tagline ‘texting that’s human at any scale.’ So we adjusted our messaging accordingly and saw a big increase in the conversion rate.” 

Results

CIENCE’s partnership with Emotive, which began in October 2020, is ongoing. What started as a single SDR team quickly moved into twelve teams—and one of CIENCE’s biggest clients. This rapid scalability was a huge part of the value proposition.

The campaign continued to scale to more than 90 teams and schedule over 2,300 qualified appointments, a staggering result for both Emotive and CIENCE. Emotive managed to convert many of these appointments, which naturally led to a significant boost to profit margins.

“The CIENCE team helped our business re-engage customers that had drifted into inactivity,” said Vince Velasco, head of customer experience at Emotive. “Their expertise in engagement outreach is apparent, and the results we saw from their efforts were evident.

CIENCE scheduled so many qualified appointments for Emotive that a separate rescheduling cadence was needed so Emotive didn’t lose any of these hard-won appointments. CIENCE kept a keen eye on the show rate and did everything possible to improve the quality of those appointments. CIENCE continues to follow up on its outbound efforts to ensure maximum success.

Partnership Success

CIENCE’s partnership with Emotive was tremendously productive. CIENCE’s highly targeted outreach solved Emotive’s email deliverability and domain rating problems, helped it engage with the right customers and brought significantly more qualified appointments into its sales pipeline. 

One of the most remarkable feats about this partnership was how rapidly and successfully the campaign ramped up: Emotive wanted to go to market and generate results as quickly as possible, realizing the quickest way to build a pipeline was to team up with CIENCE rather than hire internally. 

“It takes time to build a pipeline from scratch, but you’ll be able to do it faster with CIENCE than if you had to hire internally,” said Ian Palin, sales executive at CIENCE. “Building your SDRs’ decks, giving them data, and explaining the campaign strategy takes a lot of time.” With Emotive, CIENCE managed the entire process extremely quickly, which allowed Emotive to rapidly scale its outreach.

CIENCE was able to evaluate which channels were working, what industries were the most receptive to the messaging, and which conversions were transforming into business for Emotive. Figuring out this pipeline math allowed Emotive to confidently move forward and add those additional twelve extra teams. Furthermore, Emotive was able to quickly adjust the number of SDRs working on the campaign as and when needed.

“We’ve thoroughly enjoyed our experience and results from CIENCE,” said Vince Velasco. “The CIENCE team is truly a wonderful group to work with. They are industry experts and executed our plan to a T. We’ve seen a legitimate impact to our business from their effort, and we consider them a valuable partner to our organization.”

Frequently Asked Questions

What challenges did Emotive face before partnering with CIENCE?

Emotive’s outbound strategy relied on sending thousands of uncustomized emails at scale. Over time, Google’s algorithm began blocking these messages, causing a significant drop in email deliverability rates and lowering Emotive’s domain rating. This disrupted organic traffic flows and had an adverse effect on sales conversions and marketplace visibility.

How did CIENCE help Emotive improve its outbound lead generation strategy?

CIENCE implemented a 5-channel omnichannel campaign for Emotive that combined phone calls, emails, LinkedIn messaging, banner advertisements, and a dedicated landing page. This approach allowed CIENCE’s SDRs to reach each prospect between 10 and 15 times across multiple channels, increasing the likelihood of meaningful engagement and qualified pipeline.

Why did Emotive choose CIENCE for its sales development needs?

Emotive had long outsourced lead generation but needed a more targeted, data-driven approach after raising $50M in Series B funding. CIENCE’s omnichannel methodology offered the customized outreach Emotive needed to protect its domain rating, resolve email deliverability problems, and scale its outbound team faster than internal hiring would allow.

What business outcomes was Emotive targeting with CIENCE’s outbound SDR services?

Emotive aimed to build a stronger, more predictable sales pipeline to support aggressive post-funding growth. The goal was to identify which outreach channels and industries drove the best conversions, and to scale outbound efforts quickly enough to cement its competitive advantage in the eCommerce SMS marketing space.

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