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Case Study
How Linq spiked attendance rates 218% — and found its No. 1 product
Cracks in the FunnelIn September 2024, Linq was five years and millions of dollars behind on its most critical problem: Customers were booking consultations they never showed up for. Attendance rates hovered around just 22 percent, a huge expenditure of fortune and focus.
The lead funnel was working as designed. After someone booked a meeting, they received both automated and personal outreach. Email reminders with calendar invitations. Friendly SMS texts that offered details and support. Virtual meeting links that required no special software. But opportunity after opportunity ended right after it began.
Last ResortLinq’s success team knew that customers who received their outreach nearly always attended the meeting they booked. Customers taking care of their own clients just weren’t paying attention to Linq’s emails and texts amid a stream of other notifications.Over time, people have become desensitized to the look and feel of marketing communications that all look the same, particularly the overwrought subject lines and impersonal templates of an email drip campaign. Today it’s nearly unconscious behavior to scroll to the bottom of an automated email and look for the word “unsubscribe.”
Marketers have long known that the open rate of SMS messages far outpaces email. But just as people have learned to ignore marketing emails, a marketing text message has only one giveaway.
If it's green, it's spam. Green indicates an old-school, character-limited SMS message, technology invented in 1992. Green messages are the transactional kind sent by banks, public transit, or scammers out to take someone’s money.
In the United States, 57 percent of people use iPhones. Every iPhone has had iMessage capability since 2011. For nearly 15 years, the majority of the American public has learned that green messages are transactional, and blue messages are people.
In September 2024, Mariel Didier, a longtime Linq success rep, was trying to reach another customer. She looked at her personal iPhone. Then she picked it up.
ProgressThe response was remarkable and swift. When the team used iMessage to send reminders or follow-ups, it cut through the noise. Customers began to respond to reminder texts as if they were talking to a friend, providing more information on their use cases and needs.
As the practice spread, Linq’s meeting attendance rate for every kind of meeting — customer questions, sales consultations, onboarding, inbound leads — began to steadily rise. First to 30 percent. Then to 45, 50, 60, 65 percent. Eventually, the attendance rate for outbound sales demos alone reached 70 percent.
Where was the other 30 percent? Looking at the data, Linq concluded, these leads were unqualified, spam, or fraud.
While the team was thrilled with the increased customer service and sales opportunities, another problem arose. A growing business meant that handling all customer communications manually could not scale. Understandably, although it helped people do their jobs, using personal devices wasn’t preferable.
OpportunityThe products it makes are for people like them: Proprietary AI databases that enrich contacts to improve lead quality. A full-featured dashboard to manage teams of any size. Seamless integration with top CRMs. Digital business card products that surprise and delight.
Before long, company leadership began to see a complementary opportunity in iMessage outreach. If it worked for Linq, why wouldn’t it work for Linq’s customers?
Development began on the product now known as Linq Blue, which exists as a companion feature on the LinqOne platform. At first, Blue was used internally to automate meeting reminders for its customers. Linq continued to be the testbed as more iMessage features were added, including high-quality attachments, read receipts, typing indicators, and everything else customers would expect. When it was ready, Linq CEO Elliott Potter announced the launch in a LinkedIn post. But he wasn’t prepared for the response that would follow.Market fitFrom January to March 2025 as word spread, Linq’s outbound consultations spiked 218 percent. The sales team’s calendars began to fill to capacity every day, so much so that new reps were offered a job on the same day they interviewed.
Customers were asking for Blue to be integrated with all the bespoke CRMs that Linq One supported, and they wanted it immediately. Customers signed contracts sight unseen. People wanted to convey the trust of their personal device while separating their work and personal lives. Combined with the bedrock Linq One platform, Blue became the anchor feature that everyone wanted.
In a review of the Linq App, one customer put it this way:
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