Season of Sending: How We Executed a Company-Wide Holiday Send Across the Entire Customer Lifecycle (Sending using Sendoso)

This piece is brought to you by Sendoso Director of Corporate Marketing Brianna Valleskey.

‍A number of holidays make the last three months of the calendar year a busy time for those who live in the United States. But they’re also a busy time for anyone who has a quarterly quota, revenue, or retention number to hit. Our Sendoso team is no exception.

While we were sharing tips for successful holiday sending, charitable gift ideas, and strategies for generating revenue in Q4 of 2020, we were also planning our own company-wide holiday send that would span our sales development, account executive, customer experience, and advocacy teams.

For prospects, the goal was to start conversations with members of our SDR team or advance deal stages in existing sales opportunities (for our account executive and account management teams). For customers, we wanted to send them something meaningful to show our appreciation—prioritizing soon-to-renew accounts.

The Strategy

Influencing Pipeline with Popcorn

At the top of the funnel, we pulled a list in Salesforce of Tier 1 accounts that belonged to SDRs that had a 6sense stage equal to “Purchasing” or “Decision.” The contacts selected were all people in marketing roles with purchasing power (director or higher title).

Once we had our list of recipients, we did a batch upload into Sendoso using a CSV and then included the generated Address Confirmation links in a Marketo database email from our marketing team that CC’d the SDRs who owned each contact. The Sendoso integration with Marketo allows us to trigger direct mail, personal gifts, eGifts, and more based on Marketo Smart List criteria, as well as add unique eGift URLs into email templates.These prospects were sent a Popsations Gourmet Popcorn holiday bundle, and then added to an Outreach Sequence to follow up after the send was received. (With Sendoso’s Outreach integration, Outreach triggers can automatically add prospects to to follow up Sequences).

Driving Revenue with Reindeer Piñatas

To engage accounts that we’re in an active sales opportunity at the time (both net new sales from our account executive team and renewals/upsells from our account management team), we bucketed them into two tiers to ensure we could include as many as possible while using our budget efficiently. Tier 1 accounts received a Reindeer Piñatagram, while those in Tier 2 received a Bonjour Bakehouse DIY Cookie Jar—both were offered the option of a donation on their behalf in lieu of a gift.

We then went to our sales teams, shared context around the campaign and the types of accounts it would be best to include, and gave them one work week to fill out a spreadsheet with their nominations for recipients. The final approved list was uploaded to Sendoso as a CSV. The send was then executive via a Marketo database email (also from our marketing team with reps CC’d so that they could nudge recipients in the same thread).

Responses and contact statuses were pushed to Salesforce so that the sales reps who owned the accounts could track the send in real time. We also published a CSV of the Address Confirmation links for our sales reps so that they could follow up directly with their recipients in LinkedIn or via text message.

Building Advocacy with Beanies

Last, but certainly not least, we wanted to show love and appreciation to our most dedicated customers. We used a similar nomination process with those in our SuperSender advocacy program, but since only one team member (who runs our advocacy program) was nominating, she simply added the contacts to a Salesforce campaign. Sendoso’s Salesforce integration allows you to track anything you send as activities in Salesforce and connect those activities to your campaigns.

And as with our other sends, the offer went out via a Marketo email from the marketing team, and our advocacy manager CC’d so that she personally could ask them to confirm their address in the same thread. She also had the ability to resend the Address Confirmation links via SuperSender Slack channel. Those recipients were sent an orange, Sendoso-branded beanie.

The Results

Drumroll please! In total we sent a gift to 1,200 recipients across our entire customer lifecycle with a 36% response rate. The total cost was $10,000, and here are the results we saw …

• $2.3M in pipeline influence across almost 90 open opportunities
• $241K in closed-won revenue (to-date, as of Jan. 20, 2021)

So not only were we able to generate massive ROI, but we were also able to give a kind and thoughtful gesture to our prospects, customers, and advocates after what had been a roller coaster ride of year for many people.

Bonus: Engaging Employees with Embroidered Blankets

Oh, and if you’re wondering whether we sent a holiday gift to our employees, the answer is, “Yes!” Each Sendoso team member here in the U.S. received a beautiful, soft blanket with a Sendoso logo stitched in the corner. And while we have our employees addresses on file, we still used Address Confirmation to ensure that the package was delivered to wherever they were working at the time!

We know that continuing to connect with people in meaningful ways and making virtual feel more personal will be even more important in 2021 as everyone works to combat virtual fatigue. So keep an eye out for more creative and unforgettable campaigns from our team, and happy sending!Sendoso is the most effective way to stand out, build a lasting brand impression, and drive revenue. Want a custom demo of our solution? Click here or on the image below.