How We Built Sendoso’s “Adopt a Marketing Innie” Campaign in 1.5 Weeks

Human-first marketing

At Sendoso, we believe in human-first marketing. That just means we prioritize people, relationships, and surprise and delight over volume, “quick wins,” and dashboards. We know that buying journeys are increasingly non-linear and word-of-mouth based, so we don’t attempt to force people to take certain actions or fit them into an imaginary “funnel.” When the 5% of people who are in-market at any given time are ready to buy, we hope they’ll think of us first.

People buy from people

We run at least one big creative, playful direct mail campaign per quarter because resonant, connection-focused, non-transactional brand marketing drives demand. Over the last few years a lot of companies have cut human-first brand marketing only to realize that trying to hack the buying journey and “capture” demand without investing in brand and relationships… doesn’t work.

Now we’re seeing an exciting shift away from automation-first back to relationship-driven engagement. We’re here for it, and we hope that building in public will help other marketers.

We have a few simple requirements for our campaigns:

1. Be unique and unforgettable
2. Make people smile
3. Show the impact of gifting and direct mail 
4. Include a personalized, shareable element that sparks joy
   
   

Integrated direct mail campaigns connect our team with our community and potential buyers AND support top of funnel awareness, qualified pipeline generation, and deal acceleration. Our Q4 “Sendoso Elves” campaign resulted in 500+ thoughtful “letters to the elves” from people nominating hard-working GTM folks, and drove $1.7M in pipeline, supporting a record-breaking quarter of revenue. 

Adopt a Marketing Innie

Going into Q1, our team has had multiple discussions (while refreshing our pipeline dashboards every 5 min) about how being a marketer often feels like being trapped in your “Innie” (work consciousness) 24/7. (If this seems oddly familiar but confusing, ask your friendly AI agent about the severed floor.) We’ve heard from many fellow marketers that they feel the same, and Seasonal Pipeline Disorder is rampant within our community.

We decided it was our duty (praise Kier) to make it possible for our community to “Adopt a Marketing Innie” and reward them with a human moment that breaks the cycle of demand gen hell. The timing was right if we worked fast — related memes were trending across social media, we knew our target audience related to them, and the end of Q1 for many teams is coming up soon. 

Campaign Timeline

We built this campaign in 1.5 weeks with a team of 7, including our incredible freelance team members. It’ll run for a month. Here’s how we did it:

Severed landing page

We build everything to be reusable so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel with every new campaign. This meant we could use the foundation for our Q4 Elf campaign to craft this one. We worked with the amazing Hien Lam at Huck Finch Studio to create a delightfully weird Webflow landing page with elevator doors that open to welcome visitors into a severed marketing experience. 

We used ChatGPT for ideation and did rounds of team edits to ramp up the weirdness and relatability of the landing page copy. As visitors scroll, they experience a day in the life of a Marketing Innie — basically just our lived experience as marketers, which is often so ridiculous it’s pure comedy.

We crafted several extra special gifting experiences to help Marketing Innies remember why they became marketers in the first place. Visitors can fill out a Mad Libs style Webflow “adoption” form to adopt the Marketing Innie of their choice and upon completion, we use a webhook to send it to Marketo (thanks to Rachel Squire at MOBI Solutions and her MOps superpowers). 

The form’s dynamic fields include text fill-ins for the Adopter’s name, Marketing Innie’s name, a drop-down menu to choose which wellness experience the Innie might enjoy (winning waffle experience, donation to a goat sanctuary, defiant jazz break, and more), plus a long-form text box for the adopter to fill in details about why the Marketing Innie needs a break.

Surprise and delight 

Boring thank you pages are a missed opportunity. We created an unexpected auditory experience — a wellness session with soothing music and special facts about your Marketing Innie. For example: 

Your Innie remembers every customer’s dog’s name. 

Your Innie can calculate ROI based on only mental arithmetic.

Please try to enjoy them all equally. 

Creative 

We wanted to personalize the experience for everyone who engaged. Our brilliant designer Eduardo del Rio created both an adoption certificate that’s customized in the confirmation email for each adopter, and a custom work badge that’s automatically personalized in the notification email for each adopted Innie. He also designed some incredible illustrations for the site and a series of wonderfully strange and mysterious teaser videos (elevator doors, black good dripping from the ceiling, etc) for us to drip out on Linkedin the week leading up to our campaign launch. 

Emails

We needed three automated Marketo emails: one to notify marketers that they had been adopted, one for the adopter to confirm their submission, and one for the actual wellness experience (gift). With the help of a well-trained ChatGPT, Katie and the team were able to spin email drafts up and iterate quickly.

For the wellness experience email, we reused a template that included the Marketing Innie’s name, the adopter’s name, the text from the “Share observations about this Innie’s work performance” form field, and the link to allow the Marketing Innie to confirm the best address for their gift.

‍Tech integrations

We used Zapier to get this out the door quickly. Austin set up zaps to:

• Push the adoption form information into (our new favorite) Slack channel
• Push adoption form information into a Google Sheet
• Create the cute Sendoso Industries badge and adoption certificate images that are auto-included in the emails

We built a Clay table to weave all of this together for some surprise and delight automation magic.

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Community love

Our team has been active and helpful in our community over the last year plus, and as a result we’ve forged strong relationships on LinkedIn and IRL. To help build the mystery and intrigue, we “adopted” a bunch of marketers in our community the night before the launch and asked them if they’d be open to sharing their badges the next day. We also announced the campaign live and dropped the link in our Human-first Marketing Webinar to 100 marketers on launch morning. We’re sharing the campaign with prospects, customers and partners. Many marketers across our community have engaged with and shared our campaign, which means the world to us. We send all of the mentions to an internal Slack channel and our whole team engages with them.

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Thought leadership 

When the organic momentum dies down on LinkedIn, we’ll work with Canberk Beker at ROAsted to boost some of our favorite campaign content and expand reach with those who may not have seen it yet (but are in desperate need of a wellness experience). We’re publishing this breakdown of how we built the campaign in the hopes that it’ll inspire other marketers to push for unique and unforgettable brand marketing.

The results‍

So far, our Adopt a Marketing Innie campaign has driven 2000 views of the landing page and over 150 “Marketing Innie adoptions,” it has gone viral + boosted our Linkedin reach by over 500%, and we were delighted to see the marketing community sharing and engaging with the campaign. We’ve gotten notes from customers asking how to do something similar, and the campaign even inspired an amazing future co-hosted partner event that we cannot WAIT to tell you about. 

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In summary

• Put people and relationships at the heart of your work
• Have the courage to be weird 
• Build everything to be reusable
• Create experiences: be playful with landing pages, forms and thank you pages
• Make your community part of your campaigns
• Use AI and automation to surprise and delight people, not to blast generic garbage 

Let me emphasize: our goal here is NOT to drive immediate meetings booked and we don’t expect big, immediate pipeline results. Our goal is to surprise and delight other marketers, show how powerful human connection can be (and how gifting can be used creatively to forge meaningful connections), and to be unforgettable. 

We know that we’ll see an impact on pipeline, deal acceleration, and customer engagement as a result, because that’s how good marketing works and we have the data to prove it. We’ll report back in a month or so!

Feel called to rescue a Marketing Innie? Take the elevator to https://www.sendoso.com/adopt-an-innie.

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