How Jacob at Rubrik Ran a Sock-cessful Direct Mail Campaign

With about 10 years of experience in enterprise sales, Jacob Karp, a Strategic Enterprise Sales representative at Rubrik, knows that standing out to buyers requires a bit of personalization. At Rubrik, he helps companies think about cyber security, cyber resilience, data protection, and security to ensure that their data is safe. I recently sat down with him to learn more about a collegiate sock campaign that he saw success with.

Jacob ran this campaign in 2019, when you could find more people in office. He had 30 accounts assigned to him and chose 15 target prospects to add to some sort of direct mail campaign.

He’d done books and mailers before- but this time, he wanted to do something different. While brainstorming, he took a look at his list of 15 target prospects and realized that they had all gone to colleges with football programs. Jacob, an Arizona State alumni, thought about how he wears Arizona State socks every football Friday to represent his team and figured sending collegiate socks to these prospects would resonate with them.

He purchased socks for all the alumni of the various personas and sent them to their offices along with a hand-written note reiterating some of the messaging that he’d sent in prior outreach. Jacob said, “Some of the schools were a little less recognizable- like UPenn. The guy that I sent the socks to there said he didn’t even know that they had football socks and the guy played football there. So, that was cool.” Jacob mentioned that for follow-up, he coordinated with his contacts’ assistants to ensure that the socks were received.

The results of this collegiate sock campaign were impressive. Jacob recalls that he’d “sent an EVP of a multibillion dollar technology company 10+ highly researched and relevant emails over 6 months with no response” but when he sent him socks from his Ivy League school, he had a response 24 hours later. Jacob says that the gift was the “tipping point where you send something well researched based on something that would appeal to them”. This campaign allowed Jacob to stand out from the noise with these enterprise buyers.

With a 60% reply rate and a 33% conversion to meeting, it’s easy to say this campaign was a sock-cess. But how can this campaign be replicated today, when most people are working remotely?

‍Utilize LinkedIn Sales Navigator to create an account list and search your target accounts by location or alma mater.

Write sports-themed outreach inviting them to confirm their address via an Address Confirmation link.

For more sports-themed direct mail campaign ideas, visit the blog here.

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