Field marketing registration climbs 70% with swag automation

Record pipeline generation is a big deal for any field marketing team. It’s even more impressive when you consider the company featured below began integrating Sendoso into its B2B marketing campaigns only nine months ago. And the results have only started trickling in on their biggest campaign yet.

“The program wrapped three weeks ago and we have already seen our pipeline generated exceed expectations so far,” explained Allison S., senior national field marketing manager.

It’s a quick start for Allison, who estimated that it usually takes a six-month lag to reach that level of pipeline generation.

It’s one of many wins since Allison brought Sensodo’s automated corporate gifting platform to the full-scale data streaming company.

The company enables B2B clients to access, store, and manage data. Allison helps support the commercial, enterprise, and account-based marketing teams. She needed a platform to help scale and send swag (direct mail) to incentivize her field marketing strategies.

She chose Sendoso, and the return on investment is adding up fast. Allison estimated Sendoso has been the number one influence pipeline for field marketing in the first nine months. 

Her goal besides influencing pipeline?

Allison and her counterpart, Marketing Program Specialist Katie H., have been tasked with creating field marketing experiences that scale for all regional field marketing managers. 

Despite early success, improving field marketing engagement was one of the biggest challenges.

“People are not going to events like they used to,” said Katie. “They can’t stuff their backpacks with all the swag and everything.”

However, sales still needs to keep in touch and engage with prospects. Katie believes swag is a perfect way to do that even in a virtual space. 

“I think the longer you wait to re-engage people with swag and reintroduce it into this virtual world, the art of swag dies,” added Katie.

Enter their big idea.

The company hosts an annual digital content camp. It features six weeks of on-demand challenges. It’s a way for the field marketing team to engage and educate prospects by incentivizing their B2B content in a fun way. 

The team rewards prospects as they complete each challenge. Camp prizes range from flannel shirts, to product trials,  to gift cards. The team even gave away four YETI coolers as grand prizes.

However, the timeline posed the biggest challenge. 

“This year we took the gamification to another level,” said Allison, who admitted that the volume of swag and manual work was a pain point for the past two years.

The team shipped all their swag kits to the Sendoso Fulfillment Center to better automate their campaign. The move meant they wouldn’t have to manually trigger, ship, track, or calculate the ROI of their swag. It made the workflow seamless for Katie and allowed her to focus on driving engagement in other ways. 

“I’m not waiting for anyone to respond to me to send swag,” explained Katie. “I’m not waiting for anyone to give me an update. I can see everything every single step as it automatically happens.”

Allison echoed those sentiments.

“In the past, we would have to organize a workflow with the vendor and have to send the list through email, ask for specific tracking numbers, and have very little visibility into everything. This was much smoother and saved me so much time.”

The six-week campaign quickly crushed all expectations.

The field marketing team hoped for the same amount of registrants as 2021. Instead, they saw a 70% increase from the number registered in 2021.

Everything about the 2022 field marketing event was bigger. The company added two weeks to the program and two additional prize levels.

For Allison and Katie, it was the engagement rates they were most focused on.

“There were about 450 people who stayed engaged the entire time, which is huge, because there’s natural attrition,” said Allison.

The duo focused on content and field marketing engagement by sending weekly update emails. Each email was drafted to maintain the campy theme by using marketing puns like:

• The s’more the merrier—look who’s joining camp!
• Your campfire is burning up! 2 weeks left…
• It’s getting in-tents! 1 week left…
• It camp get any better than this.

The email sequence worked. The campaign had an average email open rate of 55%.

“That’s the power of Sendoso. It allowed us to quickly gamify every aspect of it,” Allison said.

The field marketing campaign reported a 49% attendance rate. 31% of campers completed the entire six-week series and qualified for a chance to win the YETI cooler.

However, one of their more popular incentives was a Walmart eGift card. That final incentive caused a 63% uptick in camper participation. It means that people who stopped participating earlier returned for the eGift.

Sendoso even offered the campany unexpected solutions they didn’t anticipate needing.

The field marketing campaign was designed only for prospects in the U.S. and Canada. But when an overseas client won a cooler, they ran into a logistical problem.

“We turned it around because Sendoso has no problem shipping internationally. But if Sendoso did have a problem, we’d be in trouble,” explained Han. “So that actually is another huge plus to Sendoso.”

The success already has Katie and Allison planning ahead for next year.

Katie expects to make a few changes to streamline the process even more, including improving how they integrate Salesforce with Sendoso.

Allison even has advice for other enterprise companies considering Sendoso: “Keep pushing.”

She said the biggest hesitation for an enterprise company to move forward with Sendoso might be the red tape or pushback. Allison ran into her own red tape with her company’s privacy team, which was apprehensive about data sharing.

“That was our stickiest point of onboarding with Sendoso,” she explained. 

Allison said it took time to make sure the right people at her company, Salesforce, and Sendoso connected. 

“Sendoso did a great job of having that documented and guiding the process. So it wasn’t hard. Once we went through that barrier, we were off to the races.”

The impact of Sendoso’s influence is now being felt beyond the field marketing team.

The success means more teams want access to Sendoso.

“It’s insane because we’ve been able to mostly automate it. Our sales development representatives (SDRs) are using it, our account executives (AEs) are using it.”

Allison and Katie had to add more licenses to accommodate all the extra users.

The success means the field marketing strategy will expand to EMEA and APAC in 2023.

“The Americas have been crushing it,” explained Katie. “Now all the other regions are like, ‘Wait a minute, we need Sendoso,’ so that’s the power of Sendoso.”