Leveraging Gifts to Successfully Drive New Opportunities

Capturing customer engagement with direct mail

Efficiency is key at Ontra (previously InCloudCounsel). Powered by AI and machine learning, the software company is committed to streamlining routine legal work — regularly giving hours back to legal teams so they can focus on higher-value tasks.

Ontra kicked off 2021 with some impressive metrics, including hundreds of customers and over 400,000 contracts processed. They wanted to accelerate this hypergrowth by securing meetings and re-engaging inactive prospects.

Re-evaluating their existing marketing initiatives, Ontra realized they were overlooking a major channel: direct mail. Determined to change that, Senior Demand Generation Manager Delaney Kutsal joined Ontra in December 2020 and introduced the company to Sendoso in February 2021. “My first big marching order was to get a direct mail strategy in place and launch it for the sales team,” she explained.

At the time, corporate gifting (other than for milestones like anniversaries or holidays) was a bit of a new concept to Ontra. However, to support a growing sales team, brand awareness, and engagement across the funnel, they wanted to stand up a global, scalable direct mail solution that would neatly align with and grow with their team.

To get everyone enabled, Delaney created in-depth training materials and held contests with prizes for the most active Sendoso users. Before long, the Ontra team was comfortable with the Sendoso platform — and eager to start brainstorming campaigns.

Launching customized digital and physical campaigns

Ontra executed a variety of direct mail campaigns with Sendoso to boost the number of net-new meetings booked by their sales team while also re-engaging deals that have gone cold.

Delaney leveraged eGifts to incentivize prospects to join Lunch and Learn meetings with Ontra’s sales reps. These Lunch and Learns served as in-depth demos to prospects or as trainings to help onboard new customers. The sales team was able to browse through dozens of eGift options for lunch, coffee, and other offerings and choose the perfect one for each prospect.

“The vast eGift options that Sendoso provided us really helped give sales directors an array of choices to send prospects,” said Delaney. “That put them at ease to better personalize their outreach.”

Delaney also launched physical gifting campaigns with Sendoso to surprise and delight prospects and customers across the globe. To target audiences in the UK, where it often rains, she came up with the idea of sending branded umbrellas as door-openers in beautifully packaged boxes. The gifts included a punny card that read: “​​We’ve got you covered. Let us handle your NDA so you can make it rain.”

What did the message say? We’ve got you covered. Let us handle your NDA so you can make it rain.

This campaign helped the sales team re-engage contacts that had gone cold and influenced 59 opportunities — landing Delaney the 2021 Sendie Award winner in The Rising Star category.

Delaney has run more than 17 different Sendoso campaigns in under six months and has exceeded hundreds of sends that resulted in a considerable increase in Sendoso usage and pipeline influence.

Anecdotally, Ontra sales reps receive plenty of positive feedback from prospects and customers. “Their reactions are always the best,” said Delaney. “We receive many emails thanking us for the thoughtfulness of our gifts, and that really goes a long way.”

While Ontra regularly tries out different campaigns, one thing always remains constant — the ease of measuring success with Sendoso. “I love that Sendoso has the integrations and analytics needed for everything to pass through Marketo and Salesforce and be trackable,” explained Delaney.

Catching on at Ontra

While regular direct mail gifting was just introduced in early 2021 at Ontra, it’s now a mainstay in the company’s marketing efforts. Inspired by the sales team’s efforts, teams across the Ontra organization have become interested in using the platform for additional engagement use cases.

“We’ve seen a huge uptick in usage across the organization, and more departments want to get in on the Sendoso action after witnessing the success of our sales team,” shared Delaney. “Now, we run contests every quarter to encourage the consistent use of Sendoso and get our new sales team members excited about sending!”

Most importantly, Sendoso has helped Ontra continue to accelerate its growth by driving opportunities among prospects and engagement from customers. Delaney has also enjoyed the internal benefit of increased collaboration between the sales and marketing teams.

“Direct mail not only generates more opportunities, but drives alignment against shared sales and marketing goals,” she explained. “People like gifts, so it’s a nice way to bring everyone together.”