Global sends drive $4 ROI per $1 spent for Verkada

A direct mail engine that is targeted and scalable can be used in tons of ways. If you're not using Sendoso, you're probably missing out on an opportunity to powerfully connect with your customers and partners in ways that ultimately drive revenue efficiency and scalability.

Valued at $1.6 billion just three years after its founding, Verkada provides intuitive physical security for commercial buildings. Direct mail has been part of Verkada’s sales and marketing strategy success since the beginning.

“Direct mail is very powerful because it allows us to send a personal touch that best demonstrates how our integrated suite of cloud-managed security devices can help solve many of the problems their organization is facing with their traditionally on-premise solutions,” said Idan Koren, vice president of marketing at Verkada.

As the unicorn company grew, so did its B2B direct mail strategy.

Marketing leaders quickly realized that executing direct mail campaigns in-house wasn’t going to be sustainable for long. Instead, they looked to Sendoso to scale their international marketing efforts as the business grew beyond the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia.

“When evaluating other direct mail vendors, I don’t think we saw another solution like Sendoso that could scale with us at the rate we were going,” explained Koren.

Scaling international demand generation

The global security startup partnered with Sendoso in 2018 to support its demand generation program. Since then, the enterprise company has implemented direct mail throughout the customer journey even within foreign markets.

“While our business is B2B, our marketing team can choose to employ a B2C mindset because of the amount of customers and professionals who have a need for our products,” said Koren.

Verkada offers video security, access control, environmental sensors, alarms, and visitor management that integrate with its centralized cloud-managed software. Buyers come from a wide range of companies and departments, including IT, facilities, health and safety, security, operations, and construction superintendents.

Incentivizing webinars to increase ROI

A clever theme, brand capabilities, and smart integrations helped Verkada leverage the power of scaled direct mail.

It’s a move that paid off in impressive ROI. For every $1 spent, Verkada earned $4 based on bookings within a year.

The marketing team uses Sendoso’s automated gifting platform to incentivize webinars. The team sends Verkada branded merchandise to help boost attendance.

Verkada sends branded YETI mugs, Maglite flashlights, and other gifts that are meant to last—just like their security solutions. Easily adding branding to products is one of the benefits of Sendoso. Clients can utilize the Custom Brand Shop to create one-of-a-kind swag.

Verkada sends about 500 gifts per week using this program and has sent more than 100,000 YETI mugs so far.

Automating direct mail with integrations

To run such campaigns at scale, Verkada uses Sendoso’s Marketo integration to automate webinar follow-up. Marketo automatically confirms attendees. It also qualifies attendees based on certain criteria, like those in the example below:

1. Attended the webinar
2. Have not previously received a gift for a webinar
3. Have filled out a form providing their valid shipping information
4. The shipping address is in a region that we have capabilities to ship to (US, CA, MX, UK, FR, IE, AU, NZ)

Next, the leads are added to a Marketo campaign where their addresses are verified and pushed to Sendoso to execute the gift.

If a registrant missed the webinar, the program sends an automated follow-up email offering a personalized demo in exchange for the gift.

“Because of the integrations, our demand generation managers never have to worry whether webinar attendees will receive gifts,” explained Sean Moreno, marketing operation manager at Verkada. “The automation means they can just create the webinar and know it’s going to happen.”

Teams can track every step of the automated process using Sendoso. The Sending Platform tracks the status of physical sends. The platform also breaks down how each send is driving revenue, influencing pipeline, and closed-won opportunities within the Salesforce integration.

“Sendoso integrations allow us to scale,” added Moreno. “From a developer perspective, it’s always easier, cheaper, and less time-intensive to choose a solution that will scale with you, rather than going with another solution and having to migrate everything later.”

Corporate gifts boost webinar attendance

The Verkada team found that incentivizing webinar attendance with a gift leads to a lift in ROI both by lowering the cost for webinar registration and by increasing webinar attendance.

For example, their average webinar attendance rate without gifts is about 28%. However, sending gifts increases that rate to about 48%.

Even if some of the additional attendees were initially only interested in the gift, the webinar helps them understand how Verkada’s intuitive and scalable solutions can solve many of the real problems they are facing. Then they can choose to pursue a trial.

Leveraging direct mail on a global scale

The team is also using Sendoso internationally for webinars in the UK and Australia.

“I think we started distributing YETIs in the UK before YETI did,” laughed Koren. “It’s really great that we can partner with Sendoso on our international campaigns. It saved us from having to find a small distributor fulfillment situation in the UK and deal with development.”

Verkada has held more than 100 webinars outside of the U.S. and is quickly becoming a global brand. The Verkada team has sent gifts to prospects on their mailing lists in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.

“The fact that Sendoso is growing more internationally, the better off we are because we’re growing at the same rate and we already have our next ideas of where we’re going from here,” Koren added.

Always experimenting, the Verkada team has A/B tested campaigns with and without direct mail. Marketing leaders found that campaigns with direct mail generate triple the response rate.

“As marketers, a powerful direct mail touch can immediately turn a colder lead into a warm contact,” said Koren.

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