Customer story

One campaign yielded an 18% meetings booked rate

How Zuora uses Sendoso to break into new target accounts.

Request a Demo

With Emily Aradi, Senior Manager, Global Campaigns at Zuora

Challenges

Zuora needed a way to engage prospects at target accounts who hadn’t responded to previous outreach.

Results

By sending a high-value, personalized gift at the right moment, Zuora was able to spark new dialogue with executive decision makers.

75%

email open rate

18%

meeting rate

Zuora helps companies launch, manage, and transform into subscription-based businesses.

Headquarters

Redwood City, CA

Founded

2007

Company Size

1,000-1,500 employees

Website

www.zuora.com

Industry

Enterprise IT

Founded in 2007, Zuora provides cloud-based software via subscription that enables any company in any industry to successfully launch, manage, and transform into a subscription business. Zuora’s intelligent subscription management hub automates, integrates, and extends the entire subscription order-to-revenue process, including billing and revenue recognition, for more than 1,000 companies around the world.

A few years ago, Zuora’s demand generation team began exploring direct mail as a creative way to reach decision makers and influencers at top target accounts. At the time, they handled everything in-house, recruiting employees from other parts of the organization and even creating assembly lines to organize, pack, and label hundreds of custom shipping packets. The packets were finally loaded into the car and dropped off at FedEx. Results were hard to track, with manual processes in place to measure sales follow up and business impact.

Emily Aradi, senior manager, global campaigns at Zuora, remembers one particularly complicated direct mail campaign: “It was extremely manual. I didn’t sleep for days and I saw a masseuse immediately afterward.”

One of Emily’s colleagues had used Sendoso at a previous company, and recommended the platform for Zuora. The team launched a pilot in 2017 with a successful marketing campaign, and Zuora continues to be a Sendoso customer today.

Spending more time on strategy, not assembly lines

“We have a huge appreciation for all the things Sendoso does behind the scenes to make our lives easy because we used to do it ourselves,” said Emily. “Now with Sendoso, we can focus more on overall strategy and coming up with meaningful and relevant offers that will delight and inspire our prospects.”

Emily has since scaled the direct mail program and trained additional Zuora teams on Sendoso, including SDRs and account managers. She pioneered a variety of campaigns, both physical and digital, including a March Madness campaign that garnered a 15% response rate, an Independence Day campaign with a 22% response rate, and a Whole Foods Thanksgiving gift card campaign that generated a 20% response rate.

If we’re spending all of our time assembling direct mail packages and tracking responses ourselves, we won’t have the capacity to optimize and scale the channel. – Emily Aradi

Now, armed with benchmarks to help forecast results and drive adoption, Emily and her team were ready to launch a direct mail campaign with a high-impact gift item: champagne.

“The crown jewel of direct mail campaigns”

The goal of the champagne mailer was to help the sales team secure meetings with target accounts where previous attempts were unsuccessful. Emily and her team identified key company milestones that were relevant to Zuora: companies that recently launched a subscription service, hired a new digital or innovation executive, or acquired another company that offers subscription services.

Once one of these “celebration signals” has occurred, the sales rep was able to trigger a mailer to be sent to the appropriate contact. The Zuora-branded box contained a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne with a handwritten, personalized note of congratulations accompanying the bubbles. Zuora SDRs then used Sendoso’s Salesforce and Outreach.io integrations to follow up with personalized email sequences. The message said,

While a speedy subscription launch is certainly something to celebrate (hence the bubbly!), as you know, the success of your new innovation hinges upon how you can iterate afterwards. Would love to chat about how we’ve helped similar companies get to market, test, and iterate quickly.

Understanding the impact of direct mail

Sendoso tracking and analytics provided Zuora a line of sight into pipeline influenced. “A critical element was the ability to serve real-time status tracking to maximize impact of a timely follow up, to ultimately increase the likelihood of a favorable outcome—in this case, meetings set,” explained Emily.

The success of Zuora’s champagne campaign can be attributed to a number of factors: the box’s intriguing “alcohol inside” sticker helped get the package noticed; the shareability of the gift—recipients were encouraged to share the champagne with their teammates in celebration; the handwritten message was personalized for each recipient; and, importantly, it gave SDRs two reasons to reach out—once to give a heads up about the champagne, and again to confirm they received (and chilled!) the bottle.

“Giving the team multiple touchpoints is important,” said Emily. “Direct mail gives our team a concrete reason to call and connect.”

A high-value mailer that drove high response rates

The result of the champagne mailer? A whopping 75% email open rate, 40% email response rate, and 18% meeting rate.

Looking ahead, the Zuora team will launch and scale a phase two of the campaign that’s tied to Zuora’s overall integrated marketing strategy. And because Emily has tested and measured a variety of Sendoso campaigns, she has the data and benchmarks to develop future campaigns that will yield predictable results. These success metrics facilitate planning and budget management. Beyond that, sharing expected outcomes is included in every Zuora direct mail campaign launch—whether it’s an eGift card or physical mailer.

“We can now project that if we send a certain number of gifts, we’ll secure a certain number of meetings if we follow the formula and orchestration we’ve optimized,” she explained. “I’ve got that down to a science, which is game changing for setting expectations and getting buy-in from the most important stakeholders—the sales team who are, at the end of the day, actioning the campaign.”