We wanted to amplify the article’s impact by ensuring our prospects and customers could physically hold the Forbes magazine and read the article themselves.
The team engaged Postal’s Paper Plane Agency to collaborate on a creative strategy to distribute the magazines and get them into the hands of executive decision-makers on their ABM target list. Paper Plane creative experts decided to include a hard copy of Forbes magazine as part of a custom gift to amplify their featured article.
This campaign tells the story of creativity. Postal can execute at such a high level, and we closed a deal immediately following the sending of the Forbes kit to a high-level executive.
Supporting local businesses in custom-branded kits
The Fivetran team decided to support a local and BIPOC-owned coffee shop in Oakland, CA near the Fivetran office (a team favorite). Paper Plane included a bag of coffee beans in the gift box with the magazine. Paper Plane also ensured the Forbes magazine was open to the correct page using a Fivetran branded clip.
The final product was a beautifully branded box that included a QR code that directed recipients to a custom landing page with a message from Fivetran's CEO and a video featuring their customers.
Internally, the creative aspect and ideation of this campaign helped the marketing team realize it’s possible to take a physical or digital asset and make it tangible by creatively packaging and distributing it to create a unique brand experience. Fivetran sales reps were particularly impressed, considering it to be one of the most creative campaigns they’d ever seen.
Campaign execution and sales alignment
The ABM team was sure to let the sales team know about the campaign and the custom kit ahead of the launch to ensure campaign success.
To ensure the campaign was targeted at the right role level of contacts, sales managers were responsible for allocating a specific number of boxes to send with their team.
The gifts were sent via Postal’s direct send feature using a personalized message as well as Postal MagicLink. MagicLinks for each rep was created, so they could easily track and follow along who accepted the gift. All sends were automatically tied to Salesforce so reps could easily track engagement and activity back to their native CRM.
Using offline engagement to score buyer intent
Another major component that contributed to the success of the campaign was scoring buyer intent in Demandbase. Fivetran used a Postal dashboard to track the acceptance of gifts and integrated this into Salesforce and Marketo. Additionally, they integrated Postal with Demandbase, their account-based marketing tool, to prioritize accounts that had accepted a gift.
The integration between Postal and Demandbase allowed Fivetran’s ABM team to track and score the level of engagement on every account. For instance, when an account accepted a gift from Postal, the account score went up in Demandbase, which meant that the sales team prioritized outreach to the account. The alerts were extremely helpful in identifying and prioritizing accounts that were already owned by an account executive and have a higher level of engagement with Fivetran's brand. By scoring buyer intent and prioritizing accounts that were more likely to convert, Joicee’s team saw significant results.
The results: immediate $100k deal and 5x potential ROI
The Fivetran saw ROI within 1 month of launching the campaign: an immediate $100k deal closed and 148 opportunities were influenced. Aside from driving new revenue, this campaign helped strengthen relationships with current customers, and will likely see a nearly 5x return on their investment with pipeline generated and influenced from this initiative.
Joicee’s advice on running a successful ABM campaign
Closely align with sales and then work with Postal on making it come to life. We started off with this program in North America and now I have global teammates requesting to utilize it.
Creative offline execution = $660k Influenced Pipeline
Fivetran’s custom kit and ABM campaign demonstrate how creative offline execution can lead to a high return on investment. The initiatives to amplify PR reach, support local businesses, and use offline engagement to score buyer intent was a huge success, and Postal enabled the team to stand out and create a memorable experience for their key audience.
