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UserGems is a platform that enables companies to find their best buyers when they move jobs and capture the buying committees of target accounts, so they can boost pipeline, drive expansion, and win more deals.
VP of Marketing, Trinity Nguyen, is always looking for ways to improve the experience for potential buyers and maintain relationships with customers. While Trinity has always believed in the offline channel to deliver results, she hadn't always had an Offline Engagement Platform at her fingertips to save time and create efficiencies.
To express gratitude to employees, prospects, and customers, Trinity implemented gifting early-on at UserGems. She originally sourced gifts from the modern art museum and stored them in her apartment, which soon became a micro-warehouse.
This wasn't a sustainable solution as she spent countless hours running to-and-from UPS, and had to manage inventory manually.
After speaking with a number of B2B professionals who had used gifting platforms to supplement their pipeline generation playbooks, Postal advisor, Kyle Lacy, pointed her towards Offline Engagement. The flexible pricing and packaging were appealing, yet Postal's internal Paper Plane creative services team was the main differentiating factor.
How UserGems goes to market with Offline Engagement
The offline channel is a large component of how we go to market.
UserGem's entire organization is using Postal: 70% of use comes from the sales and marketing side for generating pipeline, 20% from customer success to get in front of champions, and 10% from people ops to celebrate employees. Each of these departments consistently use Postal MagicLinks, a way to digitally offer gifts without having address information, given how easy they are to include in emails and campaigns.
The sales team uses Outreach for outbound sequences, and almost all of their campaigns include an offline touch or MagicLink within the sequence. The items are pre-selected by sales development representatives (SDRs) and account executives (AEs), who have the ability to personalize the offering based on who they are trying to engage with, or offer a Postal Collection to give recipients the ability to choose their item. All offline activity from Postal shows up in Salesforce, giving Trinity a centralized dashboard to track return on investment (ROI) and the overall success of her reps.
On the marketing side, paid LinkedIn ads offers lunch to qualified leads that submit a demo request and the SDRs nurture these relationships. Trinity tightly controls the target audience using their own UserGems product to ensure that only the relevant buyers would receive these ads, which has resulted in a 50% jump in sales accepted pipeline.
On the customer success side, UserGems CSM team uses Catalyst to send personalized gifts as a part of customer celebrations. One successful gift that Trinity called out is a UserGems branded Baby Box, which is sent when a contact has a new baby to celebrate the big moment.
Besides the fact that the gifts are super cute, everyone loves it - and subsequently likes your brand more - because you’re celebrating a personal moment that matters to them. It humanizes our interaction with our prospects and customers.
Achieving a 90% email open rate with a job change campaign
Despite the challenges in achieving high email engagement, Trinity has found success by using personalized offline gestures to celebrate job changes. When customers or friendly prospects change roles, the first step is a personalized congratulations gift. This is automated through Postal’s Outreach integration, resulting in many happy responses and a tremendous 90% open rate and 30% reply rate.
This engagement commonly translates into pipeline, as reps reach out for a follow-up 2-3 weeks later. However, achieving such high email engagement rates is no easy feat, as industry averages suggest: according to Mailchimp, the industry average for email open rates and click rates are only 21% and 2.6%, respectively.
The offline channel is a large component of how UserGems engages with prospects, customers, and employees. Postal has played an integral role in helping them scale their gifting program while offering robust reporting to let Trinity measure its impact on pipeline and relationships with prospects and customers.
