SendGrid IPO Public Relations Campaign
SendGrid allows companies to send email without having to maintain email servers. SendGrid manages all of the technical details, from scaling the infrastructure to ISP outreach and reputation monitoring to allowlist services and real time analytics. I worked with the team at Lewis PR to take the company through a successful IPO in November 2017. SendGrid was traditionally known as an email sender, but to prepare for the IPO, the team worked to position the company as the world’s most trusted customer communication platform and establish itself as a category leader. My role was to ideate, develop, execute, and place thought leadership pieces in major publications that were attributed to top executives at SendGrid. I worked with SendGrid leadership and marketing teams to pitch ideas, interview executives, and gain final approval.
The overall campaign was a huge success and achieved the following results:
Secured over 740 original articles in top tier business, tech and trade media
Placed over 25 thought leadership byline articles
Secured over 35 speaking engagements for SendGrid’s executive team
Submitted for 13 product, business and workplace awards
Secured Nº1 spot in Share of Voice (SOV) for Q4 2017 against main competitor
Social channels achieved a 31.46% average growth, including 13% growth on Twitter, 38% on LinkedIn and 44% on Facebook
SendGrid raised $131 million in successful IPO, and after pricing shares at $16, the company closed that day at $18.03, or up almost 13%
I've included two examples among several written by me below.
More Companies Should Release Their Diversity Numbers
By Sameer Dholakia (originally published on Fortune.com)
Silicon Valley leaders often say they want to advance workplace equality, but behind closed doors many executives—both male and female—admit they’re not exactly sure how to go about doing it. There is general confusion around what works, what doesn’t, and where to start. Leading a team that’s shown tangible results on diversity over the last few years has given me some insights that are worth sharing:
Release your numbers
Beginning in 2014, SendGrid joined tech heavyweights like Google and Apple in sharing our diversity numbers. Deciding to take this step wasn’t easy, since these reports have tended to stir up controversy. We weren’t sure if our numbers were good enough, but we decided we had to have a benchmark to start with, otherwise we would never be able to show improvement. We also felt that honesty would be empowering, and that releasing the numbers would help us hold ourselves accountable.
We believe that releasing our numbers helped us attract more women, because it sent a signal to the talent pool that we were serious about hiring a diverse workforce. Since we began sharing these numbers, we’ve seen improvements in every area of focus. For example, women now make up 32% of SendGrid’s 349 employees, up from 24% in 2015 and 22% in 2014. Women also hold 29% of all leadership jobs, up from 27% in 2015 and 19% in 2014.
Recruit differently
It sounds obvious, but often companies forget how important the recruiting process is when it comes to achieving workplace equality. We’ve seen tremendous success since we changed the composition of our interview teams to ensure gender and ethnic diversity, especially for engineering positions. There are several ways to accomplish this. We use blind auditions on GapJumpers, a site where companies can post a challenge and get a job seeker’s solution—without seeing their gender, education, or experience. We also use Textio, which analyzes job descriptions for subtle nuances, flags words or phrases that tend to put off women, and then offers gender-neutral suggestions.
One of the great benefits we’ve discovered since releasing our numbers is the impact that it’s had on the recruiting process itself. Our diversity numbers reinforce SendGrid’s commitment to the happiness of our employees, and the numbers are a great point of differentiation for job candidates.
Embrace community
Once we started looking more deeply at potential solutions to the problem of workplace equality, we started to see that tremendous resources are already available for companies that want diversity in their workforce. A whole community of organizations is working on this issue, and if a business wants to address their diversity, all they have to do is reach out to another company.
One of our strongest support networks has been the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT). Through our relationship with them, we were able to get in on the ground floor of an initiative started by a fellow NCWIT member designed to help women transition back to the workplace when they haven’t been working for a considerable amount of time. Through this program, we’ve hired four women to return to the organization.
Taking on the issue of equality in the workplace is no small task, but it’s a worthwhile endeavor. Releasing diversity and inclusion numbers can spark transformative conversations, changing the approach to recruiting improves the talent pool, and embracing a community of female leaders creates powerful alliances. We’ve found that the whole process improved our internal communications and created a stronger foundation for changing the status of women at work.
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Holiday Email Best Practices for Avoiding the Spam Filter
By Len Shneyder (originally published in AdAge.com)
The holidays represent huge opportunities for retailers; some of them depend on the few precious days to generate a disproportionately large amount of their total year's revenue. The season is not only laden with opportunity, it's also fraught with peril when it comes to competing for eyeballs and clicks in the inbox.
According to ReturnPath's 2015 Email Deliverability Benchmark Report, 21% of email either lands in the spam folder or simply gets dropped by an ISP. When you consider that SendGrid alone delivered 30.4 billion marketing emails between Black Friday and Cyber Monday last year, the potential cost to marketers during the holidays is staggering.
As reported in SendGrid's recent Global Engagement Report, email related to eCommerce is the highest in terms of volume, but the lowest in terms of engagement. This alone should give marketers pause. ISPs typically don't change their systems during the holidays, so all the filtering a sender experiences this time of year is just the result of bad practices, not a changed environment. By following a few basic rules during the upcoming holiday season marketers can improve the chances they'll hit both their revenue and engagement targets.
1. Keep volume consistent. Inconsistent volume can set off alarms. If you send a million emails every Tuesday and Thursday and suddenly start sending 6 million the day after Thanksgiving, chances are the increase in volume may reflect poorly in your inbox placement. Volumes need to be ramped up slowly in the weeks leading up to the holidays. Consider spreading the volume across more days vs. more volume on a single day. Consistency in volume generally results in more favorable inbox placement.
2. Keep complaint rates low. Even a tiny increase in complaints (subscribers tagging messages as "junk" or "spam") can cause email to be blocked by ISPs. Keeping the complaint rate very low (less than 1%) is very important. Re-engaging very old segments during the holidays is a sure fire way to drive up complaint rates and hamper your ability to reach more engaged recipients. Re-engagement should be slow and steady in the months leading up to the holidays and paused for the duration of the season to improve success.
3. Avoid email fatigue. Sending multiple emails per day can lead to fatigued and annoyed recipients resulting in users blocking, unsubscribing and sending messages to spam folders. Sending 2-3 emails per day results in upwards of 42 emails after a couple of weeks. That's too much even for the most loyal customers. When preparing for the holidays, keep recipient lists as clean as possible by removing addresses that haven't been engaged in a long time and segment each list by engagement.
4. Give consumers control. Marketers should offer a preference center that allows recipients to down-subscribe or up-subscribe for the holiday season (some recipients actually want more email). Just remember that unsubscribe volume goes up proportionally with send volume. Consider making email subscription options more prominent during the holidays. If a consumer has to look for the unsubscribe button, they may find it easier to use the spam button instead -- and complaints have the potential to do lasting harm.
5. Rethink subject lines. Offering a discount in the subject line is popular. But according to our research earlier this year on SendGrid emails delivered during Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2015, it's not correlated with stronger engagement. In fact, the opposite is true: emails without a discount in the subject line are the ones with higher engagement rates. Overly promotional email subject lines may come across to consumers as spammy. Test subject lines and don't assume that the same subject, or call to action, will work for every recipient.
Email is reassuring in that it has a long history; most marketers can compare and benchmark themselves against results from previous years. Monitor delivery throughout the holidays and compare against previous results to gauge successes and failures. Remember, every percent of non-inbox placement represents money left on the table. Take the necessary precautions to improve the likelihood that recipients will receive, open and click email by following best practices before, during and after the holiday season.