Growing DoorDash B2B Programs
DoorDash is best known for connecting consumers to their favorite restaurants. But it also provides services to business owners and corporate end users through programs such as DoorDash for Merchants and DoorDash for Work.
However, the DoorDash marketing team didn’t have the tools it needed to communicate efficiently with these B2B customers at first.
Harry Dehal, Marketing Engineering at DoorDash, describes the situation before he came onboard:
“Three years ago, we had a single landing page with a Formstack lead capture form. Nothing was translated and everything was manually integrated with Salesforce.”
Building forms in HTML
DoorDash had only one form and landing page because creating them was very challenging and time-consuming.
“We used old-school HTML forms, which required an engineer to go in and hook up the form to a database on the backend,” says Christopher Wise, Senior Manager, Retention Tech and Operations at DoorDash. “It took a lot of HTML, CSS styling, and JavaScript to take those requests and pass them somewhere else.”
Manual database clean up
The team also had to clean the information submitted through these forms before manually uploading the data to Salesforce, which was a time-consuming task.
“We had to pull down data, search to find different iterations, and then override them,” says Chris. “We would spend five to 10 hours a month on this manual work that no one really wanted to do.”
Limited email segmentation
Creating email marketing campaigns was another time-consuming task. Every marketing email was built from scratch.
“One hundred percent of our campaigns were one-off email campaigns,” says Andrew McCarthy, Director of Content Marketing at DoorDash.
Segmenting the recipients of those emails was also time-consuming and challenging.
“It was so hard to build each audience from scratch,” says Britt Coombs, Senior Email Marketing Manager. “Some of the data was there, but we didn’t know how to identify it.”
Operationalizing Marketing Hub and Operations Hub
In response to these challenges, DoorDash implemented the HubSpot CRM platform and Marketing Hub in 2018 and rolled out some base-level features.
“At first, we used only very basic features of HubSpot, such as sending out batch emails,” says Chris.
When HubSpot introduced Operations Hub in 2021, it galvanized a fuller implementation of the HubSpot CRM platform and empowered DoorDash to utilize it more fully.
Easy-to-create forms and landing pages
Today, HubSpot makes it easy for the DoorDash marketing team to create forms and landing pages.
“We can easily spin up different landing pages for different verticals in different situations,” says Chris.
Because forms and landing pages are so easy to create, the marketing team can test different strategies for optimization. For example, the team decided to test the impact of creating branded, personalized landing pages for several large B2B customers.
“Thousands of people came through those forms,” says Chris. “In the end, we found that personalized branding didn’t actually make much of a difference, which was good to know.”
Cleaning data at the source
DoorDash eliminated the need to manually clean information collected by forms with Operations Hub, giving its sales and marketing teams reliable information they can count on.
“With Operations Hub we can clean data from form fills before we save it into user profiles or our databases,” says Chris. “It makes everyone’s life easier down the road when we take action on that data.”
HubSpot-Salesforce integration
With the Salesforce integration, information collected via HubSpot forms flows into Salesforce without manual intervention.
“We’ve gotten more sophisticated in our usage, specifically using forms a lot more on different platforms. And those leads easily flow through HubSpot and into Salesforce,” says Chris.
Email workflows
HubSpot also had a big impact on DoorDash’s B2B email marketing campaigns thanks to automation.
“Over the course of the last year, we’ve shifted from 100 percent one-off campaigns to about 80% of our emails existing within workflows,” says Andrew.
Segment audiences for email marketing
Britt and her email marketing team can also segment audiences faster and easier than ever before. In fact, they recently created a segmentation directory with Marketing Hub that enables them to precisely target DoorDash’s database.
Recently, Britt used the segmentation directory to send a product guide to merchants in Canada. She had to segment the audience by location to send both French and English guides to Quebec merchants, as required by law.
“Before, the audience building process for this campaign would have taken several internal emails or Slack conversations, and lots of double-checking and hand-wringing, to get it right,” says Britt. “But with our lists, which are already vetted and approved, we did it in about two minutes."
Sales email sequencing
DoorDash is also using sales email sequencing to facilitate collaboration between marketing and sales.
For example, marketing used to avoid contacting leads that salespeople were actively working. But now, sales and marketing are working together to challenge this long-held practice.
Britt explains:
“About 10-12 salespeople volunteered to connect their inboxes and calendars to HubSpot. The marketing team sent emails to active leads on behalf of these salespeople, encouraging them to book a meeting.”
The strategy worked amazingly well. Out of 2,000 leads, over 100 booked meetings, and 20 converted.
“Through our own creativity, we found 20 closed wins for DoorDash,” says Britt. “And those wins are essentially free because we already own the email marketing channel.”
Saving 3 Days With Every Email Campaign
Britt estimates that her team saves at least three days of work with every email campaign they produce.
“It shortens the total turnaround time,” says Britt.
Chris notes that HubSpot also saves his team time thanks to its Salesforce integration and easy-to-use interface.
“HubSpot honestly has the best UI out of any enterprise email service provider,” says Chris. “It’s easy to understand. It makes sense—and you don’t need an entire team to execute within it.”
Given this positive experience with the HubSpot CRM platform, Britt doesn’t hesitate to recommend it to others.
“We often have conversations about why we love HubSpot so much,” says Britt. “It hits the right balance between power and user-friendliness.”
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