How Snowflake Achieved More Than 3X Its Registration Goal for Its Annual Summit

Snowflake’s founders started from scratch and built a data platform that would harness the immense power of the cloud. But their vision didn’t stop there. They engineered Snowflake to power the Data Cloud, where thousands of organizations have seamless access to explore, share, and unlock the true value of their data.

Objective

Snowflake’s marketing team was preparing for its annual, virtual Summit for data professionals on June 13-16th, 2021. The target number of registrations that the ABM team was looking to drive (out of the global target of 60k) was 2,000 RSVPs— this was significantly higher than benchmarks this team set in the past. An additional business metric they were (and always are) tracking towards is setting their sales partners up for success and driving high-quality leads. The ABM team at Snowflake wanted to take an innovative strategy to drive interest and secure RSVPs for this year’s summit in a way that seamlessly captured and routed leads. As ABM Marketing Manager Chris Marshall said, “We were looking for a new approach to driving attendance, other than traditional email outreach.” 

Solution

The team partnered with LinkedIn on a beta integration with Marketo, the marketing automation software that enables organizations to streamline their marketing tasks. “Without our account team at LinkedIn, we wouldn’t have been able to get the Marketo integration going. They made it seamless for our head of marketing ops to align with Marketo,” Marshall said. The integration allowed Snowflake to send personalized gifts with its outreach. Specifically, its team created a nurture stream to send a coffee gift card to prospects who registered. From there, Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) reached out to registrants and facilitated a warm introduction to their account team ahead of the virtual event. Better still, the marketing team created personalized agendas based on audience demographics. So SDRs were able to send tailored summit sessions for data scientists vs. data engineers. “From an ABM standpoint, we made sure we were promoting the relevant tracks that made the most sense to the audience of data professionals we were promoting to,” said Hillary Carpio, director of ABM at Snowflake. “We couldn’t have done this without the SDRs,” she continued. The marketing team also enabled ABM tactics on LinkedIn Campaign Manager by leveraging Lead Gen Forms, which allowed prospects to quickly register and form-fill their LinkedIn profile information with the click of a button. “When Lead Gen Forms came out, we were incredibly excited. In the past, when we created LinkedIn events and sent out links, the front-end experience was amazing. But on the back-end, the data wasn’t routed as easily,” Marshal said. Lead Gen Forms now integrates directly with marketing automation and CRM tools, allowing teams to manage leads with ease. 

Results

It worked unbelievably well. Almost too well. ABM Director Hillary Carpio had to keep doubling and adjusting the goal number of RSVPs from 2,000 all the way up to 4,000 and 6,000. And still, the team exceeded expectations. They received 6,902 registrations strictly from LinkedIn Events, 4,494 of which were unique customer and prospect accounts. Of those RSVPs, 1,920 individuals attended (a 27% attendee rate) with a significant share of individuals watching the on-demand sessions afterward. And they were able to generate 175 high-quality Enterprise leads in the form of campaign responders who RSVPd and had an initial meeting with the account team facilitated by the SDRs. This innovative approach to event activation earned a lot of attention from Snowflake’s CMO and marketing leadership team. “As a growth company, we have extremely high goals set. I think that’s where the excitement comes in. We saw that it was working, and needed to move quickly,” Carpio said.  

Impact

Results How has this success influenced the team’s strategy moving forward? “Long story short, we’re going to use this approach on every national, if not global, event that will be taking place in the coming months,” Marshall said. Snowflake marketers in APAC and EMEA are now launching these tactics for their marquee events as well. Marshall shared that their team was initially hesitant to try new product features and integrations, “but after we saw the success from Summit, this is an absolute no-brainer.”

To learn more, view the full case study here.