iDrive Logistics provides eCommerce shipping and fulfillment solutions, including access to the best shipping rates through their software (available to both 3PLs and brands), warehousing, returns, freight, rate optimization, carrier contract analysis, and more.
The iDrive team has deep roots and knowledge from companies such as UPS, and has negotiated more than $5 billion in shipping spend since their founding in 2008.
They leverage economies of scale and their deep experience in the shipping industry to get the best rates available from FedEx, UPS, USPS, DHL, the Amazon Shipping Network, and more.
iDrive also works with customers to optimize their shipping cart UX and has a network of 20+ warehouses that utilize iDrive’s competitive shipping rates.
In April 2024, iDrive Chief Operating Officer Brett Haskins reached out via my website contact form to get some help on the marketing side, and we agreed I would step in as their fractional CMO to get the team and processes set up. At the time, I wasn’t available to get started right away, so we kicked off 2 months later in June 2024.
Here’s a testimonial from Brett as of January 2025, six months later;
Simply put, Rachel is a “hired gun” for early to mid-stage tech marketing companies. There is no substitute for her experience and familiarity with the methods and tools required for modern marketing. Her network of contractors and domain experts helped us execute quickly and decisively on our roadmap milestones.
As a COO, my role spans departments and disciplines. I rely on extremely smart, competent people in key roles to provide know-how and leadership and Rachel is no exception. She quickly gauged where we were and what needed to be done and started to implement her playbook to build a solid marketing foundation. She works quickly and communicates effectively. Despite having a solid playbook, she adapts well and thinks outside of the box to solve unique business problems.
If there was one area that Rachel could be a little more knowledgeable in, it would be AI, but that being said, knowing her aptitude for learning, I imagine she will be an expert at that too very soon. In summary, Rachel is a rare breed of marketer and a panacea for those lucky enough to find her.
Here’s what the first six months of setup looked like, followed by what’s left to come.
Onboarding the team
Throughout the seven months (so far) I was with iDrive, I onboarded the following key roles.
- SEO consultant – Technical and ongoing on-page SEO
- Freelance writer – Articles and web copy
- Multimedia agency – Case study packages, branding (ie. webinar decks), and content repurposing
- Email outbounds infrastructure consultant – Set up outreach inboxes and process for sales, repaired inboxes with high spam scores
- PR consultant – PR strategy and management
- Editor and content project manager (in progress)
The key thing that enabled me to build with mostly contractors was that they already had a full-time, on-site marketing manager who was on top of all of our processes, cross-team interactions, and customers. She also knew how to manage our complex customer database in HubSpot, the nuances of different data points, and how each action reacted with other teams. For example, there was a customer property that had to be tagged a certain way to ensure the sales team didn’t contact someone already in a marketing sequence.
The marketing manager was instrumental in getting everything running smoothly, as she was the person I worked with to set up the processes and brainstorm strategy (she had deep insight into what would and wouldn’t work based on the company set up and politics). Moving forward, I believe she is well-equipped to keep the team running smoothly with the resources we’ve put in place.
Building the basics
The first one to two weeks of my contract was spent spent interviewing internal team members, getting to know the tools and processes in play at the time, and lining up customer interviews. At this stage, previous sales calls weren’t as relevant as iDrive was shifting their model away from being a shipping rate provider to almost a 4PL.
However, instead of earning on services, iDrive earns when brands opt to ship with our rates, which are often the most competitive option available (and how our rates end up being chosen). Our margins are already built into the rates that brands see, so when they choose an iDrive label they know what they’re getting.
Then we got to work setting up the foundation for the marketing team. This included:
- Setting up Asana as our project management tool
- Moving to HubSpot from their former disjointed CRM
- Finalizing the WordPress website (more on that below)
- Setting up GA4 and the HubSpot reports dashboard
- Building a welcome email sequence, and launching the email newsletter
Tech stack
- Asana – Project management
- HubSpot – Email, CRM, analytics and KPI tracking, landing pages, forms
- WordPress – Website (we moved from Webflow)
- Hotjar – Session tracking, AB testing
- Riverside – Podcast recording tool we repurposed for webinars
A new website launch
First priority was the website, SEO, and alongside that managing email outreach vendors.
Updating all old blogs; deleting what wasn’t relevant or getting any traffic, deciding what to keep and update, creating project briefs for the updates, sourcing and testing writers, finding one that worked really well, executing the updates, managing SEO checks on them, etc. The website was the biggest undertaking, since it involved updating all of our old blogs which were mostly short and under a different brand, alongside new blogs that needed to be created.
Moving from Webflow to WordPress; we found that Webflow had limitations when it came to SEO, many of which were highlighted by our SEO consultant. I’m glad I got to work with Webflow to learn more about it, but as with all my other clients, I continue to recommend WordPress.
Testing and CRO; Once our new website was launched and all technical SEO items resolved, we used our analytics tools and session tracking tools to find where visitors were dropping off to “plug the holes.”
Creating more bottom-funnel content; this included case studies, lead magnets, and anything that could convince a visitor to either contact us or sign up for our newsletter. We wanted a way to capture more emails so we could nurture them as well.
Mapping our buyer journey
After facilitating customer interviews, talking to customer-facing team members, and brainstorming with different department heads, we were able to map out the buyer journey and key steps through acquisition, activation, and retention.
Here’s a rough overview of how we decided to think about different pipelines.
Lead capture
- Lead
- MQL
- SQL
- Pitched
- Closed won
Onboarding
- Contract sent
- Contract signed
- Account creation
- [Key activation step]
- First order sent
- First invoice paid
Lost
- Unqualified
- Closed lost
- Revisit
- Churned – Internal
- Churned – External
Shifting from outbound to inbound
When I first joined, I was handed two outbound email agency relationships to start testing. One of them offered as many emails as they could find and relied on volume to learn where to optimize and get leads. The other is more mature, and offered a fraction of the emails but promised a more sophsiticated email optimization software and sales process.
We quickly learned that the inbound leads we started getting from the website and content were “1000x better” than the ones we were getting from automated cold emails, and didn’t renew our contracts with them.
Part of the issue was when working with a company or agency to do outbound emails, you don’t get to choose your account manager. When that process is in-house, you can filter for exactly who you hire to represent you in cold outreach. Agencies aren’t nearly as personal or careful with your brand or outreach target selection, and we were unlucky enough to get an initially unresponsive account manager who threw our progress off by a month.
We ended those contracts after three months, and decided to focus on inbound and nurture channels instead. This included;
- Getting more case studies and social proof; I had to find a way the team could quickly and easily get effective case studies published.
- Creating lead magnets we could leverage for inbound and outbound; we needed something that we could give away to showcase our expertise and professionalism.
- Setting up emails; we launched an email newsletter, set up an automated welcome email for the newsletter, and started working on an onboarding email sequence.
- Mapping the buyer journey (mentioned above); We mapped the buyer journey to find out what our “trigger stages” were to get customers to convert and reach out to contact us, and how to get them from contact to contract signed.
However, the acquisition team didn’t abandon outbound completely. Sales still did their own highly personalized outreach to a few dozen accounts per day.
We brought on Michael Folling, whom I had worked with in the past, to create an easy process that used our existing tools.
Summary: Sales would reach out with an alternate but similar email domain, replies would go to their main inboxes for subsequent conversations. All emails, including the initial outreach, would be logged in HubSpot and tied to the correct salesperson, as we can associate multiple emails with one user.
Setting up a case study cadence
I brought on a digital agency to streamline our case study creation process, so we would only need to get a customer on the phone and record the interview.
One video recording of a customer interview became:
- An edited recording of the full interview to be published on YouTube
- An edited transcript to be published on the blog with the YouTube video embedded
- A case study write-up to be published on the blog
- Video snippets of key quotes and concepts to be shared on social media
- Quote graphics from the speakers to be shared on social media
Creating lead magnets
We launched two webinars; one on shipping cart optimization, and another on how to understand your shipping rate contracts. This would cover both of our major lines of business (shipping rates/fulfillment, and contract negotiation).
The webinars were promoted on;
- Our newsletter
- Social media
- LinkedIn paid ads
- Cold email outreach from our team (and any email outreach agencies we were using at the time)
More important than the registrants for the live events, the recordings gave us a useful lead magnet to repurpose into blogs, clips, social posts, PDFs, and more.
After the webinars, the recording edited and published on our blog, along with a form to fill out to download the slides. This would allow us to continue capturing emails from those most interested.
The recordings were also shared with our sales team for their use in closing deals.
Finally, we repurposed the webinar topics and were able to use the clips, images, and PDFs to generate even more leads across more channels, from paid ads to organic social.
Building out nurture channels
In line with our push for inbound organic acquisition, we wanted to improve our nurture channels. This included creating an email newsletter, a newsletter page where visitors could sign up, prompts to sign up to the newsletter across the website, and an automated welcome email.
One of the tactics that proved successful in increasing our newsletter subscriber rate was webinars. We noticed a bump in subscribers after our first two “test” webinars mentioned above.
In the coming months, once a new product platform is launched, we also plan to build out an automated onboarding sequence that will keep users returning to their dashboard.
Initial results
Although not yet the well-oiled machine that can scale the company over the next few years, we are certainly getting the right tools in place for better visibility and more organized processes. Overall I’m incredibly happy with the team and resources we’ve put in place.
Since I joined just as a new business model was launching, I ended up building from scratch. So I can say that the following growth (under the new 3PL-forward model) came about under the team we put together.
- We grew the newsletter to more than 1,000 subscribers. Keep in mind less than six months ago, that number was zero.
- Within 40 days from the new website launch, we got two inbound leads that converted to contracts signed/customers. One converted in less than 40 days. Since 2008, this client had never received an inbound form fill that converted to a deal. Inbound leads have been coming in steadily since then.
- We also saw a good jump in session traffic that has since leveled out, with organic search as the top traffic driver.
Moving to the next phase: PR, product-led, and referrals
At the beginning, I focused on building the groundwork for iDrive’s marketing arm. This included our processes, tech stack, key people, and my knowledge and understanding of the brand.
While that was happening, I began optimizing our content, including updating the website, ensuring we were well positioned for SEO, and updating all of our old and irrelevant blogs (deciding whether to keep, update, or delete in a content audit). This is also when I started prioritizing case studies as key pieces of content for our conversions and sales team.
Once that was underway, we started positioning ourselves as experts with events, and creating lead magnets using the recordings and slides. At this point we started noticing the bump in newsletter signups that indicated better brand recognition, yet a low webinar registration conversion rate.
This led us to theorize we had yet to build our brand recognition and trust, which is when we decided to look to PR as our next target. Back in January, we got our first big PR win when our consultant got iDrive President Glenn Gooding an interview and quote on Bloomberg.
In addition to PR, while this was happening the team was also working on a new platform rollout. With that on the horizon, we now must also start preparing to test product-led marketing, such as:
- Offering free tools that require an email to access the results
- Building integrations with other tech platforms and doing joint promotion (in-app and co-marketing)
- Providing a sandbox or demo to play with on the website, with an easy sign-up flow after (for example, prompting them to “save your data, create an account”)
Finally, I’d like to get a formalized referral program in place after hammering out the rules and rewards. This is mostly because it’s been such a viable source of quality leads that convert based on all of the customer interviews I’ve conducted.
Happily for everyone, iDrive ended up extending their contract indefinitely, so we’ll be working together on all of the above and more throughout the next year.
I expect to be able to hand off the CMO role once we have reliable resources in all of the key growth channels we decide to invest in on an ongoing basis. I know when a job is well done because by the end of it, my day-to-day execution is free and clear, and most of my time is spent course setting, correcting, and reviewing.
Stay tuned for more in 2025!