# Protected: How I managed organic acquisition for an eCommerce fulfillment startup

- URL: https://rachelandreago.com/b2b-ecommerce-organic-acquisition/
- Author: Rachel Andrea Go
- Published: January 10, 2022
- Categories: Case Study, Content, eCommerce

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Today I’m going to take you through my journey with Deliverr, an eCommerce fulfillment company focused on fast delivery for multi-channel merchants. These are the lessons I learned (some the hard way), while managing organic acquisition for this B2B eCommerce startup from pre-launch through series D.

**Background**: From pre-launch through when Deliverr raised their series C, I was the *only dedicated marketer* on the team. I sourced and hired freelancers and other contractors to fill in where I couldn’t do it alone. Our co-founder also managed a PPC consultant, a UX design agency, and a freelance WordPress developer who built the marketing website.

Michael Krakaris, Co-Founder of Deliverr, said the following about my work in a [LinkedIn testimonial](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelgo/details/recommendations/?detailScreenTabIndex=0) on June 2, 2021:

> *“Rachel was the first marketing hire at Deliverr, and from Day 1 she exemplified no other Deliverr value more than “Be Lean”. She was able to set up our newsletter and blog within a few weeks, coordinating across writers, designers, partners and development to publish multiple new forms of content every day. Rachel has grown with the company as well, taking on bigger initiatives – she built and ran our first ever seller conference, Discoverr, which hosted top retailers like Walmart and Wish along with thousands of eCommerce merchants. Rachel is a pleasure to work with – she is a proven executor and can be trusted to complete her tasks with high quality and an attention to detail. She is able to identify and communicate areas where marketing can improve and collaborate.”*

I handled:

- The blog production, growing from 2 posts/week up to 5 posts/week
- Our newsletter, sending out a weekly email recapping our latest posts
- Partnerships, including webinars, guest post exchanges, and partner pages
- Video production, sourcing and managing our media agency
- Social media, sourcing and managing social freelancers
- An affiliate program, setting up and overseeing the program
- For a while, assigning out sales leads

Some of these were hits (content, partnerships, email, video), and others were misses (affiliate, social media). But here are the key things I learned while trying to do it all.

## Year 1: Content-led growth

I joined Deliverr in March 2018 as a contractor handling content strategy and execution. Back then, similar to now, I capped my client list at four at a time to ensure I could deliver quality work to each client. That meant I had allotted a maximum of 10 hours a week, or 2 hours per day for them.

During that time, I focused primarily on **starting and scaling our blog, landing guest post exchanges, and sending out a consistent newsletter**.

**Fun fact**: The co-founder of Deliverr and I first spoke when I was [managing content for the Skubana blog](https://rachelandreago.com/blog-guest-post-exchanges/). I reached out for a guest post exchange with Symphony Commerce, his then-employer, and they had noticed the recent spike in Skubana blogs and guest posts. He asked for a call to see how I did it, and I showed him how I set up my [content Trello boards](https://trello.com/b/6y3zkd62) for all clients. Once he left to start Deliverr, he asked if I could join them to do the same.

We had regular brainstorming sessions for content ideas, I built and managed the newsletter in MailChimp, and I pitched, tracked, and wrote our guest post exchanges myself.

At the end of my first the year with them, we:

- Reached a DA of 30
- Landed 40 blog post exchanges
- Were hitting 10,000 monthly pageviews
- Published 2 blogs/week
- Had almost 5,400 newsletter subscribers
- Got a 36.8% open rate (15.7% industry avg)
- Got a 5.8% click rate (2.1% industry avg)

I had also set up email drips, managed Asana boards (Editorial Calendar, Marketing, Partnerships, SEO, Sales Lead Tracking). That last one was because I was asked to help keep the leads organized on behalf of sales, which I hope is a testament to my organizational skills.

### 2018 client review

At the end of 2018, here’s what I did well and what I needed to work on. The content below is copied from my annual review with the co-founder. I share this here, the good and bad, in the interest of transparency.

#### *Put the customer first (9/10)*

*Rachel puts customers first in her content, and has shown a strong ability to message content hyper-focused around sellers (and putting it in their words). Also in her newsletters and email campaigns, she has worked effortlessly to ensure that the emails look pixel perfect for sellers. I’d like to see her work more on figuring out what content sellers would like to see (expand more on this under the curiosity value).*

#### *Be an owner (10/10)*

*Rachel has shown tremendous initiative in getting things done. A good example is partner marketing. After asking her to take on this huge role, she was very quick to put together in depth presentations on each of the different partners on where Deliverr can get more callouts. Similar example is with our content marketing, where she has put together an editorial calendar/process where Deliverr can rapidly push out great content.*

#### *Be curious (2/10)*

*This is currently the biggest challenge for Rachel, as she rarely dives into the “why”. A good example of this would be when we’re [brainstorming new content](https://rachelandreago.com/brainstorm-and-research-content/) ideas. She doesn’t often contribute new content ideas to the pipeline, and has not shown initiative to improve this. There are other areas where she has shown some curiosity, particularly in finding a good webinar software provider.*

#### *Be Lean (10/10)*

*Rachel has been able to do more with less just about everywhere in her role. Going back to the example with the editorial calendar, she has outsourced writing to other content writers, and is able to produce good content extremely efficiently. She also initially launched our newsletter on mailchimp to save on costs, and built a way of effectively scaling it before transitioning to hubspot.*

#### *Be Honest and Direct (10/10)*

*Rachel is great here as well. She is very honest and direct both internally with Deliverr and with our partners. She’s always willing to lend a helping hand (good example being with the email automation Damian was working on) and is a true team player.*

#### *Content Marketing (10/10)*

*Rachel has excelled in content marketing. We have an excellent editorial calendar and a very scalable system in place. Our content is relevant and interesting to sellers, and we have been able to acquire quite a few merchants through our content efforts.*

#### *Partner Marketing (9/10)*

*While this is still new to her role, Rachel has shown a very strong fit for this area. Each listing tool has a project plan in place on where we’d like to see more Deliverr callouts. She was very quick to understand the role, and I believe this will help Deliverr tremendously in getting the word out to more sellers.*

#### *Product/Market Knowledge (5/10)*

*Rachel has struggled the most here. Occasionally, on content where we dive in depth into the product, there are some inaccuracies. A good example would be on the Walmart 2-day doc on how a seller gets into the program. Another example would be on an article we wrote on how Deliverr works. I believe this has also affected her ability to pitch new content ideas. I’d like to see her learn more about the Deliverr product and how it interfaces with the different pieces of software involved, as well as learn more about sellers and what the experience is like selling on Walmart vs. Amazon.*

#### *Overall Metrics (19/20)*

*Deliverr has finished with well over 1,000 newsletter subscribers, and engagement remains strong. The bounce rate has increased a bit, which is why I deducted a point here.*

## Year 2: Partnerships and webinars

At around the end of my first year with Deliverr, starting in January 2019, the co-founders asked me to go “full-time” with the company. Being international, this meant they took up all four of my retainer slots and became my sole client.

In addition to scaling the blog and continuous guest post exchanges, I dove further into **partner marketing and events**. This was and remains one of my favorite acquisition strategies for B2B companies, and you can check out some of my templates and resources at [Webinar strategy 101: Everything you need to run a successful webinar](https://rachelandreago.com/webinar-strategy/).

2019 was the year webinars were just beginning to emerge as an interesting new engagement tactic (today, in 2022, everyone has webinar fatigue). I believe that our early action on this tactic, coupled with the oncoming pandemic made virtual events an especially good acquisition channel for us.

Similar to how [guest post exchanges](https://rachelandreago.com/guest-blog-exchanges/) were “new and exciting” back when I managed them at Hubstaff and Skubana, webinars were my “lightning” at Deliverr.

On top of that, the nature of our company meant that we needed to have integration partners. These were the low-hanging fruit of co-webinars, where it was easy to see the mutual benefit we would gain by [promoting each partner](https://rachelandreago.com/webinar-partnerships/).

Our**content and partnership efforts** did incredibly well in this growth stage of the company. Most of our customers were coming from these organic acquisition channels, and we were building our brand. This is the year we were no longer considered a typo in a Google search.

This was also the year I began**repurposing our content.** I selected our most popular blogs according to Google Analytics, and turned them into videos and email courses to extend ROI. I determined which posts to prioritize by looking at their conversion rates from session to qualified lead status, which at Deliverr we tracked by when a merchant integrated their listing tool and imported their SKU data.

I sourced a video agency that was affordable and could help us get different content mediums for merchants who didn’t want to read. It also helped us boost our YouTube channel viewership and liven up our social media presence.

**Fun fact**: The video agency I hired and managed saw my project management board and adopted it throughout their agency for all their other clients.

At the end of my second year with Deliverr, we achieved:

- 150K+ monthly pageviews to the entire website (10%, 15K+ driven from the blog)
- A DA of 37
- 18K+newsletter subscribers
- 14K+ Facebook followers
- More than 1,800 Messenger subscribers
- 20,000-30,000 monthly YouTube views
- 60+ guest post exchanges
- More than 30 co-webinars

I also dabbled in some more large-scale content experiments, such as doing a state of multi-channel eCommerce report with original data (from surveys), and a series of email courses that incorporated our videos.

### 2019 client review

At the end of 2019, we had grown large enough to merit a more sophisticated HR team. With it came a more professional review system. Whereas my first review was given to me via a PDF, this one used software called Lattice. In it, my manager (the co-founder) and I were both asked to give three achievements and three growth areas. These are the comments copied directly from the co-founder. Funnily enough, we had alignment on all six points, and when asked to chart my performance and trajectory we both asynchronously placed our dots beside each others.

![](https://rachelandreago.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Performance-and-trajectory.png)

#### *Achievement 1*

*Rachel set up Deliverr’s video content system, which has become widely popular today. She was able to design compelling stories and catchy animations for each video at an affordable cost, all within quick timeframes. Video has become core to Deliverr’s content strategy today, and a unique advantage we have when looking at the non-Amazon content community.*

#### *Achievement 2*

*Rachel set up our social strategy, hiring individuals to run our social content and ads, as well as set up messenger bots to engage with interested prospects. She was able to get this off the ground in a record amount of time, and has continued to scale our social efforts for the past few months.*

#### *Achievement 3*

*Rachel set up multiple email courses for sellers, which included really helpful information on marketplace selling and has had solid adoption today. It was also an idea she thought of on her own, which demonstrates strong creativity – a growth area for her in 2018.*

#### *Growth Area 1*

*Rachel needs to improve on the data and attribution side of things. She needs to work on communicating the quantitative value of different content initiatives (which is inherently a challenge based on the tracking available at the moment), but I’d still like to see more initiative here as to how she measures success. I’d also like to see more curiosity as it relates to data and attribution – for example, we quickly acquired 15k followers on FB, so at a glance, it looked like the initiative was a huge success. But when diving deeper into the data, there were serious quality issues with our audience – something I’d like to have seen her identify earlier on.*

#### *Growth Area 2*

*Creativity continues to be a growth area for Rachel. I do think she’s made considerable strides here (refer to email course above), but I’d like to see her dive deeper into the product and ask the “why” questions more often. I think she has the potential to create great, interesting and unique content if she can dive deep into a subject and ask the “why” a bit more.*

#### *Growth Area 3*

*I’d like to see rachel focus a bit more on creative ways to distribute our content. We are starting to get a great collection of interesting content, but I feel like we often fall short when it comes to distribution. An example was our multichannel seller survey this year- we had super interesting content, but the readership could have been better. Rachel primarily relies on the blog, email newsletter, and messenger subs to distribute content, but there may be more creative ways that we haven’t yet thought about.*

## Year 3: Pandemic and caffeine-fueled growth

In 2020, COVID-19 hit and fueled eCommerce growth faster than anyone could have predicted. We launched five years into the future and everything was at all-time highs, particularly my caffeine levels.

Honestly, this was not a healthy year for me. No double entendre intended. With the absence of travel and socializing, I had nothing to do but work.

Our DA jumped to 56, we were doing **multiple webinars every month**, and there were**some weeks I published eight blogs**! That’s more than one blog day – including weekends.

I **organized [Deliverr’s first annual Discoverr conference](https://rachelandreago.com/virtual-ecommerce-conference-organization/), launched an affiliate program, ran another state of eCommerce survey, began review management**, and was *still* overseeing our **video production, social media, writing newsletters, managing partnerships**, and at one point even **building new webpages**. (I was in charge of creating and managing all of our partner pages, the COVID-19 response page, and proofing and fixing new webpage copy in staging.)

It was such an interesting year for data as well. I regularly published primers on which eCommerce categories were growing quickly, to give merchants an idea of what to invest in next. I would often pull that data into webinars and guest blogs to give our content an edge.

As I mentioned above, this is also the year we tested out an affiliate program, which led to poor leads and ultimately more work without much returns. I definitely didn’t have enough time to scout the right affiliates for us, and didn’t have time to do the relationship management a successful program required.

If I had to do it again, I would hire a team before I burned out like I did. We had been looking for a director of marketing for a few years, but since marketing was one of the least problematic areas, we were lowest priority for HR. That meant I never did get a marketing director to work with and learn from.

In 2020*, the year of eCommerce and not leaving my house, we achieved:

- Almost half a million monthly pageviews
- 74K+ monthly blog pageviews
- 45K+ newsletter subscribers (this would grow to almost 70K by the time I left Deliverr)
- 30K monthly video views
- Almost 100 guest post exchanges

**Starting in Q4, my KPIs changed to look only at marketing-qualified leads, so the metrics above are from the end of Q3.*

### 2020 client review

By the end of 2020, I was no longer working directly with the co-founder. Instead, the marketing team was led by a data analyst. The comments below come directly from that manager.

#### *Summary*

*Rachel is a pleasure to work with – she is a proven executor and can be trusted to complete her tasks with high quality and an attention to detail. She is able to identify and communicate areas where marketing can improve and collaborate. She in encouraged to continue developing her data skills and thinking about the ‘why’ of a given ask or insight.*

#### *Accomplishments*

##### *1. 6x increase in YoY blog page views*

- *a. This reflects both the quality and quantity of Rachel’s work – Rachel is able to quickly turn out new content that is valuable for our sellers.*
- *b. She is able to brainstorm new topics and work with others on the team to determine what to write about next. She moves quickly to launch articles as soon as she identifies good topics.*

##### *2. Top organic ranking for eBay fulfillment terms*

- *a. This is a testament to Rachel’s ability to be a first mover on topics that are scarcely covered by other companies – she does this by leveraging her partnership contacts and by completing sound research. Where needed, Rachel will ask within Deliverr for the right contacts who can guide her to create valuable content that resonates.*
- *b. This also shows that Rachel can effectively use SEO tools to publish content that is relevant for what we already rank for, or hope to rank for in the future.*

**Note**: This referred to an article on eBay fulfillment that **brought in $8,400 worth of signups** (based on first-touch attribution) within Q4. I decided to write the piece after noticing eBay fulfillment was a common attendee concern in live webinars.

##### *3. Publishing 5 blog posts a week in Q4 2020*

- *a. This accomplishment underscores Rachel’s organization skills – when we asked her to ramp up the number of blog posts published each week, she was able to do so because of her diligent planning on the editorial board. She has a strong ability to work backward from each publish date to identify what research needs to be completed, what assets need to be created, and when writing needs to be completed by to allow time for revision.*
- *b. This also shows her ability to manage external contractors who help create content for us – she is able to vet their quality and manage them to complete articles on time*

#### *Areas of growth*

##### *1. Using data more effectively throughout her role*

- *a. Rachel in encouraged to continue learning technical skills to manipulate data – learning simple excel operations will give her the freedom to do some of her own analysis*
- *b. However, what is arguably more important than data manipulation, is thinking about how to derive insights from existing data in graphs, charts and tables. Rachel is encouraged to think more critically about what the data is telling her and what insights she can derive to help guide her work. For instance, if we see session volumes on the blog decrease, Rachel should think in a structured fashion around what the potential drivers of this could be. She should then isolate how she can check whether each driver is at play.*
- *c. Lastly, Rachel should look to reflect data, charts, and graphs more effectively in her content. She should think less about what the raw metric is, but rather what it means and why that is important. For instance, in our category relativity charts, a category might be outperforming how it did last year. Instead of stopping there – Rachel is encouraged to write about why this is and other insight that could be valuable to sellers.*

##### *2. Thinking more critically about the task at hand*

- *a. Rachel is an excellent executer and works quickly to accomplish the tasks assigned to her*
- *b. However she is encouraged to think more critically about the underlying goal of the task and whether or not she is accomplishing the goal when completing the task. For instance, she was asked by Michael to update testimonials on the home page. She added many new testimonials but some of these were not as strong as existing testimonials and diluted the section. In this situation, she should think about why we are adding testimonials in the first place (to make sure they are up to date, and not to add them for the sake of adding them because Michael had asked her to).*

## Beyond Deliverr — Moving back into freelance and expanding my skillsets

By mid-2021, I wanted to get back the “move fast and break things” magic that I had experienced at the very beginning of Deliverr. After leaving, I continued to write blogs for them in a freelance capacity for a few months until they could find another writer. I had also given them a two month notice, along with pre-scheduled articles to keep the blog active for a time. They also asked me back to [run Discoverr a second time](https://rachelandreago.com/deliverr-discoverr-conference-coordination/). It just wasn’t the same with so much more red tape, difficulty getting things approved, and no more autonomy.

Today, I once again work with four clients; two on strictly content and two on strategy and execution. I’m once again learning and growing, which is my top priority for the projects I take on. I’m also in a much better place when it comes to sleep and health, which cannot be decoupled from productivity. There is no way I would have been able to keep going at the full sprint I was at in 2020 and half of 2021.

I’ve taken a [number of courses](https://rachelandreago.com/work/resume/) that dive deeper into product-led growth, customer-led growth, and the [JTBD framework](https://rachelandreago.com/jobs-to-be-done/).

Finally, I am investing more time into my own content and starting to see some nice results.

![](https://rachelandreago.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Copy-of-July-1-2017-to-June-30-2023-GA3-metrics-for-RGO-e1697125568130.png)

**Chart updated July 2023 when GA3 stopped processing and analytics switched to GA4. See original graphic [here](https://rachelandreago.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/RGO-website-progress.png).*

You can see the breakdown of my different acquisition channels below. You might notice I’m still all about that organic acquisition, although I should be investing a little more time into an email newsletter.

![](https://rachelandreago.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/RGO-acquisition-channels.png)

Stay tuned on my blog for more updates and case studies like this, as I tackle new client challenges and “think out loud” on [virtual] paper.

Timeline recap:

- March 2018 – Joined Deliverr as first marketer (10 hours/week, which we quickly blew past)
- April 17, 2018 – Public launch of Deliverr
- October 2018 – Deliverr raises Series A
- January 2019 – Asked to go “full-time” and allocate all retainer slots to Deliverr
- September 2019 – Deliverr raises Series B
- February 2020 – Deliverr raises Series C
- August 2020 – We expand our marketing team (I get some help)
- March 2021 – Deliverr raises Series D
- May 2021 – I leave my role at Deliverr, but stay on to help with content on a limited freelance basis
- August 2021 – Deliverr brings me back to run the 2nd annual Discoverr event

Updates on this story:

- In July 2022, [Shopify acquired Deliverr for $2.1 billion](https://news.shopify.com/shopify-completes-acquisition-of-deliverr-to-expand-fast-and-easy-fulfillment-for-merchants-across-multiple-channels)
- In May 2023, [Flexport acquired Shopify Logistics, including Deliverr](https://www.flexport.com/blog/dave-clarks-note-to-flexport-were-acquiring-shopify-logistics/) for [13% equity and a board seat](https://www.freightwaves.com/news/flexport-acquires-shopifys-fulfillment-business)