SendGrid’s Social Media KPIs Take Off With GaggleAMP

Having a strong social media presence is a tough task for small marketing teams, but employee advocacy can help any SMB maximize its potential.

SendGrid, an email marketing firm located in Denver, Colorado, wanted to find a way to boost its social media reach, clicks, and engagement to maximize the potential of its limited marketing resources.

The company made up of 450 employees saw employee advocacy as the best way to do so, but its strategy was not very effective at first. At the time, SendGrid’s marketing team emailed employees requests to share and promote specific posts but didn’t get the results they wanted.

"[Our original process] was not the best process — it was really manual. That's why we went with GaggleAMP. It really takes the manual parts out of the process [of sharing on social media], which lets people get their hours back."

Jesse Sumrak

Social Media Community Coordinator at SendGrid

GaggleAMP allows employees to schedule social media posts, and easily respond to notifications to promote posts. Our employee advocacy tools let them to be part of the program without taking time away from their day-to-day responsibilities.

By The Numbers

It was important that any employee advocacy tool SendGrid used could track all their social media KPIs, including clicks, engagement, and user participation, and boost these numbers across the board. This is another reason why SendGrid adopted GaggleAMP.

"We definitely came in with high expectations. But if you look at how we've scaled it, we definitely exceeded those expectations."

Jesse Sumrak

Social Media Community Coordinator at SendGrid

Sumrak saw a huge boost in SendGrid’s social media metrics after taking the wheel of the company’s employee advocacy program with GaggleAMP. The results are undeniable.

People visited SendGrid content through social media seven times more frequently between January and May of this year compared to the same stretch just one year ago. In that same time period, the company’s total reach tripled, and the number of shares of social media posts is more than six times higher.

"It really was huge how much we've changed in just the past 12 months. Honestly it's been great to see. There's been such a big increase in engagement, which resulted in greater reach, more followers; everything's gone up!"

Jesse Sumrak

Social Media Community Coordinator at SendGrid

Segmented Approach

SendGrid has already seen a tremendous improvement in its employee advocacy program, but it has every reason to aspire for further growth.

The SMB has not yet rolled out GaggleAMP to all of its employees because it compartmentalized its rollout. In fact, the company is still seeing these great results with less than half of its employee population active on GaggleAMP. This is by design.

In order to personalize its employee advocacy program as best he could, Sumrak categorized SendGrid’s employees by department. He trained each group differently so they could be active on social media, promote content and engage influencers all in ways that are specific to their area of expertise.

For example, SendGrid’s Human Resources focuses on talent pool development, sharing and promoting content each week on career tips, hiring positions, company culture, and more. This of course is different from the type of content the developers or sales team would share and promote.  

In addition to group trainings, Sumrak offers one-on-one training to employees who need it and those who haven’t been active for a long period of time. He also plans to include a 10-to-15 minute training session for new employees as part of the company’s onboarding process and wants to offer department-specific group training sessions to more departments at SendGrid this year.  

Introducing Gamification

In order to keep employees motivated in the employee advocacy program, Sumrak opted to implement the gamification aspect of GaggleAMP.

With GaggleAMP, SendGrid can see which employees are the most active in the employee advocacy program by assigning points to each action they take. SendGrid offers quarterly prizes, such as company-branded backpacks and other company merchandise, to specific point totals that anyone in the employee advocacy program can reach. There is no limit to the number of people who can win.

As part of the gamification process, Sumrak will occasionally email employees individually to let them know how close they are to winning a prize. This is in addition to a monthly company-wide email of a leaderboard that recognizes employees who are the most active.

The gamification aspect has helped get employees to volunteer to be part of the employee advocacy program, Sumrak said.

"I've been really happy with GaggleAMP. Just from talking with people who use other solutions, I've found that GaggleAMP has featured and offers simplicity that [others] don't."

Jesse Sumrak

Social Media Community Coordinator at SendGrid

SendGrid’s employee advocacy program took off after taking a personalized approach with GaggleAMP. Watch the quick video learn more about how GaggleAMP can help your company, or request a demo.