Ramp
How Ramp Increased Brand Awareness and Revenue While Generating a Steady Flow of Warm Leads
While Ramp’s demand generation and field and events team is lean, they have a lot else on their plate. So Ramp partnered with Growth Today to expand capacity and go beyond the traditional email-blast approach to promoting events and webinars.
We reviewed their target accounts and contacts, validated the data, and worked to increase email coverage and address accuracy, so we could reach more of the right people, in a better way.
Once that data foundation was solid, we moved it into a data warehouse that keeps the data current and accurate, and layered on a self-learning model, using LLMs, that learns what works and why, so we can double down on the patterns that drive registrations.
We also added custom data points, like which ERP a company uses, the complementary finance tools they use, and keywords and interests we can infer about each contact.
With all of that in place, the event launch process became data-driven and streamlined, a self-learning loop where every cycle improves our understanding on which persona, topic, and data points actually drive registrations, so we know who to target next, with an expert reviewing the reads before they drive a decision.
Impact TL;DR
- 60+ events promoted on a rolling calendar, including an eight-event August masterclass series
- 150 on-brand domains managed with advanced warm-up, placement testing, and daily limit monitoring
- 1 sign-up out of 66 contacted prospects (best conversion ratio )
- A repeatable persona map built from results, showing which titles convert on which topic types to improve conversion of each webinar campaign
- Warm re-engagement of prior engagers signing up for events at roughly 1 in 6 people contacted
- An ERP detection layer that identifies a prospect's actual finance stack, alongside other custom data points, all refreshed and maintained in the data warehouse
Ramp's webinar calendar is so full that you can't keep up with it by doing this manually
Ramp’s demand team promotes events nonstop, in person and online. A single month can include a nonprofit session, a higher-education session with a customer spotlight, a finance webinar for the Canadian market, a monthly product deep dive, and the start of an eight-part AI masterclass. Every one needs its own audience.
First, a new secondary sending domain needs two weeks to warm up before you can send a single invite from it. So you are already two weeks behind before you can promote anything.
Second, the usual drip platforms are built for email blasts and newsletter promotions, which often land in the Promotions or Updates tab instead of the inbox. A mass newsletter feels the same to the reader: you can send one broadcast to a whole cohort, but people rarely feel the event is meant for them, especially now, when everyone’s inbox is flooded with invites from brands they do not know, on topics that have nothing to do with their role, expertise, or goals. So we took a different approach. We wanted each invite to read like a person reaching out, not a broadcast, and to make the value of the session clear up front. That means real inboxes, personalized to the person at scale, kept healthy enough to land at all.
Deliverability is its own problem. Landing in someone’s inbox takes more than a good offer. You have to follow cold-email deliverability best practices and watch the health of every domain and inbox, and Ramp had no way to do that. Marketing platforms give you no levers for it either, because they were never built for a 1:1, personalized invitation like this.
Then there is the overlap. Promote 5 to 15 webinars a month to a similar audience and you will reach the same people again and again. So we set up a data warehouse that does more than store company and contact data. It lets us make sure nobody feels spammed, while still handing each person something genuinely worth their time on every send.
Then there are the LLMs. We put all that context to work: sharpen the targeting, reach a more relevant audience, and make each campaign convert better than the last. Every cycle feeds back what we learned, what worked, which audience converted best and why, and how to make the next one better.
Key challenges were:
- Ramp adds several events a week, each needing its own list of the right finance people, so list building has to keep up with a calendar that never stops
- To keep up with that volume, the domains need constant work: warm up new ones, watch each one’s health, and swap out any that weaken, so you always have more sending capacity ready than you plan to use
- Almost every event goes to the same finance audience, so each repeat invite had to feel relevant and on brand, not spammy, by articulating why the webinar is relevant to them
- Ramp has over 850,000+ active opportunities, current and former customers, and unsubscribes, and every one had to be excluded cleanly on each send, which took accurate, streamlined data wired into the process, not a one-off exported list
Make every launch repeatable, streamlined, and smarter than the last
Instead of treating each event as its own campaign build, we built a system where:
- Have enough sending capacity to support all events instead of scrambling to catch up
- Suppression checks live customer, open-deal, and do-not-contact data real-time
- Optimize the next webinars through data-driven learnings
- People in the same audience get genuinely different messaging each time, not the same invite twice
- Anyone who engaged with Ramp gets re-prospected
- Every result ties back to persona, topic, and segment, so the next event campaign is smarter than the previous one
None of this was going to work without infrastructure Ramp's own security team had signed off on. So we built a big domain and inbox pool from scratch, including:
- Sourced 150 domains whose names passed Ramp’s marketing conventions
- Ran a 14-day warm-up with scheduled inbox placement tests on every inbox
- Ran an advanced deliverability system with N8N and Python cron scripts tagging every domain and its inbox based on their health to use only the best-performing inboxes for sending
- Tracked each inbox and domain's health, their daily limits, and tags on live dashboards
- Tracked each persona, targeting, messaging learning on a live dashboard
Self-learning, with a human in the loop
To make each webinar campaign better over time, every event feeds its persona, topic, and segment results back into the next one, and into a learning model. AI executes brilliantly, but it is only as good as the context we feed it, and here context is everything. So we never let it optimize itself. A senior expert reviews and pressure-tests what the model recommends, so commercial judgment and domain expertise always have the final call over a pure-AI recommendation.
Find what works and double down
What we did: Every event was reported with sends, contacted, replies, and registrations broken down by persona and segment, accumulating enough data to make informed decisions and draw the right conclusions.
What we learned:
- Seniority defined the funnel of the webinar: Senior titles want thought leadership and the big picture; operators want something tactical they can use right away.
- Across all seniorities and interest and company size, people resonate better with events that are run by operators and experts (one of our sessions achieved 1:83 against 2,726 contacted, while less tactical sessions on a similar audience drove fewer results)
- A warm audience was more receptive to product-oriented themes
While these sound like basic marketing fundamentals for us, by pairing all these learnings with a lot of data, you can significantly drive better results. Very specifically:
What the outcome was:
- Data-driven, high-performing webinar roadmap (without the guesswork): the data showed which angles each audience actually wanted and clearly defined a pattern over the time as well as pointed out outlier themes, all of which enabled us to recommend specific topics that are very likely to perform significantly better. Whenever you write a LinkedIn post or webinar, it either resonates or not. By building the social and webinar intelligence, we could not only optimize the campaigns, but directly come up and recommend webinar topics for the team.
- Each campaign is better over the time: Since every launch feeds the learning model, we could easily optimize the targeting, messaging of the next campaigns. The best pairing reached a 1:66 sign-up-to-contact ratio.
Using first-party and re-prospecting previously engaged contacts
What we did: We built a motion that contacts people who engaged with Ramp previously and collects data on their profile and previous interest.
The outcome: 12 of 71 prior engagers registered, roughly 1 in 6, which is an order of magnitude above cold performance. On one event, 15 of 16 total registrations came from this warm re-engagement branch and from out-of-office follow-ups.
If you're running events, re-engaging the people who couldn't make it, didn't have time, or were on leave is a super high-converting and durable event marketing motion.
Using third-party insights for better targeting
What we did: We built a signal layer that identifies different direct and complementary technology insights, including but not limited to which ERP a company uses by using 3rd party signals and reading its own job postings in the US and Canada. If a company is hiring someone to work in NetSuite, QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, Xero, or Dynamics 365, it is useful context for both the targeting and messaging point of view.
The outcome: Contacts who use these tools, are more senior, or show certain signals get prioritized, depending on the upcoming webinar's theme, topic, and our matching logic. With this, compared to general customized matching, we see incremental registrations and improved conversion ratio.
Real-time suppression instead of static lists
What we did: Suppression runs against Ramp's customer, former customer, open opportunity, and do-not-contact data rather than a periodic export.
The outcome: We're always on-brand and we don't hit unwanted contacts or accounts.
The underrated return on a webinar program: a repeatable, forecastable marketing engine
These webinar programs are measured on one thing: how many people register for the event. Nobody is asked to book a demo, and no sales meeting is the call to action.
Our programs produce sales conversations anyway. Replies to the invitations included direct demo requests, trial requests, and specific competitive questions comparing Ramp to named alternatives. Several came from people who had recently implemented a competing platform and wanted a comparison before their next evaluation cycle. Each one was routed straight to Ramp’s sales team while they stayed registered for the upcoming session.
For companies with strong brand recognition, this is one of the most underrated marketing engines you can run, repeatable and forecastable. The emails are cheap to send, yet they give a 1:1 experience most SaaS brands never match with their mass promotions. On top of that, it is one of the best soft-sell ways to reconnect with buyers who were not ready before, and to drive revenue both directly and indirectly, which raises marketing’s impact inside the company.
What the replies look like
Drive more revenue, not just registrations
The outreach reconnects Ramp with buyers, and a meaningful share ask for a demo or pricing. Event promotion that is ignored produces garbage leads. Our programs reconnect prospective buyers with the sales team
GT APP5:02 PMGT APP5:02 PMGT APP5:02 PMRe-engage and expand existing customers
The same campaigns surface current customers who want more, a signal the CS and expansion teams would not otherwise see.
GT APP5:02 PMGT APP5:02 PMGet competitor and product intelligence
Replies reveal what buyers use today and what they wish existed, giving intel for the product marketing team they can act on.
GT APP5:02 PMGT APP5:02 PMConnect and nurture the whole buying committee
Prospects often invite teammates, allowing you to connect and nurture the whole buying committee at no extra cost.
GT APP5:02 PMGT APP5:02 PMWhy Ramp Chose Growth Today
Deep SaaS go-to-market know-how, plus extra bandwidth that is easy to work with
Ramp’s bottleneck was throughput. The demand team could produce more events than any campaign-by-campaign process could keep up with, and the infrastructure work was not something they wanted to own or had the bandwidth to manage. Growth Today covers every part of making a go-to-market program work: deliverability, targeting, messaging, reporting, and the AI expertise to run it all effectively, while keeping the collaboration lean for the sake of rapid progress and results.
Results & Impact
RevOps Impact
- 150 domains under managed warm-up, placement testing, and advanced health monitoring
- Real-time suppression lists without negatively impacting the data integrity or accuracy
- On-brand program without any IT security concerns
Sales Impact
- Demo and trial requests arriving from event invitations, positively impacting the SDRs' output
- Competitive comparison requests surfaced from accounts that recently implemented an alternative
- 1:66 best conversion ratio on the strongest persona and topic pairing
- 1 in 6 conversion on prior engagers
Leadership Impact
- Extra capacity to do more webinars
- Marketing driven and influenced revenue
- Better webinar roadmap
- More webinar registrations from target accounts
The result is a repeatable, forecastable marketing growth engine that increases brand awareness, drives revenue, and gives sales a steady flow of warm leads.
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