Data Holes & ‘Drive’ Goals

Marketing a product without reliable customer data is a unique challenge that demands creative problem-solving. This case study explores how our team at DoorDash navigated massive data roadblocks to launch the first-ever email marketing campaign for Drive, an established yet under-marketed solution for small businesses.

By turning behavioral signals into actionable insights and tapping into cross-functional expertise, we came up with a resourceful strategy that not only overcame the immediate data limitations but also created a foundation for sustained programmatic success.

The Challenge

A Hidden Gem In Need Of Strategic Promotion

Small businesses face significant challenges when it comes to managing their own deliveries to local customers:

• Costly hiring and training of delivery personnel

• Vehicle maintenance expenses

• Reputational damage from delivery failures

Drive (later rebranded to Drive On-Demand) had been solving these problems for six years by offering merchants access to DoorDash’s delivery network without the overhead of managing their own fleets. The product was a success: For thousands of small eateries and shops across the country, Drive was the reason local customers could be delivered to.

But despite the proven value of Drive in the market, it had never been the focus of a devoted campaign. Leadership hoped to break this cycle: What heights could the product reach if it were more strategically promoted? Our team was tasked, therefore, with launching the first-ever nurture series for Drive, a campaign with four key objectives:

1. Increase brand awareness for this product, which was valuable but needed more visibility

2. Engage relevant prospects and spark meaningful conversations with them

3. Drive revenue

4. Establish the groundwork for future outreach to the core Drive audience

The Need for Email Marketing

A dedicated email marketing campaign was essential for several reasons:

• Email offers the highest ROI of any marketing channel, averaging $36 for every $1 spent

• Competitors were actively targeting the same merchant base with solutions similar to Drive

• Small business owners often research independently before contacting an organization’s Sales team—and an email can link out to an asset or landing page that enables and incentivizes them to do this

• Email enables brands to educate merchants about complex offerings in a direct and straightforward way

• Drive as a product was already ‘successful’ but it still had massive growth potential—if an organic, owned channel (email) could platform its first campaign, then this potential could be investigated in a relatively low-cost and straightforward way

The Data Void

We faced a critical obstacle, however: Within our database of millions of prospects and clients, the data needed for targeting was unreliable or missing entirely. A half-decade of poor database maintenance (which predated the tenure of current team members) had left us with hundreds of thousands of uncleaned, unvalidated user records from disparate sources.

This presented multiple challenges:

• How could we ensure we were speaking only to merchants—not to the delivery drivers or customers who also comprised our three-sided marketplace?

• How could we ensure we were speaking only to merchants based in the U.S., the only country where Drive was available?

• How could we ensure we were speaking only to U.S.-based merchants who worked in industries we serviced? (For example, we could deliver for florists, restaurants and wineries, but bookshops, home improvement retailers and department stores were not yet supported.)

• How could we identify businesses interested in Drive but not actively engaged with Sales—so we could avoid communicating with users who were already close to converting with account executives?

Targeting the wrong audience risked serious consequences: increased spam reports, unsubscribes, damaged email performance metrics, and potential issues with our HubSpot account. HubSpot’s spam report threshold is extremely sensitive—even a rate of 1 in 1000 (0.1% of one percent) would trigger an automatic warning to our account manager.

Enough warnings and all of our email marketing through HubSpot would become restricted, which would impact unrelated email programs for other products that consistently generated leads and pipeline.

The Solution

Behavioral Data Mining: Reinventing Audience Targeting

With traditional segmentation impossible, we pivoted to an untapped resource: behavioral data from HubSpot’s tracking code, which captures analytics and visitor data for all the website pages it’s installed on. Fortunately for us, while the database we’d inherited was chaotic, our predecessors had indeed installed the HubSpot tracking code all over our web properties.

Our team thus built a four-part strategy that leveraged existing behavioral signals and engagement patterns to identify our ideal prospects: those U.S.-based merchants in industries we could deliver for, who were currently unengaged with the Sales team. To overcome the data void, we used an approach that combined content mapping, automation techniques, targeted filtering, and strategic messaging:

• We catalogued all Drive-related content by…

  • Conducting an audit to identify every Drive landing page, case study, blog article, e-book and webinar;

  • Creating a content taxonomy to categorize different levels of purchase intent based on content type;

  • Leveraging existing HubSpot tracking data that had been quietly collecting site visit information for years

• We automated behavioral filtering by…

  • Creating custom HubSpot workflows to identify contacts who had Drive-related values in certain data fields;

  • Focusing especially on “First Page Seen” and “Last Page Seen” indicators as primary engagement signals;

  • Developing secondary engagement scoring based on time spent on page and scroll depth metrics;

  • Treating even a single visit to Drive content as significant engagement because of the product’s niche audience

• We added critical data layers by…

  • Filtering for B2B users (i.e., business owners who wanted the Drive product—not hungry customers who wanted food driven to them, and not moped-ready dashers ready to drive food to customers);

  • Prioritizing recent engagers (people who had engaged with a Drive-related web property in the last 30 days), with bonus points for high frequency of engagement during that timeframe;

  • Prioritizing prospects at the bottom of the funnel—i.e., those theoretically readiest and closest to conversion

• We worked with cross-functional stakeholders to create universally appealing messaging—so that even the occasional (if not expected) mistarget with our brand-new solution would be OK. We did this by…

  • Partnering with the Product team to ensure technical accuracy;

  • Partnering with Brand to develop storytelling that maintained DoorDash’s well-known tone of voice;

  • Consulting account executives within the Sales organization to learn which value props resonated with merchants;

  • Social-proofing the campaign with success stories and preemptive answers to common questions

Emboldened by this methodology, we went to market with a campaign we felt was indeed communicating mainly with our desired audience: American, Drive-ready prospect merchants. We programmed our automations to deliver emails at the best days and times for business owners—that is, when they were most likely to be open to receiving new information (which literature showed was often weekends, early in the morning or late in the evening.) Further, we tailored copy and visuals based on ‘engagement temperature’: Warmer leads received more direct calls-to-action, while cooler prospects received more educational content.

In addition, our workflows used a progressive engagement framework: The more someone engaged, the more chances they would be given to engage further. Some emails, for example, would only trigger if a recipient had interacted with the email directly preceding it, which we took to indicate an interest in a certain aspect of Drive that it would be fair to communicate with the person about even more. Our campaign setup could also be called a virtuous cycle, as it created “chains of events that reinforce[d] themselves through a continuous feedback loop, resulting in favorable outcomes” (Zweig).

The Results

Immediate Business Impact

Within just one month, our inaugural Drive nurture secured two new partnerships whose virtual storefronts now appear on the mobile DoorDash app and can be purchased from by local customers:

1. Wingstop, the third-fastest growing restaurant chain in the U.S.—a massive win for our team, given it’s achieved strong financial growth and brand recognition due to a recent increase in ad spend and internet virality

2. Nectarine Grove, a local organic café and bakery in southern California—which provided great social proof for the vast majority of merchants in our database who owned smaller, non-franchised operations

Outstanding Email Performance

Our campaign exceeded both industry and internal benchmarks for email marketing performance:

These results validated our approach across multiple performance indicators:

• Open rate of 31.8% (nearly double our internal benchmark of 16.5%)

  • Demonstrated strong initial interest in our messaging

• Click-to-open rate of 8.3% (168% higher than our internal benchmark of 3.1%)

  • Showed the content resonated with recipients and drove action

• Read rate of 68.9% (115% higher than the global benchmark of 32%)

  • Confirmed we had reached an engaged and interested audience

• Unsubscribe rate of 0.09% (82% better than the industry standard of 0.5%)

  • Proved we had targeted the right segment with our tracking code-based solution

• Spam report rate of 0.179% (79% worse than benchmark)

  • While above HubSpot’s strict 0.1% threshold, this figure represented just 90 reports out of ~50k emails sent to recipients we had never or sporadically contacted in the past—mostly confirming, as we knew, the database was overdue for maintenance

Overall, the resultant metrics told a cool story: Not only had we successfully navigated the data void to reach qualified prospects, but also we had done so with minimal negative impact while driving real engagement.

Looking Forward

This campaign built a foundation for ongoing relationship-building with a previously untapped audience segment. Following its success, our (small but mighty) marketing team:

• Developed additional targeted campaigns for this cohort: We built three subsequent nurture series specifically for merchants in the restaurant, florist and winery industries—understanding they shared delivery challenges but would also hugely benefit from tailored, nuanced messaging.

• Used each initiative to improve data hygiene: Each subsequent campaign incorporated progressive profiling techniques that gradually enriched our contact database with verified information, turning our initial weakness (the data void), over time, into a sustainable, long-term strength.

• Built increasingly refined audience profiles: We analyzed click patterns and content consumption to learn even more about the Drive merchant segment. One learning, for example: Established businesses with 5+ locations prioritized integration ease, while growing merchants (2-4 locations) focused on scaling without hiring. With this intelligence like this, we worked ‘growth stage’ into our segmentation, further improving our targeting.

• Generated opportunities for more conversions and valuable upsell opportunities: Our approach resulted in a 32% increase in qualified Drive leads passed to sales—and those leads had a 19% higher conversion rate compared to non-Drive products.

The Bottom Line

Through collaborative effort and technological creativity, our team transformed what could have been a setback into a big win for both DoorDash and the businesses it served. Overcoming the data void with behavioral analysis and cross-functional teamwork, we successfully introduced Drive to merchants who needed it—planting our first flag in email as a long-term driver of engagement and revenue.

Importantly, our work also made it easier for growing businesses to learn more about a product that let them provide their local communities with enterprise-quality delivery of goods: a socioeconomic value-add that, of course, extended well beyond the marketing metrics.