Arxan Nails It with Direct Mail

Arxan Technologies provides a suite of high-end application security products for businesses. Many other companies compete in the same space, but San Francisco-based Arxan is unique in that its products work at the code level, where hackers can do the most damage. If they get to the code level, hackers can rewrite parts of the application to reverse-engineer them or cause other harm.

Though Arxan secures applications on more than 500 million mobile and internet-connected devices, its products are highly technical and come at a premium price, which complicates its efforts to move hard-to-reach buyers into the sales funnel, according to Deborah Clark McGinn, Arxan’s vice president of global marketing and communications.

“In reaching our target audience, email has been king, but people are so inundated with emails and spam, it’s tough to break through the clutter,” McGinn says. “We’re competing against hundreds or thousands of other organizations. We are all looking for enterprise-level customers. Think about how many messages they are getting on a daily basis.”

McGinn came to Arxan two years ago with a goal of revamping its marketing strategies, eliminating programs to free up the budget, developing a better way to track the success of marketing efforts, and cleaning up the marketing technology stack.

“We needed to stop wasting money on programs that weren’t producing and do a better job of getting our message out in front of core decision makers,” McGinn says. “We know where we have strong use cases. We needed to penetrate the top enterprises with higher deal sizes and to have higher close rates.”

McGinn encountered PFL and its tactile marketing solution at Salesforce.com’s 2018 Dreamforce user conference, and she was sold.

“I wasn’t looking for them,” McGinn recalls. Yet the message about using unconventional direct mail to get a company’s message through marketing clutter quickly resonated with her.

PFL offers integrated, personalized tactile marketing automation that integrates a physical experience (from a gift to a high-impact dimensional mail piece) to drive higher open rates, a higher recall, and higher conversions.

Arxan started working with PFL in February, and one of its first undertakings was to segment its audience into three groups:

• those who don’t know they have a security problem;
• those who don’t think they have a security problem; and
• those who don’t know how big their security problem is.

After that, Arxan sent physical kits, which included personalized content and customized tactile direct mail, to the different segments via FedEx to grab the target’s attention and clearly deliver its message.

This is more than just sending a water bottle or some other promotional item, McGinn adds.

When Arxan targeted one top financial institution, for example, it used PFL to develop a package that included a special flashlight and a personalized card with an invisible ink message, which could only be read using the flashlight, about the unseen threats the organization could be facing. It sent these packages to the chief information security officer (CISO) and the manager of application security. The CISO was so impressed by the creativity that he had the manager of application security schedule a meeting with Arxan, McGinn says.

McGinn credits the creativity of the PFL messages for a significant boost in Arxan’s success, not only with that one company but also with many others.

Thanks to PFL and other changes the company made in its marketing strategy, Arxan has seen its closure rate of leads grow from 2 percent to 25 percent, and the leads in its pipeline grow from 25 percent to 40 percent, with deal sizes increasing as well, according to McGinn.

The company is looking to further refine and become more creative with its PFL marketing campaigns to new clients and to upsell existing technology to current clients, according to McGinn.

The Payoff

Since implementing PFL's marketing automation suite, Arxan Technologies has seen the following results:

• closure rate of leads grow from 2 percent to 25 percent;
• the leads in its pipeline grow from 25 percent to 40 percent; and
• deal sizes increase.