Eating our own Dog Food

We used BuiltWith Pro (our own tool) to find people who signed up for our service that were customers of HubSpot - then reach out to them in a meaningful way and introduce to them the HubSpot Sync functionality we recently added to BuiltWith.

We thought this would be a great way to use our own product in a way that customers also can. It's called Eating Your Own Dog Food - a term apparently thought up by Microsoft in the 1980's.

Eating our own dog food was super successful! Attribution: WiredWitch

By targeting users with an email that was relevant to them we achieved a 52.5% open rate and a 12.8% click rate on the emails we sent out, this is much higher than the industry average statistics as compiled by MailChimp and also much higher than our typical email blasts -

Comparison of our Dog Food mail campaign to our other email campaigns.

How did we do this?

First of all we created a Pro account on BuiltWith. We then created a list of all of the unique domain names for everyone who has ever signed up for BuiltWith (by using the domain part of the email) - we removed the gmail, hotmail, yahoo addresses and just used the people with proper company domain name emails. We upload this list to BuiltWith (kb guide) then downloaded the portion of the domains that used HubSpot then reached out to them with an email that was on fleek for them because it was actually relevant (they use HubSpot and we'd built a cool HubSpot feature) and potentially beneficial to what they are doing as a company. The individual steps are below -
Step 1 - Upload a list of domains of your customer / free signup users from the domain part of their email (here's how to do that in Excel) or their website address if you store that
Show the List Upload Options

Select List Upload from the Create New Report Screen
Step 2 - From the 'Tech' tab of the report we search for Hubspot in the 'Technology Filter' box
Hubspot Search

Step 3 - We created a new report from the sub-section of Email Domains and sites that were all currently using Hubspot.
Step 4 - We then exported that list and used Excel VLOOKUP function to create a list of emails that matched from our original list and put that into our email Campaign Management tool
step5

Step 5 - We then sent out a very simple and to the point email -

We've just released BuiltWith integration with HubSpot and as your company uses HubSpot we'd thought we'd eat our own dog food by using BuiltWith to find that out and reach out to you as someone with a BuiltWith account!
If you're interested in the BuiltWith HubSpot integration checkout this blog post with instructions on how to integrate HubSpot and BuiltWith.

The open and click through rate where really high and the response rate in terms of replying to an automated email is higher than I'd ever expected it to be -

Manual non-OOO replies

Conclusion

This validates the use of BuiltWith and especially the report filtering capabilities to create a list of relevant websites, the more filters you have the more relevant information you can put into reaching out to potential new customers for yourself. Checkout some our other report filtering capabilities for more information.

Eating our own Dog Food

How did we do this?

Conclusion

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