About the company
Beck's is the largest family-owned retail seed company and the third-largest seed brand in the U.S. They sell corn and soybean seeds to farmers via direct sale and a network of dealers throughout the Midwest and Mid-South.
- Industry: Manufacturing & Distribution / Agriculture
- Website: beckshybrids.com
- Founded: 1937
- Integrations: Proprietary CRM Eventbrite
Beck’s Hybrids increased customer engagement and reduced unsubscribes with Delivra email & SMS
5x
higher CTR on SMS than email
75%
lower unsub rate
1 hr
est. time saved per email
After nearly 100 years in business, Beck’s family-owned retail seed company provides its hybrid seeds to farmers through their growing network of resale partners throughout the Midwest and midsouth. This fifth-generation family of farmers grew to be the third-largest seed brand in the country by taking a community-led, service-oriented approach based on serving farmers, encouraging referral business, and rewarding repeat customers.
As a leader in manufacturing and distribution, Beck’s understands that their success hinges on cultivating close relationships with their customers and resellers. They use data from their custom-built CRM together with Delivra’s email and SMS marketing to deliver hyper-relevant educational content and timely updates that support the logistics and longevity of their business.
The Challenge
As a previous customer of Delivra, Beck’s marketing team knew what they were missing when an internal directive had them switch to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. After only 3 years, they switched back to Delivra in 2019 when they recognized the expense of Salesforce far outweighed their use of the platform.
“We’d gotten to the point with Salesforce where it was so expensive and we’d always had a good relationship with Delivra, so we came back,” says Kyle Dickover, digital marketing lead.
But it wasn’t just the dollars and cents that brought Beck’s back, it was also the issue of having access to the strategic and technical support they needed
“The biggest thing aside from cost savings was customer support: reaching anyone at Salesforce was always hard—you had to go through seven steps and a help portal to finally talk to someone and if you did get to talk to someone, they weren’t that helpful. With Delivra, if I’ve ever had an issue, it’s been fixed right away.”
Kyle Dickover, Digital Marketing Lead at Beck’s Hybrids
The Solution
Knowing that relationships are the bedrock of their business, Beck’s invests heavily in crafting educational content series targeted at subsegments of their customers, dealers, and prospects.
“We’re big believers that customers are more successful when they’re more engaged with Beck’s. So, the vast majority of our communications are educational content—mostly via email but also via SMS.”
Kyle Dickover, Digital Marketing Lead at Beck’s Hybrids
Those custom campaigns include product updates and instructions, proprietary research studies (Practical Farm Research), and a variety of content that supports farmers and resellers.
To execute this wide range of content marketing and nurture programs, Beck’s takes full advantage of Delivra’s segmentation. “I work closely with the internal team that controls the API to make sure we’re getting the right data input into Delivra” and we use that data to “do a ton of custom list creation.”
Grouping contacts and creating dynamic segments was a big pain point for the team before using Delivra.
“With Salesforce, the lists had to be built in SQL and if you miss a single line of code, it doesn’t work. Deliver is user-friendly and it’s much easier to build out segments and find the people that I need—I just build a few clauses.”
Kyle Dickover, Digital Marketing Lead at Beck’s Hybrids
In addition to newsletter-style content series, Beck’s also hosts a variety of in-person and virtual events. Email does the heavy lifting when it comes to driving registrations but as the day-of approaches, communications switch to SMS text messaging: “In the case of a cancellation or venue changes, we’ll send texts because it’s going to reach them quicker than an email would.”
SMS also supports some of the back-office business logistics such as sending critical product updates and reminders for contracts awaiting signature.
“We know that people check their text messages more than their emails so if it’s important, we send a text. While we don’t get the rich media text messaging with Delivra, 160 characters work just fine for us.”
Kyle Dickover, Digital Marketing Lead at Beck’s Hybrids
The Results
Since returning to Delivra in 2019, Kyle and Beck’s marketing team can access the data they need to create the segments in minutes and make adjustments to their engagement strategies in real-time, instead of learning to write and troubleshoot SQL queries. They’re able to complement their nurture programs with texts to deliver those urgent must-read messages.
In January 2023 Beck’s team launched a new website and re-architected much of their educational content. Looking toward the future, they plan to optimize the site for lead generation with the help of Delivra’s webforms (popups, fly-ins, bars, etc.).
Delivra enables the Beck’s team to serve their communities and build the kind of mutually beneficial relationships with their customers and resellers that have kept the company in business for the better part of a century.
If you’d like to learn more about how Delivra can help you establish real relationships with your customers and subscribers, feel free to chat with us anytime.
