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

DoorDash 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.

But despite Drive’s value, it had remained largely under-promoted and had never been the focus of email marketing. Our team was tasked with launching its first-ever nurture series with four key objectives:

1. Increase brand awareness for this valuable product in need of visibility

2. Engage relevant prospects and spark meaningful conversations

3. Drive sales and revenue

4. Establish groundwork for future outreach

The Critical 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 engaging with sales—and emails contain links to pages that help them do this

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

• Drive as a product had significant growth potential but lacked visibility in the market

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. Years of poor database maintenance had left us with hundreds of thousands of uncleaned, unvalidated records from disparate sources.

This presented multiple challenges:

• How could we segment U.S.-based merchants in delivery-friendly industries?

• How could we identify businesses interested in Drive but not actively engaged with sales?

• How could we distinguish between merchants, customers, and dashers in a three-sided marketplace?

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 (just 0.1% of one percent) would trigger automatic warnings to our account manager. Such warnings could lead to platform-wide restrictions on our email marketing abilities, potentially crippling unrelated email programs for other products that were consistently generating 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.

Questioning our demographic data, we developed a comprehensive four-part strategy that leveraged existing behavioral signals and engagement patterns to identify our ideal prospects with surgical precision. Our approach combined content mapping, automation techniques, targeted filtering, and strategic messaging to overcome what initially seemed like the insurmountable challenge of the data void.

• We catalogued all Drive-related content.

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

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

  • Leveraged existing HubSpot tracking data that had been silently collecting site visit information for years

• We automated behavioral filtering.

  • Created custom HubSpot workflows to identify contacts with Drive-related values in web fields

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

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

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

• We added critical data layers.

  • Filtered for B2B users (i.e., merchants—not hungry customers and not moped-ready dashers)

  • Prioritized recent engagers (last 30 days), with bonus points for high frequency of engagement during that timeframe

  • Prioritized bottom-funnel prospects showing conversion readiness

• 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.

  • Partnered with the Product team to ensure technical accuracy and with Brand to develop storytelling that maintained DoorDash’s voice

  • Consulted the Sales team to identify which value propositions consistently resonated with merchants

  • Synthesized these insights to emphasize core benefits that would be relevant across verticals:

    • No delivery driver training required

    • No vehicle purchases, insurance, or repairs

    • No fleet management or tracking necessary

  • Reinforced with success stories, limited-time offers, and preemptive answers to common questions

Using these insights and data points, we programmed an email campaign that delivered at merchant-optimized send days and times when business owners were most likely to be open to receiving new information. We tailored copy and visuals based on engagement temperature—with warmer leads receiving more direct calls-to-action and cooler prospects receiving educational content.

The campaign also used a progressive engagement framework: increased interaction triggered additional touchpoints, creating a virtuous cycle where the more a prospect engaged, the more opportunities they received to further deepen their relationship with DoorDash.

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 app and can be purchased from by local customers:

Wingstop

• The third-fastest-growing American restaurant chain

• Enterprise-level national account

Nectarine Grove

• Small, organic bakehouse in California

• Proof of concept for smaller merchant prospects

Outstanding Email Performance

Our campaign exceeded both industry and internal benchmarks:

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

• Spam report rate of 0.179% – While slightly above HubSpot’s strict 0.1% threshold, this figure represented just 90 reports out of ~50k emails sent to recipients we had never, sporadically or poorly contacted in the past, indicating, actually, pretty reasonable list health (and likely signaling the database was overdue for pruning)

These 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 team:

• Developed additional targeted campaigns for this cohort: We created three subsequent nurture series tailored to specific industry verticals (restaurants, florists, and wineries) that shared similar delivery challenges but would benefit from more 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 data weakness into a 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, and built nurture paths that would fast track high-intent prospects.

• Generated opportunities for more conversions and valuable upsell opportunities: Our targeted 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.

Through collaborative effort and technical ingenuity, our team transformed what could have been a setback into a big win for both DoorDash and the small businesses we served. By overcoming the data void with behavioral analytics and cross-functional cooperation, we successfully introduced Drive to merchants who genuinely needed it—planting the first flag in email as an organic, sustainable channel in our overall marketing engine.

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

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