How Rippling uses Clay to scale growth experiments and email personalization | Clay.com

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At a glance

"Clay has helped us operate at a level we never thought possible—streamlining processes, boosting engagement, and enabling experimentation like never before”

Company

Rippling is a platform that enables companies to manage their people, spend, and IT all in one place. It has tens of thousands of customers globally.
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Industry

With a growth team of 30 people tasked with expanding business via tactics like personalized email and direct mail, Rippling faced a common challenge. It was hard to find accurate data—without manual work—and even harder to test new growth ideas fast. But their head of growth challenged the team to double their cold email channel, which meant personalizing hundreds of thousands of emails a month.

“Scaling personalization and experimentation while maintaining accuracy was a massive hurdle. We needed a flexible tool that could support both large-scale operations and creative, ad hoc experiments” – Explained Davison Chung, a Growth Lead

By centralizing data enrichment for both email and direct mail, automating repetitive workflows, and allowing the team to test and iterate on the fly, Clay helped everyone on Rippling’s team work faster and more independently.

Impact TL;DR

Clay helped Rippling scale across three core use cases: email personalization and outreach, direct mail enrichment and address validation, and team-wide experimentation. Let’s explore each.

The problem

The solution

Use case

01

Making emails more personal

Outbound email is one of Rippling's most effective channels for driving new business, but personalizing messages at scale posed a significant challenge. While the team had successfully implemented basic email personalization by segmenting customers by persona and company size, they hit a wall when trying to scale further.

"We needed to test different personalizations, get accurate data into Salesforce, and scale the engine that worked," shared Noah Adelstein, Manager of International Growth.

The team turned to Clay to automate and iterate on their personalization system. They began by creating a streamlined data pipeline that would automatically import leads into Clay tables, enrich the data, store results in Snowflake, and push personalized sequences into Outreach.

With this foundation, the team could focus on nailing the right personalization approach for each audience. By segmenting sequences across personas and tailoring content based on enriched data from Clay, they created over 12 targeted variants that significantly improved engagement rates.

"We were able to 2x year over year performance of our cold email channel in 2023 when we had record goals, off the back of Clay personalization," Noah said. “It’s very easy to test new copy and personalization because we can quickly push the copy into our email system.”

“Clay has made it possible for us to maintain the high level of personalization our outbound campaigns demand at a scale we never thought possible. It’s been a game-changer for our team,” said Chung.

Use case

02

Verifying direct mail addresses

Rippling sends thousands of direct mail pieces every month.

Before Clay, inaccurate addresses and incomplete data often compromised the effectiveness of these direct mail campaigns. Their direct mail process relied heavily on a team in India manually finding and validating addresses, then sending CSV files to vendors. This manual approach not only slowed down campaigns but also introduced potential errors that could compromise delivery rates.

Now, Rippling uses Clay as the cornerstone of their address enrichment and verification workflow, helping the team source, enrich, and verify addresses with accuracy.

The team developed a multi-step verification process that combines data from various sources to identify possible office locations. Clay cross-references prospects’ contact information with office locations to decide which offices are the closest commute away.

This workflow has transformed how Rippling manages its direct mail campaigns. By automating address enrichment and verification, the team ensures high levels of accuracy and confidence in their outreach, which is critical when sending thousands of direct mail pieces every month.

"Clay helps us know we're reaching people at the right addresses, This process is essential for running our direct mail program at the scale we need." said Lee Alpert, Growth Lead at Rippling.

Use case

03

Testing new ideas quickly

Clay has become the growth team's go-to tool for trying new ideas quickly. Anyone on the 30-person team can use Clay to test new workflows without needing technical expertise, involving engineering resources, or committing to additional data providers. The team particularly values Clay's ability to quickly test new copy and personalization ideas by seamlessly pushing updates into their email system. This agility has been crucial for rapid experimentation and optimization of their outreach efforts.

By helping the team with rapid experimentation and self-service workflows, Clay has become an essential tool for Rippling’s growth team, fostering a culture of innovation and agility.

"Clay is our first line of defense for quick, hacky experiments. Before we even consider getting a new data provider or involving engineering, we try to self-serve it in Clay where we can test and iterate rapidly,” said Chung.

Clay's impact

Clay’s impact on Rippling’s growth team

Clay changed how Rippling's growth team works in a fundamental way. Before Clay, data access and activation bottlenecks prevented rapid experimentation. Now, instead of waiting for engineering help or spending hours copying data between systems, the team now moves quickly and tries new ideas on their own. The impact shows up not just in faster work and better results, but in how the team approaches new challenges.

Here's what changed:

“With Clay, we’ve unlocked a new level of efficiency and creativity. It’s a tool that grows with us and helps us achieve more with less,” Chung concluded.

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