Welcome Monday: Behind the Scenes

For the last several years, many companies have invested less and less in brand campaigns.

Not because brand doesn’t matter — but because it’s harder to quantify. Boards and executives want tangible ROI. Pipeline. Revenue. Metrics that show up cleanly in a dashboard.

As a VP of Marketing, I don’t believe growth is black and white. Performance and brand both have a role to play. And looking ahead, I believe the brand will become even more important — not just for recognition with customers, but for visibility in an increasingly AI-driven discovery world as well.

Why We Tried Something New

Entering Q4, we found ourselves in a rare position: a bit of extra bandwidth. Not accidentally. Rather than defaulting to another traditional year-end promotion, we saw an opportunity to test something new — something we could learn from and potentially carry into 2026.

That’s how Welcome Monday began.

This holiday season, we launched it not as a promotion-first campaign, but as a brand story.

That was new for us.

Like most B2B companies, we’re accustomed to measuring success through immediate outcomes: leads, demos, conversions. Brand campaigns don’t always fit neatly into those boxes. They require patience, consistency, and a willingness to let a message build over time.

The Value of a Brand Campaign

Welcome Monday wasn’t about pushing harder at year-end. It was about reframing how the week — and growth — can feel when marketing is intentional.

Brand campaigns do something different than demand-driven ones. They:

• Create familiarity before someone ever raises their hand
• Reinforce trust through repetition and tone
• Give prospects language for how they want growth to feel

What the Data Told Us

About midway through the campaign, we paused to look at the data — not to declare success or failure, but to learn.

Here’s what we saw:

~10% lift in pipeline generated (to date, which is in line with our other promos)

But what was different:

• +266% increase in LinkedIn followers
• +28,000%+ increase in impressions
• +370%+ increase in reactions
• +400% increase in comments
• +395% increase in reposts

What stands out to some is the ~10% lift in the pipeline. Is that good or bad? The honest answer: we won’t know the full impact until we see the final data at the end of the campaign.

But Welcome Monday was never about chasing a single metric.

It was about telling a cohesive story — one that wove together our point of view, our technology, and the role our content and campaigns play in making marketing feel more manageable.

Email Marketing Data

Now, let’s dive into email marketing data. Across 15 emails segmented by audiences, we saw an average of 26% open rates, several days it was above 36%, the average click through rate was 16.6% unsubscribe rates stayed low and stable, even with frequent sends.

Rather than treating this as a list of metrics, we looked at it the way we would when assessing a long-term go-to-market investment: what performed well, what stood out as unusually strong, what we’d refine, and what it implies for the year ahead.

A 16.6% CTR isn’t a rounding error or a one-off spike. It’s a signal.It tells us the theme resonated, the subject lines earned curiosity, and the content matched advisor intent. This wasn’t discount-driven clicking. It was a genuine engagement. 

Retail advisors showed particularly strong engagement throughout the campaign:

• Open rates ranged from 27% to 36%
• Click-through rates ranged from 11% to 22%

Some of the strongest-performing messages leaned into emotional reframing:

• “We got tired of Sunday scaries. Here’s what we’re doing instead”
• “MonYay Moments: Gifting is FUN”
• “This MonYay, your demo makes a difference”

What this told us was clear: our audience respond when marketing feels human. When it acknowledges how growth actually feels—and offers a sense of relief, control, and support—engagement follows.

Welcome Monday wasn’t really about Mondays. It was about making growth feel more manageable.

Firms: Smaller Lists, High Intent

Firm volumes were smaller, as expected—but intent was high.

This segment consistently showed:

• 33–37% open rates
• 19–24% click-through rates

The same brand framing worked here too, which reinforced an important insight: brand storytelling doesn’t dilute credibility. It earns attention before rational evaluation begins.For this audience, clarity and confidence matter more than louder messaging—and Welcome Monday delivered both.

High-Intent Audiences Behaved Exactly as Expected

SQL and promo-focused sends showed very high engagement, with click-through rates reaching well above 20%. Unsubscribe rates were slightly higher on the most promotional sends, which is both expected and healthy—allowing people to self-select out rather than disengage silently.

Nothing in this data raised red flags. In fact, it reinforced that intent—not volume—is what drives action.

Low, Stable Unsubscribes Told an Important Story

One of the most encouraging signals was what didn’t happen.

Despite multiple touches in a short window, unsubscribe rates stayed low and stable across segments. That told us the cadence was tolerated, the tone felt additive, and the campaign didn’t fatigue the list.

In brand campaigns, this matters more than many people realize. Engagement without churn is a strong indicator of trust.

The Strategic Takeaway

Taken together, this data reinforced a few important beliefs:

• Brand campaigns aren’t “soft.” When done well, they lift engagement quality, create downstream intent, and make performance campaigns more effective.
• Leading with empathy and clarity—rather than urgency—worked. Emotional entry created space for rational evaluation, and that pattern is repeatable.
• And finally, this validated something we believe will only grow in importance: brand matters not just for human recognition, but for AI-driven discovery and recall as well.

Welcome Monday showed us that when we lead with intention, we don’t just drive engagement—we protect our audience, strengthen trust, and create better conditions for growth.

Why This Matters

General promotions create urgency. They convert demand that already exists.
What they don’t do particularly well is build trust.

Welcome Monday did both.

It created momentum and familiarity. It allowed prospects to engage without pressure, understand our perspective, and start conversations earlier — often before they were actively looking to buy.

That trust doesn’t always show up immediately in a report. But it changes the quality of everything that follows — from engagement, to sales conversations, to long-term brand recognition.

Testing Under Constraints

Testing is easy to talk about. It’s much harder to do when resources are constrained. Most teams don’t have unlimited budget, time, or headcount. Every experiment competes with something else that feels safer, more predictable, or easier to justify. In those moments, testing can feel like a risk — or a luxury. What we’ve learned is that constraints actually make testing more important, not less.

They force clarity. They push prioritization. And they help you understand where you can thoughtfully push the boundaries — and where consistency matters more.

Welcome Monday wasn’t a massive, open-ended experiment. It was a focused one. We chose a moment in the calendar where expectations were already shifting, defined clear guardrails, and paid close attention to the signals along the way.

When resources are limited, learning faster becomes a competitive advantage.

What Was Actually New About This Test

We’ve run holiday promotions before.
We’ve used segmentation and nurture programs.
We’ve sent emails with clear calls to action.

What we hadn’t done — at least not in a deliberate, end-to-end way — was weave social, email and assets together into a single, cohesive story.

Welcome Monday wasn’t a set of disconnected messages delivered through different channels. It was one narrative, unfolding over time.

Social set the tone.
Email reinforced the message.
Repetition built familiarity.
And the promotion gave the story a natural moment to convert.

Instead of asking each channel to perform independently, we asked them to work together — carrying the same idea forward across multiple touchpoints. That orchestration was new for us — and it mattered

Staying With It

Bringing a cross-channel story to life wasn’t seamless.

Along the way, we ran into real hurdles — figuring out timing, alignment, ownership, and how each channel should carry the story forward without feeling repetitive or disconnected. There were moments of frustration. That’s natural when you’re doing something new, especially without a pre-existing playbook.

What mattered is that we stayed with it.

We adjusted as we went.
We refined what wasn’t landing.
We kept the core idea intact while improving the execution.

And in doing so, we didn’t just run a campaign — we built a map. A clearer understanding of how to orchestrate social, email, and promotion into a single narrative. A framework we can reuse, refine, and iterate on — rather than starting from scratch next time.

That learning may end up being one of the most valuable outcomes of all.

The Part That’s Easy to Miss

Reading this back, it might sound straightforward.

Come up with a creative idea.
Align it to product strategy.
Package it in a way that delivers value.
Orchestrate it across channels.

In reality, it’s a lot.

It requires creative vision and discipline.
Alignment with product strategy and restraint.
Deep understanding of the audience and market timing.
Intentional decisions about visual design, cadence, and sequencing.
And then the operational work to bring it all together across email, social, and landing pages.

None of that is automatic.

And as I was writing this behind the scenes, I found myself thinking about our clients. Because all of this — the audience research, the market timing, the visuals, the messaging, the coordination across channels — is exactly what Snappy Kraken is designed to do for them.

And yes — if I’m being honest — it made me a little jealous. Because this is hard work. It’s thoughtful work. And when it’s done well, it creates clarity, confidence, and momentum.

Looking Ahead

As Welcome Monday comes to a close, we’re grateful — for the lessons, the collaboration, and everyone who followed along. We’ll take what we learned into the new year, continuing to balance clarity with creativity, and growth with intention.

Thanks for being part of the journey.