Totally Chocolate Achieves 40% Open Rate by Building Partner Relationships

From dad jokes and two-pound chocolate bars, to cookies in exchange for social media follows, this chocolate manufacturer’s unconventional marketing is working.

Most of Totally Chocolate Promo’s history has been spent staying quiet in the background of the promotional products world, an industry known widely for company swag. They’ve been making premium custom chocolates for decades but had never actively marketed to the industry’s vast network of distributors. That changed when they hired Kristina Beal in April 2025 as Promotional Product Industry Lead to tap into a market that does $24 billion annually in sales.

Kristina came in and immediately reached for Intuit Mailchimp as her primary tool to execute a complete marketing overhaul. She used the platform to establish an email open rate twice the industry average while simultaneously managing the delicate balance of keeping 2 distinct business divisions—distributors and direct-to-consumer (D2C)—completely separate.

Totally Chocolate's monthly distributor newsletters blend education with personality, providing them resources they can use to grow their own businesses. Trade show follow-ups that once dragged on for days now happen in hours. But getting to this point required solving problems most suppliers never even consider—some that Kristina said could have destroyed the business if handled wrong.

The challenge: One mistake away from ruining relationships

Totally Chocolate's business model can create an unwanted situation that keeps her vigilant about audience management. The company operates 2 completely separate divisions: a D2C direct-to-business side that sells chocolate directly to end customers, and a promotional products side that works exclusively through distributors who represent Totally Chocolate to their own clients.

Mixing those audiences, even once, could harm business.

"Having separate CRMs is not just a good idea, it is a must," Kristina says. "It's mandatory for our business model. We don't ever want to steal business on our direct side from our distributors. They are our business partners, they are our sales force to open up places for our chocolate to go that we would never, on our own, have access to."

If a distributor partner sees a D2C price in an email meant for end buyers, the relationship could be over.

For example, when someone recently called saying they'd received Totally Chocolate as a Christmas gift from a distributor and wanted to order more for themselves, the response was: "We will reach out to your distributor and let them know how much you loved it, so you can place that order."

That trust is critical in the promotional products industry, which Kristina says is relationship-based, with some family businesses going back generations. 

Totally Chocolate had no marketing infrastructure to support those relationships before Kristina arrived, and instead managing everything within Outlook. Email outreach happened manually and without cadence. There was no segmentation, no automation, no way to maintain consistent communication. When Kristina researched solutions, the integration costs to sync their HubSpot CRM data were too high.

Even if they solved the technical challenges, they faced a fundamental marketing problem: distributors are drowning in supplier emails. "A lot of suppliers in the industry inundate, and it becomes white noise, and you put it in your junk folder," Kristina says. "I wanted to disrupt the game there a little bit."

The challenge was particularly steep because food gifting represents only 1.3% of the promotional products industry's business. Distributors often cite risks about products going bad or melting as reasons they don't sell more food gifts. Kristina's goal was to change that perception by educating rather than selling.

"Stop selling and be a partner, especially business-to-business," Kristina says. "If you get rid of the whole mentality of 'my job is to sell you something,' and you're like, 'I'm gonna help you grow, we're gonna be partners in this business together,' I think it just changes everything."

The tools: HubSpot integration, multiple audiences, segmentation, and analytics

Kristina prioritized 2 criteria when looking for Totally Chocolate’s email marketing platform: ease of use and a HubSpot integration. Having experience with Mailchimp in her previous job on the distributor side made the decision easier.

The HubSpot integration solved an $800-per-month cost barrier Kristina had faced with third-party tools. Now, when her team sends contact information from meetings or trade shows, that data flows directly into HubSpot and syncs with Mailchimp. 

The integration creates a force multiplier for Kristina’s workflow. 

"By having Mailchimp as another tool, when I do my show follow-up, it doesn't block them from getting their repeat order sequence or their thank-you sequence that we have them in," she says. "It opens up the opportunity to still have communication with them and not take them out of their other workflows."

Audience insights provide the protection Kristina needs to avoid mixing business divisions. Totally Chocolate maintains completely separate audiences for their D2C customers and promotional product distributors, ensuring that pricing, messaging, and offers never cross over. Within those audiences, she segments by contacts collected by different sales reps or at different events.

Kristina uses the email builder to create monthly newsletters that feel personal rather than promotional. She embeds 30- to 90-second clips where she showcases products and explains their applications. Those videos, which she records in one take, have improved Totally Chocolate’s click-through rate by 55%.

Each newsletter follows a consistent structure: a video feature, a product of the month with educational content about how to sell it, and downloadable flyers that distributors can rebrand with their own logos for their clients. Kristina designs the emails herself using Mailchimp's drag-and-drop interface. 

The newsletters also include what Kristina calls her signature: "I put in dad jokes about chocolate in it, too, which I think just sweetens the deal," Kristina says.

And analytics dashboards give Kristina real-time visibility into what's working. She monitors open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates to continuously refine her approach. When she worried about a 0.31% unsubscribe rate, the data confirmed it was well within healthy benchmarks for her industry.

"Data just helps you be better," Kristina says.

The results: Double engagement in a fraction of the time

Totally Chocolate maintains a 40% average email open rate, doubling the B2B manufacturing industry benchmark of 19-20%. They’ve sustained this performance across months of consistent newsletters.

"It's such an honor for people who want to open it," Kristina says. "We are in an industry that is oddly relationship-based, in a beautiful way."

The high engagement stems from Kristina's partner-first approach. By positioning newsletters as educational resources rather than sales pitches, she's earned a spot in distributors' inboxes that most suppliers never achieve. Distributors know when they open Kristina's email, they'll find tools they can actually use rather than generic promotions.

Totally Chocolate cut trade show follow-up time by 95%, reducing what used to take 3-4 days down to 3-4 hours. Kristina can collect 5,000+ leads in an afternoon at an industry event, and the HubSpot integration allows her to deploy targeted campaigns to those new contacts the same day while Totally Chocolate is fresh on their minds.

“Mailchimp gives me the opportunity to multiply what I can do,” Kristina says. “Without the HubSpot integration, I would never be able to leave my desk.”

The time savings free Kristina to focus on high-value activities, including building relationships at events and creating video content.

Those efficiency gains stack up across her team. With multi-line reps across the US and Canada sending in contacts from their own meetings, the automated sync ensures every lead enters the system without manual data entry. Kristina can then segment and communicate with those contacts without disrupting the sales sequences already running in HubSpot.

Totally Chocolate achieved 10% year-over-year revenue growth in 2025, the first year they've proactively marketed to the promotional products industry. 

"We didn't have anything like this before," Kristina says. "I think it's crucial to our overall business, for sure, and helping us grow."

The growth is significant given the competitive landscape. At a recent international promotional products expo, there were 6,000 supplier booths. Totally Chocolate is competing against items such as hats, keychains, notebooks, thumb drives, Bluetooth speakers, and a near endless variety of  products a distributor might recommend.

"There's not an apples-to-apples comparison," Kristina says. "I think just staying top of mind is so critical, and utilizing both Mailchimp and HubSpot is an opportunity to multiply what I can do."

Kristina's goal for 2026 is to grow the business by another million dollars. She's building on the foundation she established in 2025, continuing to send monthly newsletters while expanding into new channels like social media. 

Her strategy remains consistent: Make it easy for distributors to succeed, and they'll keep coming back.

"The more information I can give them and just be an asset to them, the more they're going to want to come to me for their projects," Kristina says.