Looking back at 2024: Doubling growth and new milestones in digital sampling innovation

We started Sampl to transform how brands recruit and connect with new customers through digital sampling. Our cutting-edge platform focuses in on high-potential customers, ensuring every sampling campaign delivers results. In 2024, we've taken bold strides to connect brands with the right consumers and the data they need to drive meaningful business growth.

This year, we doubled in size — continuing the momentum we set when we launched in 2020. Meanwhile, we’ve also focused on strengthening our core offerings, building innovative new capabilities, and deepening our partnerships across the industry to support our mission.

Here’s a closer look at how we’ve strengthened Sampl to help brands unlock the full potential of product sampling.

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Expanding the team for enhanced customer support

Building out our account management function has been central to our 2024 priority of continuing to provide brands with top-shelf service.

What began as an initiative 18 months ago has evolved into a robust framework to support our expanding client base. The best part? Each brand continues to get personalised attention as we scale.

Beyond growing our team of account managers, we also welcomed key additions to the leadership team, including:

• Adam Wright, our new Marketing Director, who aims to drive our brand awareness initiatives
• Nigel Richards, our new Finance Director, who plans to strengthen our financial processes and growth metrics

These strategic hires have helped us build more formal processes whilst maintaining the agility and responsiveness our clients value.

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Advancing our platform with AI-powered insights

Our platform has long been praised for providing unprecedented visibility into sampling campaigns. In 2024, we’ve significantly enhanced these capabilities, particularly in AI-driven analytics:

• AI-powered review analysis: This new feature distils large amounts of qualitative feedback into actionable summaries, helping brands quickly understand customer sentiment.
• Advanced metadata analysis: Brands can dive deeper into customer segments and understand how different audiences perceive their products, leading to unexpected insights that might not surface otherwise.
• Media performance analytics: New AI tools analyse images, targeting groups, and CTAs, connecting these elements to campaign outcomes for optimised performance.
• Custom dashboards: Teams can easily share and disseminate information across stakeholder groups without the need for manual reporting.

Overall, these innovations help brands understand the true impact of their sampling campaigns and optimise future efforts based on data-driven insights.

“For years, we’ve received feedback that our platform has been a bit of revelation for brands... when it comes to their campaigns and customer data, they’re not used to getting anywhere near the level of detail and clarity we provide.” ­— Matt Huntly, Co-Founder & CEO

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Strengthening strategic partnerships for expanded consumer reach

2024 saw us forge and deepen several key partnerships that help brands expand their reach:

• Priority from O2: This partnership lets brands reach Virgin Media O2’s customer base through their loyalty program instead of advertising, reducing brands’ reliance on paid ads.
• The Handbook: Our alliance with this luxury publication creates new opportunities for premium beauty and fragrance brands to reach affluent, discerning customers — a demographic that can be hard to target effectively through standard digital adverts.
• THG: Our collaboration with one of Britain’s largest eCommerce groups connects brands with beauty and wellness shoppers across platforms like Lookfantastic and Cult Beauty. Sampling campaigns generate authentic reviews that appear directly on THG’s retail sites, driving conversions for partner brands.

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Highlighting customer success: Mars Petcare

The Sampl platform helps brands across beauty, wellness, pet care, and consumer goods connect with their ideal customers and drive meaningful results.

One standout example from 2024 is our expanding relationship with Mars Petcare across Europe.

By treating pets as the true recipients of samples and personalising campaigns based on pet data, we’ve helped Mars Petcare create engaging, personalised sampling experiences.

Sampl has enabled them to:

• Target specific pet life stages (puppies, kittens, adult pets)
• Customise samples based on breed and species
• Capture valuable pet parent data for long-term marketing engagement
• Drive sustained customer loyalty in a high-lifetime-value category
• Simplify complex targeting logic through our platform’s intelligent automation

The results speak for themselves. Through this personalised approach, Mars Petcare has earned 5,595 reviews with an average 4.43-star rating — and 88% of samplers said their pet loved the product. Most importantly, Mars Petcare earned 17,600 marketing opt-ins, enabling them to build relationships with high-value customers. They are now accelerating this across multiple countries across Europe and beyond.

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Building our vision for 2025: A complete customer acquisition solution

In 2025, we’re expanding our platform’s capabilities to help brands not only distribute samples, but also acquire customers more efficiently across all their marketing channels. Our unique position gives us valuable insights into what drives consumers, from initial ad exposure to purchase and review.

Soon, we’ll be launching new tools that help brands:

• Compare ad performance across multiple platforms
• Connect advertising spend to ongoing customer actions, like purchases
• Understand which creative approaches and messages resonate most with different audiences
• Optimise customer acquisition costs through data-driven insights

This evolution will help brands make smarter decisions about where and how to reach their ideal customers.

“In 2025, we’re betting on something big — transforming Sampl from a sampling platform into a comprehensive customer acquisition and media solution. The idea is simple: help brands acquire more customers in an increasingly cost-effective way.” ­— Matt Huntly