GoSite increases merchant sales by 42% with personalized lifecycle marketing emails

Results

• 42% increase in merchant gross processing volume

The Challenge

The GoSite growth team's core focus at the time was increasing adoption of their payment tools. As a financial product, success for GoSite means success for the businesses they serve. Understanding the financial health data of a business, such as their gross bookings per month, is crucial for GoSite to be able to proactively identify and address issues for them.

GoSite's growth team understood the value of this financial data: they even had complex financial models for the financial health of a business in their warehouse. They wanted to create a lifecycle marketing campaign to notify businesses about key financial events, such as payment declines as well as account approvals. However, they couldn't easily notify businesses because their financial event data was not available in their marketing tool, HubSpot.

The team wanted to send their data-driven campaigns through HubSpot in order to maintain a consistent brand and experience for their customers, since all of their existing lifecycle marketing and post-sales emails were already sent through HubSpot (compared to the transactional emails from Sendgrid that their engineering team uses). Also, since many of GoSite's SMB customers are mobile-first, they needed to leverage HubSpot's SMS integrations.

Previously, the team tried multiple ways to get their customers' financial event data into HubSpot, with little success:

• GoSite's billing specialist would spend 20 hours a week manually adding a CSV export of customer financial transaction data into HubSpot. Given how time consuming this was, the upload could only happen once a week. This meant that most of the data was already outdated, as new payments happen multiple times every day.
• They tried using iPaas Solutions like Zapier, but it only allowed raw event data to be sent to HubSpot, whereas they needed to combine multiple events and fields from their financial data. For example, they needed to combine revenue across multiple locations of a single business into a single field, but Zapier did not allow for that flexibility.

The Solution: Sending timely financial updates to merchants

The Growth team used Hightouch to sync key financial event data from their warehouse to HubSpot such as:

• Financial models to determine which businesses are at-risk or affected by seasonality (for example, landscaping businesses in the winter)
• Events from their payment processor, such as declined credit card payments
• Product activity to help determine which of GoSite's thousands of customers are still active

Given the need to address financial events in a timely manner, these syncs were scheduled to run multiple times every hour. With that fresh data in hand, the team launched a series of lifecycle marketing campaigns, such as:

• Automated Customer Success outreach out to customers with declined payments to encourage them to update their credit card on file
• Sending consistent updates to businesses on their application status towards new financial products to increase merchant onboarding conversion
• Targeted emails with financial tips for businesses that GoSite's financial models deemed at-risk to increase financial product adoption

Result: Increased merchant adoption of financial products

These combined efforts increased awareness of GoSite's financial products and led to a 42% increase in merchant gross processing volume (which is how much money GoSite's customers process through their financial tools).