Pushpay increases Annualized Committed Monthly Revenue by over 150% in FY17 supported by scaling digital marketing with Marketo Engagement Platform and doubling leads in the funnel
Challenges
Pushpay offers community leaders a complete giving and engagement solution that enables members to stay connected to their communities not just when members are physically present, but every day of the week. This connectedness encourages people to stay engaged with their communities and contribute more of their time and money to support the causes that they hold near to their hearts.
According to Sean Reiter, SVP of Marketing at Pushpay, more and more people want to connect to their church communities via mobile. Pushpay is helping community leaders take advantage of that trend.
Objectives
- Increase the number of prospects in the funnel and accelerate the buyer journey
- Demonstrate thought leadership with content that empowers faith-based organizations to increase giving and engagement with members
- Scale digital marketing efforts to keep up with extremely rapid growth
Pushpay is the fastest-growing company in New Zealand, the 10th fastest-growing company in Australia, and one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in the world. Sean and his team attribute much of that success to their digital marketing strategy, which focuses on engaging church leaders with premium content that educates them on the value of driving users to mobile for giving and community engagement.
Marketo is the foundation for digital marketing efforts at Pushpay. The marketing team leverages the Marketo Engagement Platform to listen to church leaders, understand the challenges they face, and engage with them at scale. An essential ingredient is powerful content—blog posts, webinars, ebooks, guides, checklists, and other items— that educates prospects on the value of going mobile to reach not only millennials but also Gen-X and Baby Boomers.
Solution
A Strategy for Success
Two years ago, Pushpay’s digital marketing consisted of a simple email workflow welcoming prospects who opted into email. To maintain the company’s targets for growth, the marketing team needed to increase the number of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) in the funnel and nurture them to accelerate their progress through the buyer journey. To that end, the team mapped out an aggressive strategy that encompasses:
- Listening to potential buyers to understand who they are and what issues concern them the most.
- Identifying personas for community leadership roles and providing tailored content for each persona.
- Creating a community growth resource library with content in multiple formats customized for each persona.
- Implementing a digital automation platform that runs complex automated campaigns and scales to support the company’s rapid growth.
Marketo is foundational to that strategy. Pushpay marketers use Marketo forms to capture leads and to create persona-based nurture campaigns that run automatically.
"Our market is challenging because pain points for churches and nonprofits aren’t clearly defined in the minds of most community leaders. When we first got started, we realized church leaders, for example, weren’t out there searching for what we have to offer. So we literally had to create a giant list of prospects and use marketing automation to educate them on how to use technology and, really, inbound strategies, to connect and engage their members. The quality and value of our content motivates people in our market to fill out a fairly lengthy web form that tells us who they are and what they need. We score prospects as they move through our nurture stream and engage with our content. We then use lead scoring to help prioritize leads for our sales team,” says Beka Johnson, Director of Inbound Marketing at Pushpay.”
Benefits
The Strategy Pays Off
In the last year alone, the number of MQLs in the marketing database has more than doubled, reaching 120,000+, and the number of customers has more than doubled. The key to that astounding growth is Pushpay’s ability to make a personal connection with church leaders and keep the conversation going by providing them with practical resources for healthy and sustainable church growth and engagement.
And according to Reiter, “Our marketing strategy helps position Pushpay as the thought leader in the donor and community engagement space and sets us apart from the competition by communicating our ability to deliver an enterprise-class solution that offers security, reliability, and scalability. It is enabling us to get more leads into the funnel, score them as they move through the buyer journey, and prioritize the most promising leads for sales. The strategy is delivering amazing results. With more qualified leads, the sales team has been able to close a substantial amount of new business. In the last year we grew our customer base from 3,000 to 7,000, and during our last fiscal year, we grew Annualized Committed Monthly Revenue (ACMR) to over 150% of the previous year.”