Payment Pulse – Ep. 50

Learn why great payments programs need more than launch emails, and how SaaS companies can build marketing strategies that support merchant adoption.

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Episode Transcript

Shannon: Welcome to Payment Pulse. Michelle, this is a big one! We’ve made it to episode 50!

Michelle: 50 episodes, we’re golden!

Shannon: Yeah, which apparently means we needed giant balloons, right?

Michelle: Of course. Why not?

Shannon: Yeah, ’cause nothing says “payments expertise” like giant number balloons behind us

Michelle: I mean, I think they make us look more credible.

Shannon: Yeah, definitely. Um, but yeah, seriously, like getting to 50 episodes, that’s pretty exciting stuff, you know? We’ve had some great conversations about embedded payments, SaaS, technology, growth, AI, and where the industry is headed.

Michelle: We’ve learned a lot along the way.

Shannon: Yeah, we really have. So for episode 50, we wanted to talk about something that’s a big part of both of our worlds.

Michelle: Marketing!

Shannon: Yeah, so more specifically, how you actually market embedded payments. Because here’s a scenario we’ve seen plenty of times. A SaaS company builds a payments offering, they launch it, they send some emails, maybe put it on their website or give their team some sales materials, and then a few months later, somebody looks at the numbers and says…

Michelle: “Why aren’t more merchants using this?”

Shannon: Yeah, exactly. And then somebody calls marketing…

Michelle: “Hey, can we send another email?”

Shannon: Yeah. It’s always send another email, right?

Michelle: Yeah. And hey, we love a good email.

Shannon: Yeah, we really do. But another email may not be the answer because the real question isn’t, “How do we promote payments?” It’s, “why would our merchants choose our payments offering?”

Michelle: And if you can’t answer that, you’re probably not ready to build another campaign.

Shannon: Yeah. So let’s start there. Michelle, why should a marketer think differently about payments versus marketing another feature in a SaaS platform?

Michelle: Great question. It’s because you’re usually asking the merchant to do more than just turn on a feature. They may already have a payments provider and equipment in place. They probably have processes built around it. Their staff knows how it works. So you’re asking them to change something that’s pretty fundamental to their business.

Shannon: And it’s something that involves their money, right?

Michelle: Exactly. There’s a lot of trust involved.

Shannon: Yeah. So I think that’s really important because internally, the SaaS platform may be incredibly excited about the addition of payments to their platform. It’s a new revenue opportunity. It can make the platform more valuable. And there are all kinds of strategic reasons for the SaaS company to care about.

But those aren’t necessarily the reasons that the merchant cares about.

Michelle: For sure. I mean, all merchants really wanna know is, “Hey, what’s in it for me?”

Shannon: Right? WIIFM. Yeah. So, they wanna know, is this easier than what I’m doing now? Is it worth switching? Is switching going to be a pain? And then of course, what happens if something goes wrong?

Michelle: And most likely, what’s this gonna cost me?

Shannon: Yeah, absolutely. Because of course price matters, but I think marketers have to be careful about letting the whole conversation become about price.

Michelle: Yeah, because then it’s a race to the bottom when you’re competing on price.

Shannon: Exactly. And somebody can always come along with a lower number, you know, so the real value may be bigger than that. Maybe it’s easier reconciliation, better workflows, fewer systems, better reporting, better support, or a better experience for their customers

Michelle: And it’s our job to figure out which of those things actually matter to the merchant.

Shannon: Yeah, and I think that’s where marketing can add a lot of value because there’s a big difference between describing a feature and giving someone a reason to buy.

Michelle: For sure.

Shannon: Yeah. So take something simple like: you can accept payments directly through your SaaS platform. That’s a feature.

Michelle: Right.

Shannon: But what does it actually change for the merchant?

Michelle: Maybe they’re not jumping between different systems anymore.

Shannon: And what does that mean?

Michelle: Well, maybe they’re spending less time reconciling payments, their staff has fewer manual steps, and everything is easier to track.

Shannon: Yeah. So exactly, because that’s the story. So payments are integrated, so there’s fewer disconnected systems, which means less time managing payments and then more time running the business.

Michelle: That’s much stronger than, “Hey, we now offer payments.”

Shannon: Right. Because merchants don’t choose embedded payments because they’re excited that the payments are embedded.

Michelle: Yeah, that’s probably not on anyone’s vision board, if we’re gonna be honest!

Shannon: Yeah, probably not. You know, they choose it because something gets better for them.

Michelle: And I think that’s where marketers have to push themselves and keep asking, “So what?”

Shannon: Yes. So it’s fully integrated. So what?

Michelle: You can manage everything in one place. Okay, so what does that change for me?

Shannon: Yeah. And then the key is to keep going until you get to something that the merchant actually cares about, and that’s where your message is.

So we figured out the value proposition, then somebody says, “Great, let’s send it to our customers.”

Michelle: And that’s when I start asking more questions!

Shannon: Yeah, because “our customers” isn’t really a marketing segment.

Michelle: Especially with payments.

Shannon: Yeah. So let’s say that 20% of a SaaS company’s existing customers are already using its payments offering. That means the other 80% aren’t. So it’s easy to look at that 80% and call them non-adopters.

Michelle: But there could be completely different audiences inside that group.

Shannon: Yeah, so some of those people may have never heard about the payments offering.

Michelle: Some may have talked to sales and already said no.

Shannon: And some may have shown interest but never actually taken the step.

Michelle: And some may have started enrollment and stopped.

Shannon: And some may be perfectly happy with their current provider.

Michelle: These are all different audiences.

Shannon: Exactly, and they shouldn’t all get the same message. I also wouldn’t assume we should put the same amount of effort against everyone in that group.

Michelle: Right. Where’s the biggest opportunity?

Shannon: Yeah, so we should look at things like who has shown interest, who is a strong use case, who could benefit most from the integration, and where do we have the best chance of changing behavior?

Michelle: So we’re not just segmenting, we’re prioritizing.

Shannon: And that makes marketing and sales a lot more focused as well. So there’s another segmentation decision that I think deserves its own conversation: new customers versus the existing customer base.

Michelle: I agree. They are two separate groups with different needs and priorities.

Shannon: And if I’m signing up for a SaaS platform today and payments is built into that experience, there’s a natural opportunity to introduce it.

Michelle: Yeah, I’m already changing how I run part of my business. I’m learning a new system. I’m going through onboarding.

Shannon: So payments can be part of that conversation from the very beginning.

Michelle: Exactly.

Shannon: But now let’s say I’ve been using your SaaS platform for three years. I’ve also been using the same payments provider for three years.

Michelle: Now you’re asking me to change something.

Shannon: And that’s harder. Even if there are real benefits to switching, there’s still inertia.

Michelle: Because switching is work.

Shannon: Yeah, and that’s the part that I think we sometimes underestimate. “What I have works”: it’s really a pretty powerful competitor when you think about it.

Michelle: Yeah, absolutely. You know, maybe the merchant isn’t thrilled with their current provider, but they know how it works, their staff knows how it works, and they know what to expect.

Shannon: Yeah. So we’re not just competing with another payments company, we’re competing with the comfort of doing nothing.

Michelle: Which means the value of changing has to be greater than the effort or risk of changing.

Shannon: Exactly. And I think that changes the marketing really. So with a new customer, the message might be about starting with everything connected from day one, but with an existing customer, we may need to answer a different set of questions.

Michelle: Right. Questions like, why should I change? How hard is this going to be? What’s going to happen to my existing setup? And who’s gonna help me?

Shannon: And what do I get at the end of all this that’s gonna make the change worth it?

Michelle: Yeah, that’s a much different conversation than, “Hey, we offer payments now.”

Shannon: Which is why I wouldn’t build one strategy for acquisition and the back book. They’re different audiences with different barriers.

Michelle: And even if we’ve given them a reason to switch, there’s still another question.

Shannon: Why now?

Michelle: Exactly.

Shannon: Yeah, sometimes a merchant isn’t saying no, they’re just saying not right now.

Michelle: And those are very different things.

Shannon: Yeah, so maybe they saw your campaign six months ago and thought, “Well, that’s interesting, but I have 25 other things going on right now and I just can’t pay attention to it.” Then something changes.

Michelle: Yeah, maybe their current provider raises their rates.

Shannon: They have another location.

Michelle: They’re replacing equipment.

Shannon: Yeah, or maybe you launch a capability that solves a problem for them.

Michelle: Or they have a terrible experience with their current provider.

Shannon: Yeah. So suddenly they’re willing to listen, right? So that’s why good payments marketing can’t just be finding 15 different ways to say, “Switch to our payments offering.”

Michelle: Although marketers are very good at trying.

Shannon: Yeah, we really are, right? So instead of repeating the same pitch, give merchants new reasons to reconsider payments. So that’s probably one of the biggest ideas we’re talking about today. A payments program might exist for years, so why would its marketing strategy only last six weeks?

Michelle: Yeah, it shouldn’t.

Shannon: Yeah, ’cause the launch matters. But after launch, payments needs to become part of the broader customer marketing strategy.

Michelle: That doesn’t mean emailing people about payments constantly.

Shannon: Yeah, please don’t.

Michelle: Nobody wants that.

Shannon: Yeah, it means creating relevant reasons to talk about it. So, maybe that’s a customer story, for example.

Michelle: Yeah, or educational content.

Shannon: Yeah, like a webinar.

Michelle: In-product messaging

Shannon: Yeah, and like sales and customer success teams can also reach out

Michelle: Mm-hmm. A new capability

Shannon: Yeah, or even a targeted re-engagement campaign. So the point is not more messages.

Michelle: It’s more relevant moments.

Shannon: Yeah, exactly. So another way to think about this is where the merchant actually is in the journey, because what they need from marketing changes along the way.

Michelle: Yeah, if they’ve never heard about your payments offering, that’s awareness.

Shannon: Yeah, and if they know about it but don’t see a reason to switch, that’s probably a value or a relevance problem.

Michelle: If they’re considering it but haven’t enrolled, maybe they need proof.

Shannon: Yeah, or maybe we haven’t answered a key objection.

Michelle: If they start enrollment and don’t finish, maybe there’s friction somewhere.

Shannon: Yeah, or if they enroll but never process, now we’re talking about activation.

Michelle: And if they’re happily processing…

Shannon: …then they might be your next advocate. And that’s why I like looking at the whole journey. So from awareness, consideration, enrollment, activation, usage, and of course advocacy.

Michelle: Yeah, so it’s the same payments program, but marketing has a different job at every stage.

Shannon: Exactly. So saying “we need a payments campaign” isn’t specific enough. We need to know what problem we’re trying to solve.

So let’s make this really practical and go back to our hypothetical SaaS company where 20% of their existing customers are using payments, and that means 80% aren’t. So they come to us Monday morning and they say, “We want to grow payments adoption.”

What do we actually do?

Michelle: First, I’m not writing an email immediately.

Shannon: Thank you!

Michelle: Yeah, so I’m going to go look at the data. Who are those merchants? What do we know about them?

Shannon: Yeah, and I’d want sales involved pretty early because, who have they talked to? What are they hearing? Are there certain accounts that they’ve been trying to convert? And are there merchants who’ve already shown interest?

Michelle: Then we start breaking that big group apart. Maybe we find a group of merchants who previously showed interest.

Shannon: And that’s a pretty interesting audience.

Michelle: Yes, it’s interesting because I wanna know why they didn’t move forward.

Shannon: Yeah, so maybe another group started enrollment but then stopped.

Michelle: And now I wanna know where they stopped. Was it confusing? Did they need information, or did they just get distracted?

Shannon: Yeah. So then maybe we have a group of high-value merchants that sales starts thinking are strong candidates, but they’ve never really engaged.

Michelle: And that’s probably a very different campaign.

Shannon: Yeah, and maybe that’s not even an email first campaign. Maybe sales should lead it, or maybe marketing gives sales a customer story, a short video, or a business case conversation, or even just something personalized to help open the door.

Michelle: And then there’s probably a much larger group that we don’t know very much about yet.

Shannon: Yeah, and that’s where marketing can jump in and test things like different value propositions, different content, different calls to action, and see what actually gets a response.

Michelle: And learn from it.

Shannon: Yeah, because that’s a real adoption strategy, not send three emails to everyone who isn’t using payments.

Michelle: Although that would be a lot easier.

Shannon: Yeah, it probably would. It just probably wouldn’t be as effective, right? So we mentioned customer stories in that example, and I wanna stay there for just a sec because we’re asking merchants to trust us with something pretty important: their money.

Michelle: Yeah, and switching can feel really risky.

Shannon: Yeah. So if I’m a merchant and what I have today basically works, what do I need to see before I’m willing to change?

Michelle: Sure. So I would wanna know what businesses like mine are using it successfully. I wanna understand what the transition looks like. I wanna know who’s going to support me, and I wanna understand what actually gets better after I switch.

Shannon: And that’s why customer stories can be so powerful.

Michelle: Absolutely.

Shannon: Yeah, and not just Company X loves our payment solution. Tell me what they changed, what wasn’t working before, what got better, and what was the experience actually like.

Michelle: Yes, give me a story I can see myself in.

Shannon: Exactly. Because marketing isn’t just creating awareness, we’re helping reduce the perceived risk of making a change. So, this is actually one reason that partner marketing has become such an important part of the way that we work with SaaS platforms at Xplor Pay. So the payments technology is only one part of building a successful program.

Michelle: Not every SaaS company has people who specialize in marketing payments.

Shannon: Yeah, exactly. ‘Cause they know their customers, they know their industry, they know their brand, of course. But we know payments, and we spend a lot of time thinking about how you position, launch, and grow a payments program.

Michelle: So we bring all of those things together.

Shannon: Mm-hmm. And what that looks like, it depends on the partner. Sometimes we’re helping with positioning and messaging.

Michelle: Yeah. Sometimes it’s launch communications.

Shannon: Yeah, it could be sales enablement, merchant education.

Michelle: Content or webinars or ongoing adoption campaigns.

Shannon: Yeah, and sometimes it’s looking at the existing customer base together and asking where’s the real opportunity.

Michelle: Yeah, because partner marketing has to be more than just handing someone a folder of logos and templates.

Shannon: Right, because if the goal is adoption, we should be helping solve the adoption problem together, and a good payments partner shouldn’t just help you get your technology to market. They should really be invested in helping you make the whole program successful.

Michelle: Yeah, and you can’t figure all of this out by sitting inside marketing.

Shannon: No. So if we’re trying to improve a payments campaign tomorrow, one of the first things that I do is talk to sales.

Michelle: Yeah, I would ask them what they’re actually hearing.

Shannon: Yeah, not what we think the objections are. What are merchants actually saying?

Michelle: Yeah. Why are they saying no? What gets their attention?

Shannon: Yeah. What questions keep coming up and where does the conversation stall?

Michelle: And talk to support and customer success too.

Shannon: Absolutely, because if sales hears the same objection 30 times, that’s not just a sales objection anymore.

Michelle: That’s marketing intelligence.

Shannon: Yeah. So maybe we need different messaging, maybe we need different content that answers the question, and maybe sales needs a better tool.

Michelle: Or maybe there’s something in the actual experience that needs to change.

Shannon: Yeah, that’s an important one because marketing can’t message its way out of a product or a process problem.

Okay, so let’s have a little fun with this one. Let’s do a lightning round and name things payments marketers get wrong.

Michelle: Okay, let’s do it!

Shannon: Okay, so I’ll start. So treating the entire customer base like one audience.

Michelle: Definitely. I’ll add leading with a product instead of the merchant problem.

Shannon: Yeah, that’s a good one. How about sending another email just because the first email didn’t work?

Michelle: Or, assuming the only reason someone would switch is price.

Shannon: Mm-hmm. And assuming enrollment means success.

Michelle: Good one. Because if they never activate, what did we actually accomplish?

Shannon: Yeah, exactly. Here’s another. So creating sales collateral without talking to sales.

Michelle: Yes, you have to understand the conversations they’re actually having.

Shannon: Yeah. And I’ll give you another one. Assuming the merchant who didn’t convert isn’t interested.

Michelle: Yeah, because sometimes the answer isn’t no.

Shannon: Yeah, it can be just not yet.

Michelle: Which brings us right back to timing.

Shannon: So let’s say the campaign is running and adoption still isn’t moving. What’s the worst thing we can do?

Michelle: I would say send more of the same thing.

Shannon: Right. So this is where marketing needs more than marketing metrics. So opens and clicks are useful, but they don’t tell us whether the strategy worked.

Michelle: True. We need to know what happened next.

Shannon: Yeah. Did they enroll?

Michelle: Did they finish enrollment?

Shannon: Did they activate?

Michelle: Did they start processing?

Shannon: Yeah. And where did they drop off? Because if people are clicking but not enrolling, that’s one problem.

Michelle: And if they’re enrolling but never processing, that’s something completely different.

Shannon: Yeah. And marketing may not own every part of that journey, but we need to understand it.

Michelle: Exactly. Because if a merchant isn’t adopting your payments offering, that’s information. Our job isn’t just to send another message, it’s to figure out what that information is telling us.

Shannon: So let’s leave people with something they can actually use. If you’re marketing a payments offering, there are six questions that we would ask.

Michelle: Yeah, so the first is audience. Who exactly are we trying to reach?

Shannon: Yeah, I’d say the second one is message. So what does the audience actually need to hear?

Michelle: The third is moment. Why should this matter to them now?

Shannon: Yeah. Next is channel. Where and how should we reach them?

Michelle: And then after that we have action, like what exactly do we want them to do next?

Shannon: Yeah. And then finally we have learned. So what happened and what does it tell us?

Michelle: Then you take what you learned and do it again.

Shannon: And ideally, every time you do, the strategy gets a little smarter. So Michelle, after all that, what’s one thing you’d want someone to take away from this today?

Michelle: Sure. So I would say you can’t market payments effectively if you don’t understand why the merchant would wanna change. I would start there, then build the strategy around what the merchant actually needs.

Shannon: Mine is pretty similar. The question isn’t how you’re going to announce embedded payments, it’s why your merchants would choose it. And if they’re not choosing it, don’t immediately assume you need another campaign. Figure out why.

Michelle: Then use what you learn.

Shannon: Yeah, exactly. So better audience, better message, better timing, and of course, better strategy.

Michelle: Look at us, just solving payments marketing on episode 50!

Shannon: Yeah. Apparently the balloons worked, huh?

Michelle: You know what? I knew they would.

Shannon: Seriously though, thank you to everyone who’s listened, watched, and shared an episode, joined us as a guest, or helped us get to 50.

Michelle: And here’s to the next 50!

Shannon: Yeah, which gives us plenty of time to figure out what we’re doing for episode 100.

Michelle: I’m thinking more balloons and at the very least some cupcakes.

Shannon: Oh, awesome. Awesome. Well, thanks for listening today, and we’ll see you next time on Payment Pulse.

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