Understanding what’s driving customer engagement and rapid-fire website innovation are a couple of the benefits Aussie fintech, Help Pay, is gleaning from early investment into a digital marketing platform.
Help Pay’s platform centres around a ‘crowdsourced’ capability that allows consumers to share bills in order to have funds paid directly to the billing company. The homegrown fintech has created a technology that turns a bill into a shareable link and payment page, which consumers then share via email, social channels and chat with multiple individuals so they can pay any amount directly towards the bill.
Help Pay raised $2.4 million in Series A funding in December 2021 and has gone live in market over the past six months.
Help Pay chief customer officer, Rowan Wilde, who took up the post in December and previously consulted to the group’s founders as they prepared for launch, said the young, fast-moving startup invested early into Acoustic’s marketing orchestration platform to manage its website, email marketing and B2B marketing automation needs.
“There are a lot of options out there for the services being provided by Acoustic, but what we found in Acoustic is a partner willing to support and help us as we both learn, grow and evolve our service offering, find our markets and push out to customers,” he told CMO.
One of the initial first steps was deploying the marketing platform to manage Acoustic Content on its website. Wilde said the team has been able to get new pages up in a matter of minutes for customers or business inquiries off the back of these capabilities.
On the email front, Help Pay has taken initial steps to segment communications to customers based on their level of engagement with its mobile app. More personalisation and automation are now high on the agenda using Acoustic Campaign.
While it’s early days, Help Pay has already serviced thousands of users and provided help to pay nearly $500,000 worth of bills so far. This has created a database of customers to communicate directly with. It’s also secured more than 200 bill brands.
“We have several categories and segments of customers, from people who have downloaded the app but not used the platform to share a bill; to those who have shared bills, some of which is paid; and others who have shared bills and have had the bill paid completely,” Wilde explained. “We can easily target communications to each of the segments, plus provide information on updates or use cases over time.”
What Wilde was particularly pleased about was how quickly the team can access data on these segments.
“As people engage more with our platform through the app, they engage with email content more. That’s really valuable for us to understand and do more with over time,” he said. “Knowing people are more engaged the more they use the platform is a huge boost. It’s great for investors and teams to know that. And it enables us to make smarter decisions going forward, so there’s less guesswork.”
Read more CMO50 special report: Building consumer trust in the digital-first era
A key early benefit has been how how fast the platform enables Help Pay to update pages and content on its website.
“We’re not waiting days or weeks to launch new part of the website. If the content is ready, it can be live in minutes. It’s a huge opportunity because if we think something up, need a response, or want something prepared before a meeting, we know it’s there by the time we’re halfway through the conversation with a business customer,” Wilde said.
From a B2B perspective, Help Pay is now working to set up a marketing automation program. Supporting the B2B side will be a new head of partnerships, starting in May.
Wilde is also keen to see more marketing automation for customers and using the Acoustic platform to understand them better in terms of where are they, how Help Pay can help, what information they need and taking next steps to assist them to avoid falling into debt or missing bills.
“Not everyone user is using us because something unfortunate has happened. It could be taking care of elderly parents and they live in another state and they want to make sure the bills are paid,” Wilde continued. “It’s convenient and easier to use Help Pay than sending money and them having to transact online.
Read more Martech investment appetite is stronger than ever but confusion and poor results abound
“Those segments underneath that around why customers are using Help Pay, what content we can deliver to be helpful and keep engagement are a huge opportunity for us.”
Don’t miss out on the wealth of insight and content provided by CMO A/NZ and sign up to our weekly CMO Digest newsletters and information services here.
You can also follow CMO on Twitter: @CMOAustralia, take part in the CMO conversation on LinkedIn: CMO ANZ, follow our regular updates via CMO Australia’s Linkedin company page