Brex is building the next generation of B2B financial services with better tech and without the restrictions of legacy technology. Brex customers instantly receive a card that has 20x higher limits, completely automates expense management, kills receipt tracking and magically integrates with their accounting systems. Brex card benefits are tailored to each customer’s vertical.
Thomas Cyr is the Head of Demand Gen and Marketing Operations. With 5 years of fintech marketing under his belt, most recently leading database marketing at Square, Thomas is looking forward to shaking up the antiquated industry.
Thomas Maremaa is the Growth Manager. Thomas has worked in growth at 6 different companies and has founded a couple of his own. His entrepreneurial and innovative inclination drive him to push the boundaries -- experimenting and iterating to unlock more business for Brex.
Cyr: Banking and finance is a super antiquated industry and none of the products or services that exist out there really up until the last few years have actually solved vertical issues.
Maremaa: Our competitors, they're doing something for everyone and everyone gets treated as a business. At Brex, we do everything for someone. In this case, a very specific industry, life sciences, tech startups or ecommerce businesses.
Maremaa: We're going vertical by vertical. We're tailoring our products to specific industries and we need to be able to speak the same language that our audience speaks. What they're used to, and just be able to put their needs right in front of them, whether that be in a landing page, an email or an ad.
Maremaa: We've been using Mutiny for target account emails where we add their own link to a unique offer and a personalized landing page, where we've seen three times as many sign ups, which is huge for us.
Maremaa: We ran a few tests where we were able to increase the quality leads we were getting by more than 30% just by modifying our call to action for a top of funnel audience, by modifying the language and trying to go for something that was lower commitment. We changed it from ‘sign up’ to ‘see if you qualify’ across the site. And that's something we've implemented across landing pages and the site as a whole.
Maremaa: In regards to our known traffic, everyone that's interacted with Brex in the past through either ads, being cookied, email outreach or just everyone that's in our database, we've been able to personalize our whole homepage by industry. We're able to make the first fold tailored directly to them.
That's led to a 29% increase in applications completed, which to us is huge. It just reduces all the friction. Some people come in and they see the initial message of a corporate card for startups and they're like, 'Oh, but I'm an ecommerce business.' They would just drop out and not even scroll through the site or check out our navigation bar. So just seeing those numbers has been huge for us.
Maermaa: People's attention spans get shorter and shorter. If we're catching their attention through an ad or we're #1 on Google for a query they ask, and we're able to tailor our pages to whatever language they are speaking, you have their attention and they will read the whole value proposition. That's going to boost the conversion of the page.
Personalization to help the conversion of your page for channels you're spending money on is huge for us. Being able to get those customers that are coming through to sign up or take whatever action we want them to take means Brex is going to make money and we're able to put more into a better converting landing page. That just becomes a cycle. And it's a whole loop where you have resources to keep lighting fires under your ad spend and looking for new channels and playing around a little bit and bringing in more customers. Personalization to me is just being able to grab whatever people are paying attention to and tailor it to their eyes.
Mutiny allows us to have one standard landing page that can change depending on the search terms.. and all of our audiences speak in different terms. We can bring in URL parameters so that it changes logos depending on the ad group they're in. Being able to do that at scale just through the experiences we're creating on Mutiny allows us to allocate more resources into the creative work. The marketing team of Brex has done a great job with the way we've been marketing with out-of-home messaging. We wouldn't be able to do that at the rate we're doing it if we didn't have supporting tools that just allow us to ship things, see what works, and continue to compound on our wins.
Maremaa: We have our marketing channel on Slack and what's different about Brex is that marketing rolls up to the CFO. It's very numbers focused and we want ROI. When we have good experiments coming in and we're seeing lifts on our page and we throw those into the group, the first one to cheer for us is Michael, the CFO of Brex. He's a big Mutiny fan and he just gets excited because it's a virtual cycle. If we can increase the conversion rate of pages we are spending money on, that allows us to focus on making those ads better, making the whole experience better and being able to allocate resources in a more efficient manner and bring that CAC down.
Cyr: Getting that next layer down and doing it in a way that is accessible and intuitive for a marketing team, and being able to run tests and see pretty immediate results without having to get all those resources and buy-in and convincing an engineering team or a web team allows us to move faster.
Regardless of the size of your company, personalization is always going to be something that's critically important to increasing conversion rates and providing really strong web experiences.
If I was told that my budget is completely flat for next year, I get no more tools and I have to cut 10 of them. Which ones would I keep? I would first and foremost keep a personalization tool. Because that allows us to continually provide a better experience to the end user. Your budget is the same, how can you increase conversion rates? Personalizing is an absolute easy lever to pull.