At a time when businesses need to secure stable cash flow and diversify their offerings, they need to identify a payment provider that provides a seamless solution for their customers. When it started in 1998, Ezidebit set out to help small businesses that were tired of chasing customers for payments. They set out to offer a solution at a time when direct debit was seen only as an option for large institutions with substantial finance teams.

Today, Ezidebit helps more than 27,000 customers in Australia and New Zealand collect regular recurring payments (direct debit), EFTPOS, BPAY and real-time payments (online and over the phone) that are reconciled and managed via an online portal with a simple reporting dashboard. From dance studios to private schools, they focus on delivering value and support through a customer-centric approach.

Their steady path to growth relies on improving their ability to understand their customers’ needs and behaviours. They enjoyed a full pipeline of leads but found they lagged in conversions. Without an adequate marketing automation solution, they lacked the insight to drive quality leads to the sales team. Ezidebit needed a reliable marketing automation platform that would improve how they capture data and identify insights on leads and customers. They decided to replace their incumbent solution for Adobe Marketo Engage.

Rebecca Alvarado, Lifecycle Marketing & Automation Manager for Ezidebit, saw opportunities to help empower the marketing team and improve transparency with their sales team

Generating leads without revenue

A critical tactic towards improving conversions is to develop a thorough understanding of customers and their behaviours. Using Adobe Marketo Engage’s Lifecycle Modeller, Rebecca captured each lifecycle stage used by the sales team. “We knew there was a lag in activation, but we didn’t have the reporting in place. We now have a snapshot at any moment in time to show the average velocity.”

Through the integration between Adobe Marketo Engage and Ezidebit’s Salesforce CRM solution, they share a single source of truth for reporting and identifying lags between the time when a customer signs up and activates their account with transactions.

“That’s what prompted us to take time to build out and demonstrate the value of customers,” Rebecca explains. “We had spent so much time acquiring new leads, without seeing the revenue because they weren’t moving down the funnel and activating.”

With an exact lifecycle model laid out before them, Ezidebit’s marketing team have rolled out nurture streams across a variety of segments. Content for each programme focuses on talking points based on a customer’s industry, soware segment or geolocation. is proven critical in 2020 during lockdowns in the Australian state of Victoria, helping the marketing team to deliver emails that could take a sensitive and helpful approach to affected businesses.

“We offered support and advice, such as ways for fitness businesses to offer online classes,” Rebecca explains.

A referral programme example worth stealing

The strong integration between Adobe Marketo Engage and Salesforce has helped the marketing team to power-up their referral programme. As part of the fintech industry, Ezidebit partners with more than 60 software platforms to provide integrated solutions. Seeing the potential of this untapped market, they developed a programme to help build advocacy for Ezidebit, with Adobe Marketo Engage running a seamless experience.

Using Adobe Marketo Engage forms to create co-branded landing pages, new referrals are automatically delivered from partners to Adobe Marketo Engage, where Salesforce assigns them to a sales team member as well as the partner for follow-up. “It’s great that Adobe Marketo Engage has these native integrations to make our Adobe Marketo Engage instance more powerful. It allows us to build out the referral process and customise it as much as possible,” says Rebecca.

Building trust and transparency among marketing and sales

Since using Adobe Marketo Engage, Ezidebit developed a lead scoring system to promote greater transparency between their marketing and sales teams. As higher quality leads ‑ow to the sales team, Adobe Marketo Engage Sales Insights shows how customers interact with content across all Ezidebit’s channels, including emails, their website and social media. As well as building trust with the marketing team, the sales team value the lead scoring, while the Sales Insights panel facilitates well-informed conversations for sales calls.

At each step of Ezidebit’s progress with Adobe Marketo Engage, they’ve tapped into Adobe Marketo Engage Premium Support as a welcome and reliable source. “I always know that if I have a problem, someone will call me back straight away,” Rebecca says. “That’s important when you’re dealing with live customer data that comes from our website straight to Adobe Marketo Engage and Salesforce. We need that peace of mind that if anything were to happen, we have someone ready and waiting.”

Delivering 90% additional opportunity value in 8 months

Once Ezidebit realised the opportunities available through Adobe Marketo Engage, they’ve worked consistently and diligently to add new functions and ramp-up their capabilities. Rebecca has worked internally with Adobe Marketo Engage’s team of experts to identify and implement improvements that have led to a best-practice example of marketing automation. Their approach continues to deliver strong results, driven by their customer-first focus across the business. As a result, they’ve reduced the time to convert leads by half and delivered 90% additional opportunity value in eight months.

Recommended for you

https://main--bacom--adobecom.hlx.page/au/fragments/customer-success-stories/cards/au-caas-cards-random

See all customer stories

https://main--bacom--adobecom.hlx.page/au/fragments/customer-success-stories/contact-footer