When AvidXchange launched in 2000, most companies were still managing invoices and payments the old fashion way — with paper. Today, AvidXchange’s accounts payable and payment automation solutions transform the way thousands of companies and suppliers across North America pay bills, freeing staff from slow, manual, and expensive paper processes.

AvidXchange is one of the fastest growing companies in North America, processing more than 12 million payments to the tune of $140 billion annually. The company’s small marketing team has played a major role in this success by fueling lead acquisition. To focus on the company’s overall marketing strategy, AvidXchange brought Courtney Tobe onboard to provide critical operational support and scale programs as the business continued to grow.

“We had great campaign managers running individual email campaigns. To build on these successes, we needed to look at our marketing operations from a high-level view and more effectively nurture leads,” says Tobe, manager of marketing operations and marketing automation at AvidXchange.

While AvidXchange was using Hubspot, Tobe determined that the company needed a more robust marketing automation platform capable of scaling to support the fast-growing company. After comparing the leading marketing technology providers, Tobe chose Adobe Marketo Engage.

“Marketo Engage is an enterprise platform geared towards the needs of marketers,” says Tobe. “It empowers the marketing and marketing operations teams to have full control over campaigns and nurture leads more effectively than ever.”

Optimizing engagement with a centralized marketing model

Using Marketo Engage, Tobe created a centralized marketing operations model for AvidXchange. Campaign managers now deliver their ideas for email campaigns to Tobe and the marketing operations team, which oversees the day-to-day running of campaigns. This centralized model allows the marketing operations team to implement best practices and deliver emails more strategically. For instance, the team can gain visibility into how many emails are being sent across all campaigns and cap email frequency for individuals who might be receiving too many emails.

The marketing operations team also acts as expert advisors to campaign managers, using their knowledge to take advantage of the full marketing automation capabilities of Marketo Engage. This leads to more efficient campaigns and stronger results for the investment.

For example, a campaign manager might want a campaign that uses personalized messaging and targeted calls to action. While the campaign manager previously may have spent hours creating multiple variations of the email by hand, the marketing operations team uses its familiarity with Marketo Engage to build out the campaign much faster using personalization tokens and dynamic content. The team can even clone email, nurture, and event programs, allowing AvidXchange to scale campaigns at speed. Campaign managers can focus their attention on analyzing results, optimizing messaging, and finding new ways to nurture leads.

Compared to Hubspot, Marketo Engage offers much clearer audience segmentation. AvidXchange uses this segmentation to develop targeted messaging that increases engagement dramatically. While the company quadrupled the number of emails sent, open rates remained the same while click-through rates nearly tripled. The number of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) created through the email channel increased and opportunities more than doubled.

“Hubspot couldn’t compare to the advanced functionality in Marketo Engage,” says Tobe. “We can create multiple lead scoring models for more accurate understanding of our leads. Automated triggers activate in real time, allowing us to approach leads while their interest is highest. With our previous email platform, triggers would activate so slowly that we weren’t getting the best interactions with our customers. The updated lead nurturing program more than doubled the number of MQLs and opportunities.”

Bringing sales and marketing closer

Not only has AvidXchange centralized its marketing operations, but it is also removing silos between sales and marketing by creating a level of integration between Marketo Engage and Salesforce CRM that was impossible with Hubspot.

Working with Jay Sturgis at Solomon Consulting, AvidXchange was able to get a highly complex Marketo Engage integration up and running in just three months. The deployment includes integrating Marketo Engage into two highly customized Salesforce CRM instances. Now, AvidXchange can support their full organization in their marketing automation platform and teams can perform sophisticated segmentation and dynamically update target audiences in real time, leading to more effective marketing and sales strategies.

“One of the core reasons that we chose Marketo Engage was that we knew it was robust enough to support our unique, complex customizations,” says Tobe. “Trying to set up a stable integration with any other tool would have been a nightmare, but the workspaces, person partitions, and accessible API in Marketo Engage allowed us to develop an architecture that would solve for our immediate business case and grow with us as our company and strategy evolves.”

The integration also allows marketing operations to pass MQLs to sales representatives much more smoothly. There was no way for Hubspot to automatically pass form data into the many custom Salesforce fields so when a lead requested a demo, a member of the marketing operations team would need to carefully scrub the request, look up additional information about the industry or company, and manually manipulate the lead data so that it mapped cleanly into the custom field for the Salesforce MQL record. Marketing operations would spend up to 30 hours per week just working with MQL records.

With the integrations between the CRM and Marketo Engage, MQL records are now generated automatically and in real time. The marketing operations team supported more than 1,000 requests in the first year after moving to Marketo Engage. Sales teams can reach out to leads faster. The marketing operations team refocused this energy on running email campaigns with Marketo Engage, allowing the team to handle more campaigns through the centralized marketing model without increasing headcount.

“The tight integration between Marketo Engage and our CRM allows us to support the marketing needs of our full organization so that we can scale messaging and execute better strategies as our company grows,” says Tobe. “Marketo Engage is both powerful enough and flexible enough that we can continue to grow our tech stack and support any unique business cases that we develop in the future.”

Evolving customer engagement

Tobe has made huge strides in building a scalable and reliable marketing strategy for AvidXchange. The company now supports 14 lead nurturing programs that use behavior lead scoring to better understand leads. Demographic and firmographic models are also in the works, as well as an account-based marketing strategy built around using Marketo Engage to move customers along in their buying journeys.

Marketo Engage is an agile platform that allows AvidXchange to adapt marketing strategies quickly and act on new opportunities. During the global pandemic, for instance, the company had to transition all of its campaign strategy to digital tactics. Instead of relying on events and trade shows, AvidXchange used Marketo Engage to stand up multi-channel campaigns to connect with customers and leads. One campaign, which included a webinar, promotional emails, and digital marketing tactics, was running just one week into pandemic lockdowns. This marketing push resulted in one of the strongest sales periods that AvidXchange has seen to date.

“Marketo Engage gives us a platform that allows us to build more methods of engagement and scale as our company grows,” says Tobe. “There’s so much we can do and I’m looking forward to seeing how we can have even greater impacts on customer journeys.”

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