Over the last 3 years, many payments companies and merchant services divisions of banks have turned to Enigma to help improve customer prospecting efforts.
It’s an obvious fit. Payments providers have a specific ideal customer profile (ICP) where they are positioned to win, and Enigma can uniquely identify prospects that fit that definition. A few examples of payments providers' ICP requests that Enigma can help segment by include:
Sales and marketing campaigns drive higher ROI when a target prospect list more precisely matches your ICP. If there is a looser fit, you and your customers waste money targeting prospects that aren't a good fit.
We often get asked by potential partners: I get the value of your product in concept, but how much does your data actually boost results?
So, we set out to answer this question quantitatively. And we're quite impressed with the results.
Methodology
With the help of marketing agencies, we asked four bank and payments provider partners to A/B test the impact of using Enigma data in sales and marketing campaigns. The test group was the set of prospects they generated using Enigma data. The control group was a different sample of prospects without the benefit of Enigma data, generated from the more traditional business data sources. After defining test and control groups, these providers then measured the number of successful sign-ups (conversions) per dollar spent for both groups.
The marketing campaigns were all omnichannel, covering both direct mail and online advertising. Most of the campaigns also featured some direct sales outreach to top prospects.
This A/B testing was conducted over the past 18 months, spanning several different quarterly growth campaigns.
On average, payments providers saw a 3x increase in conversion using Enigma data compared to the control of using traditional sources.
Gross lift measures the uptick in merchant accounts created using Enigma leads versus leads from other sources.
For example, if we have the following conversion rates (% of accounts created out of total leads that were sent mail):
This would imply:
If you are a payment processor focused on efficient growth, these results indicate that you could achieve the same results by spending 2-3x less. If you are focused on growing as fast as possible, the results imply that you could grow 2-3x faster using the same sales and marketing spend.
As we continue to receive A/B test results, we will update this blog series.
Read about similar outcomes in a recent case study, or reach out to our team to hear firsthand how our data is helping payments companies grow merchant accounts.