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PayPal

SME lead nurture

PayPal: IMAGINE, the award-winning intelligent lead nurture programme that turned cold small business prospects into sales conversations

The IMAGINE hub site, showing five small business founder stories as tiles.
The IMAGINE hub: five founder stories in one place.

The challenge.

PayPal is the most widely used digital wallet in the world, yet small businesses saw it as an eBay tool or a checkout button. Earlier campaigns focused on checkouts and abandoned carts, which reinforced that view. The brief was to beat the conversion of earlier small business lead nurture, and to show the range of PayPal products.

What we did.

  • Sales Accepted Leads, not marketing leads: The programme was built to hand sales fewer, better leads, with sales and marketing aligned on what a good one looks like.
  • Peers, not PayPal, in the hero spot: Five small business founders who already got results from PayPal told their own stories, each tied to a pain point: getting paid on the go, selling abroad, funding growth, faster invoices and confident online selling.
  • A hub that goes beyond the button: One site held the five interviews word for word, each with a call to action that matched a PayPal product and a named payments specialist.
  • Short emails and targeted ads: Five bold, copy-light emails, a plain-text follow-up from the specialist, and Facebook ads aimed at look-alikes of small business owners.
  • Point-based sales activation: Lead scoring pulled prospects with a clear need into the CRM for immediate follow-up, and sales could see each prospect's journey before the first call.
  • Three stages, one backbone: IMAGINE found and verified the pain point. BELIEVE was built to bring in PayPal's payments specialists, led by video, once a prospect showed interest in a pain point. DO moved them to a conversation: set up an account, call, or request a call back. All three ran on the same hub and workflow.
  • Lost leads went back into nurture: When sales closed a lead as lost, it re-entered nurture after 30 days with a message matched to the reason, such as low value, no website or too expensive.
Three tablets showing IMAGINE emails with founder photos and personalised headlines.
IMAGINE emails: the founder, not PayPal, leads.
A BELIEVE stage email with five payment specialist portraits and the line We believe you will prove your detractors wrong.
BELIEVE: PayPal's payments specialists step in.

Impact.

The pilot launched in April 2016 to a cold audience and converted leads to opportunities at 63%, above the level PayPal rates as excellent, and ahead of the benchmark from earlier campaigns. It was on track to beat its targets for net-new leads and net-new merchant accounts.

Silver Award, Best use of digital from the financial services sector, Digital Impact Awards 2016.

Questions

What problems do these engagements solve?

Entering a new market (Paysafe Peru), repositioning a brand (Pleo), keeping customers ordering (Deliveroo) and turning cold small business prospects into sales conversations (PayPal).

Do you do brand as well as demand?

Yes. Pleo was a company-wide rebrand and a Europe-wide launch. Paysafe was national, brand-led demand generation.

Do you work on B2C as well as B2B?

Absolutely, although the bulk of the experience is in B2B fintech.

How do you measure success?

We define success on your terms, together, during the scoping call.

Find where your marketing is stuck

Let's talk and find out if we are a fit.

  • No pitch deck.
  • A straight view on what is holding marketing back.
  • A short proposal only if there is a clear fit.
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