Challenge

Square targets the small office/home office market with an easy and affordable solution for credit card payment processing. They needed help. Their online acquisition efforts were maxed out and not providing the rapid growth they needed.

The square marketing team had tried creating direct mail on their own but was not seeing the levels of performance they needed to make it successful. Leadership understood that DM could be a great channel to drive growth, but performance had to be improved.

They decided to bring in outside expertise to help them crack the code for direct mail and to build a productive, scalable channel for expanding their user base and gaining market share in a highly competitive industry. To help them find the best chance of success, they turned to the RPM team.

Actions

The RPM team began by defining the sales goals and key performance metrics for cost-per-sale and profitability. Then we designed a custom Rapid Performance Method program to accelerate learning and quickly uncover higher performance.

Building on Square’s existing brand assets to keep costs down, the creative team created more than 10 different DM test packages. Combined with list and segmentation testing to optimize targeting, we executed the first robust test program with 63 test cells and worked with Square to establish the backend process for tracking and program analysis.

Results

The test program rang up great results, helping Square bring in profitable customers with a highly effective new control package that exceeded financial performance targets. The top-performing package generated new users at a significantly lower cost per customer.

Through the test program Square also learned a great deal about to optimize list selection strategy to maximize response. Several new list sources were found which could both expand the marketable universe of prospects and also drive sales results below the target cost.

In addition to traditional reporting on DM response and conversion, we also analyzed usage and initial revenue from the newly acquired customers to optimize list targeting based on revenue and ROI.

Due to the great results from the test, Square has ramped up their DM program to become a significant driver for the growth of the company.