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Exponential Growth in Contacts
When the pandemic hit, the U.S. Small Business Administration instituted a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) that offered loans to small businesses to keep employees on their payrolls.
As a company committed to helping small businesses, Lendio agreed to facilitate the distribution of these loans to qualified applicants.
Shifting to PPP loans came with challenges. Stephanie Randle, VP of Lifecycle at Lendio, explains:
“When we pivoted to PPP loans during the height of the pandemic, we grew our database by one million contacts in 12 months.”
Small database marketing team
At the time, Lendio’s database marketing team consisted of a single person sending out broadcast emails. With the influx of its net new contacts, Lendio wanted to get more strategic with its communication strategy, including segmenting customers for more targeted communication and using automation to increase internal workflow and efficiency.
Further, Lendio wanted to better align its database marketing team with its sales team.
“Before, if the database marketing team got a lead, they just sent it to sales and wished them luck,” says Stephanie. “We needed the two teams to work together more closely.”
Stephanie explains further:
“Without better alignment, we would need to hire more salespeople to work these leads, which would increase our business costs. Instead, we needed the sales team to focus on leads who were close to closing a loan and spend less time on front-of-funnel nurturing.”
Choosing Marketing Hub and the HubSpot CRM Platform
Fortunately, Lendio already had the solution it needed to manage this influx of leads: the HubSpot CRM Platform.
Stephanie explains why Lendio chose to implement the HubSpot CRM Platform and Marketing Hub well before the pandemic hit:
“We needed a tool that could grow with us,” says Stephanie. “We didn’t want to have to change it again a few years down the road.”
At the same time, Lendio needed to keep its costs in check.
“Cost was a big deal,” says Stephanie. “We needed to choose a platform that was cost efficient while still giving us what we needed. HubSpot was pretty enticing from a cost perspective, but what really sold it was its capabilities.”
With the right technology already in place, the Lendio team started to implement automation and segmentation to manage its leads more efficiently.
More completed applications
With Marketing Hub, Stephanie and her team can identify where people are disengaging during the online application process and use automated email sequencing to address common pain points at each stage.
For example, it’s common for people to drop off when asked to provide their social security number. When this happens, an email is automatically triggered that addresses common objections and concerns about providing that sensitive information.
“We know the exact question in the form where they stopped, so we can address common objections related to that question,” says Stephanie. “We even provide them with a phone number where they can reach us to talk further, which encourages them to keep moving through the application process.”
End-of-funnel email sequencing
Stephanie and her team are also using automated emails to close more deals at the end of the sales funnel.
For example, if prospective customers haven’t accepted a loan offer within a set number of days, Lendio sends a series of personalized emails on behalf of the sales rep, reminding customers they have an offer waiting for them. These email sequences are sent automatically, requiring no intervention from the sales team.
“This approach has been super successful,” says Stephanie. “It’s a great example of how sales and marketing are now working together to make a real impact.”
Keeping leads warm
Today, Lendio’s database marketing team has grown from one person to seven as they take a greater role in warming up leads, which alleviates pressure on the sales team.
In particular, the team sends out targeted, segmented emails that are relevant to each contact to keep them engaged. For example, if economic inflation is of particular concern to an audience segment, Stephanie and her team send information on that topic to that audience.
“This allows our sales team to focus on what they do best, which is getting on the phone and closing deals instead of warming people up,” says Stephanie. “It’s been a huge deal for them.”
Easy to use templates
Stephanie also appreciates the HubSpot CRM Platform’s intuitive drag-and-drop templates that her entire team can use to easily create emails. Building segments and lists is also straightforward.
This ease of use helps Stephanie get new team members up to speed quickly.
Stephanie explains:
“We recently hired someone for our team who’s never used HubSpot before, and he was able to jump in and find his way around. Now, anyone on my team can create beautiful templates and emails without knowing any HTML at all.”
Implementing additional Marketing Hub instances
Marketing Hub is such a success, other Lendio teams beyond the corporate office have also implemented it. Today, Lendio has four Marketing Hub instances: corporate office, partners, franchises, and PPP - Loan Forgiveness.
In some cases, these groups have gone even farther with the HubSpot CRM Platform. The partners group, for instance, is using Marketing Hub and Sales Hub as its all-in-one solution for marketing and sales.
Integrating Snowflake for consistent clean data
Lendio also decided to implement Operations Hub to integrate with its Snowflake data lake. This integration facilitates data sharing among the four groups.
“To implement amazing automation, you need amazing data,” says Stephanie. “Operations Hub allows us to share data back and forth among all those instances to make sure we all have access to up-to-date, complete information.”
Twilio integration for SMS
Lendio has also integrated the HubSpot CRM Platform with Twilio to market to its contacts via text messages in addition to email.
“Email is a great channel for busy small business owners,” says Stephanie. “When we introduced SMS, it amplified our message even more. Hubspot has made it easy to integrate with Twilio and send personalized and relevant SMS.”
58% More Deals Closed
Lendio closed 58% more deals from 2019 to 2022 with the help of Marketing Hub automation.
Lendio also experienced a 618% increase in the number of loan applications completed over the same period of time.
Stephanie and her team have also increased lead reactivations (i.e. when a lead goes from not responding to responding) by 65% month over month.
Today, Lendio’s database has over two million contacts—and it continues to grow.
“HubSpot has been really awesome in helping us navigate issues as we’ve scaled,” says Stephanie. “It’s been a really great tool for us.”
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