Automating Rewards for Customer Referrals: Xero Case Study

About

Xero

Founded in 2006 in New Zealand, Xero is a cloud-based accounting software platform for small businesses with over 3 million subscribers globally. Through Xero, small business owners and their advisors have access to real-time financial data any time, anywhere, and on any device. Xero offers an ecosystem of over 1,000 third-party apps and 300 plus connections to banks and other financial partners.

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In 2020, Xero was recognized by IDC MarketScape as a leader in its worldwide SaaS and cloud-enabled small business finance and accounting applications vendor assessment. Forbes identified Xero as the World’s Most Innovative Growth Company in 2014 and 2015.

Industry:

ITeS / SaaS / Startups

Region:

ANZ

Use case:

Referral Rewards

Features used:

Xoxo reward link, Reward Marketplace, Gift Cards

“Xoxoday is that superpower that every growth marketer can do so much with!”

"We achieved a 20% growth year on year and it's a brilliant performance for us. Our management is happy and our customers get rewarded so it’s a win-win. We have been able to improve the customer experience of gift delivery while also giving them the choice to choose. That instant access was really important to us as well. The onboarding was really straightforward, the customer support was highly responsive to help me through."

Matt Wate

Head of Growth Marketing, Xero

Challenges

The United Kingdom government introduced Making Tax Digital (MTD) for income tax self-assessment to improve administration. MTD requires businesses to manage their tax affairs with HMRC using compatible software. Xero saw this as an opportunity to expand in the UK market.

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However, they faced a few challenges in achieving rapid growth:

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Rapid Growth: With every small and medium business in the UK looking to integrate accounting software, Xero had a huge opportunity but needed better strategies and promotions than their competitors to acquire market share rapidly.
Inventory Management and Distribution: In the past, Xero ran promotional campaigns by manually sending physical gifts, but they faced challenges with stock management, distribution, and high costs.
Logistics Costs: Significant costs were involved in paying upfront for bulk orders of physical gifts and coordinating the logistics of delivery.
Limited Customer Experience: Customers did not have the freedom to choose their own gifts and rewards, making the experience restricted.
Lack of Rewarding Technology: Xero could not measure the ROI of physical gifting due to the lack of technology-led rewarding solutions within their business.

Solution

Xero implemented Xoxoday's robust and unified reward platform, leveraging features like Xoxoday's global reward marketplace and its link-based rewarding technology. The reward marketplace offered a diverse portfolio of 21,000+ rewards choices across 100+ countries, while the link-based rewarding allowed Xero to automate the distribution of rewards through personalized reward links.

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With Xoxoday's platform, Xero could:

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Acquire Customers: Xero ran a referral campaign for its current customers, rewarding them a £50 link on each successful referral. This enabled Xero to build a strong pipeline of 1,900 customers in just 4 months and create advocacy within its customer community.
Enhance Customer Delight and Advocacy: With a plethora of brands and rewards to choose from in the Xoxoday marketplace, customers had a seamless experience with single-click redemption of digital rewards. Xero managed to gather the highest quality of referrals through this campaign.
Provide Instant Gratification and Diverse Rewards: By cutting down the physical gift route, the digital reward gratification was instant, and customers had a huge portfolio of brands to choose from in the Xoxoday marketplace, creating the best reward experience.
Reduce Costs with Value-based Pricing: Xoxoday charges only on the rewards redeemed, not on distribution. This allowed Xero to get more out of their marketing budgets for the campaigns.

Xoxoday's fully managed platform and responsive customer support empowered Xero to transform their promotional campaigns and achieve their moonshot goal of 20% growth year on year.

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Results

The implementation of Xoxoday's platform has led to significant results for Xero:

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Xero has sent rewards through Xoxoday to its existing customers on each successful referral in the past 4 months. They drastically lowered their customer acquisition cost (CAC) from this campaign and saw a 25% increase in their conversion rate. Improved customer experience and instant access to rewards were crucial benefits. The onboarding process with Xoxoday was straightforward, and the customer support was highly responsive.
They drastically lowered their customer acquisition cost (CAC) from this campaign and saw a 25% increase in their conversion rate.
Improved customer experience and instant access to rewards were crucial benefits.
The onboarding process with Xoxoday was straightforward, and the customer support was highly responsive.

What’s Next?

Xero plans to expand the usage of Xoxoday's rewards and incentives system in North America, the Middle East, and Africa. With Xoxoday's global catalog and multi-currency rewards, Xero can extend its rewards in different geographies as they scale. Additionally, Xero plans to introduce rewards and incentives in their subsidiary company, Planday, a workforce planning software, in 2022 to achieve exponential growth. Xero also aims to introduce rewards and incentives into other marketing verticals like market research surveys and driving demand generation.

Xero, saw an uptick of 25% conversion rates by automating rewards with for their customer referral program

20%

60%

25%

20%

60%

25%

Challenges

Solution

Results

What’s Next?

Schedule a demo with our reward expert

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