A global accounting software platform, Xero, saw an uptick of 25% conversion rates by automating rewards for their customer referral program

Introduction

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. 

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.

Challenges

The United Kingdom government recently 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 is a 360° product to simplify and automate the filing of digital tax returns, tracking of cash flow, and instant invoicing. Xero saw this as an opportunity to expand in the UK market. But they faced a few challenges in achieving rapid growth with their business. 

• Finding a smart growth hack that scales fast:  With every small and medium business in the UK looking to integrate accounting software, Xero had a huge opportunity in front of them but they needed better strategies and promotions than their competitors to acquire the market share rapidly.
  
  
• Complexities in inventory management and distribution of physical gifts: In the past, the Head of Growth Marketing at Xero, Matt Wate, tried running promotional campaigns by manually sending physical gifts like headphones, printers, keyboards, monitors among others throughout the country. But they ran into a huge challenge of stock, distribution, and high costs. The long wait between order and delivery also led to a poor customer experience.
  
  
• Significant costs involved with logistics: The true expenses went into having to pay upfront for a bulk order of physical gifts and then coordinating the logistics of delivery as well.  With the pandemic, it became infeasible, expensive, and time-consuming to run the promotional campaigns with physical gifts delivery.
  
  
• Limited customer experience: The customers didn’t have the freedom to choose their own gifts and rewards making the experience very restricted. Matt mentioned that Xero strives to add value to small businesses and wants them to see Xero as an investment rather than a cost. The physical gifting wasn’t adding value or delight to their current customers.
  
  
• Lack of rewarding technology: Xero couldn’t measure the ROI of the physical gifting because of the lack of technology-led rewarding solutions within their business. 

Xero’s Head of Growth Marketing, Matt, knew that they needed to steer away from the physical gifting and explore an automated and unified platform that simplified rewards experience for their promotional campaigns for their end-users. 
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“Xoxoday is that superpower that every growth marketer can do so much more with! It has been a great value addition to Xero. 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."

Solution - Scaling up with an effective digital reward platform

Given Xero’s aggressive growth goals and most significantly, the dynamic nature of the accounting industry in the UK, Xero had to scale up faster, elevate customer delight, and give their small business community the value that they deserve. 

Xoxoday’s robust and unified reward platform allowed Xero to run their referral campaigns with their current customers in the most seamless way possible. Link-based rewarding technology allowed the growth team at Xero to automate rewards distribution on each successful referral signup. With Xoxoday Xero could-

• Acquiring customers - Growth hack that is unique and works: Xero ran a referral campaign for its current customers and rewarded them a £50 link on each successful referral. This enabled Xero to build a strong pipeline of 1900 customers in just 4 months of implementation and also create advocacy within its current customer community.
  
  
• Customer delight and advocacy: With a plethora of brands and rewards to choose from, customers had the most seamless experience with a single click redemption of digital rewards. Xero managed to gather the highest quality of referrals through this campaign.
  
  
• Instant gratification and diverse portfolio of rewards: By cutting down the physical gift route, the digital reward gratification was instant and the customers had a huge portfolio of brands to choose from. Xero managed to create the best reward experience for its customers with Xoxoday. Automating the digital rewards, allowed Xero to save a significant amount of time and resources.
  
  
• Significantly lower costs with value-based pricing: Xero found success by not only saving time but also reducing costs by huge margins. With link-based rewarding technology, Xoxoday charges only on the rewards redeemed and not on distribution. This way, Xero could get more out of their marketing budgets for the campaigns.
  

Xoxoday offers 21,000+ rewards choices in 100+ countries. Fully managed platform, the fastest team of customer support at Xoxoday empowered Xero to transform their promotional campaigns and achieve their moonshot goal of 20% growth year on year. 

Xero has sent rewards through Xoxoday in the past 4 months to its existing customers on each successful referral. They drastically lowered their customer acquisition cost(CAC) from this campaign and also saw a 25% increase in their conversion rate through this rewarding campaign. 
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"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."

What’s Next?

Xero has distributed 1900+ rewards through the Xoxoday platform across the UK and is planning to double down on its efforts in the future. Xero is also looking to utilize Xoxoday for - 

1. Extension in the multi-geo market: Xero plans to expand the usage of the Xoxoday rewards and incentives system in North America, the Middle East, and Africa in the future. With Xoxoday’s global catalog and multi-currency rewards, Xero can extend its rewards in different geographies as they scale.
   
   
2. Xero’s Subsidiary, Planday: Xero has been hacking its way into growth with Xoxoday for its accounting software. Xero plans to introduce rewards and incentives in their subsidiary company called Planday, working planning software, in 2022 to achieve exponential growth.
   
   
3. Add rewards and incentives: Xero also plans to introduce rewards and incentives into other marketing verticals like market research surveys and driving demand generation.