Brightcove Helps Xero Boost Customer Conversion Rate and Live Happily Ever After

Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Beauty and the Beast—there’s nothing more moving than a great love story. But have you ever heard of Xena and Xero? No? Well, we hadn’t either. That is until Xero’s Pat Macfie stopped by this year’s PLAY conference to introduce the two.

First we met Xena, a small business owner who loved manual spreadsheets. She was happy with her tried-and-true accounting process and wasn’t looking for anything new. Xero, on the other hand, was an online accounting software trying desperately to woo Xena over to the cloud. He made some small talk, tried his best lines, but it wasn’t until he said something particularly special that finally turned Xena’s head:

“Your spreadsheet’s a fool. If I was your accounting application, I’d never let you do your banking reconciliation alone.”

Xero Woos Customers with Informative and Engaging Video Content

Macfie posed this clever tale of attraction and romance to illustrate Xero’s approach to the customer journey, a roadmap firmly rooted in video marketing strategy. At every stage of its sales funnel, from acquiring leads, to nurturing prospects, and converting customers, Xero uses video content to guide target audiences toward a successful business partnership. Not only that, but Xero also provides customers with engaging, educational video, ensuring users a smooth onboarding process and overall customer satisfaction.

“At the end of the day, we’re still an accounting software, and to get that up and running does require users to navigate a few tricky moments,” Macfie. “If we can’t navigate the relationship through those moments, it dies. But if we do get through it, then we’ve landed a paying customer that’s unlikely to leave.”

Using Brightcove’s Video Marketing Suite, including integrations with Marketo’s marketing platform and Salesforce’s CRM applications, Xero managed to create a transparent acquisition and retention process, one that provides Macfie and his team the necessary data to successfully guide customers toward a long-term, committed business partnership.

“Marriage! That’s where the real adventure begins,” says Macfie. “It’s a whole new journey based on deep understanding and shared experiences. That’s why we don’t take retention for granted. As our customers move throughout the process and their experiences shift slightly, we also shift our content in order to deepen customers’ understanding of our products.”

Brightcove’s Partner Integration: The Beating Heart of Xero’s Customer Conversion

With the help of Brightcove’s Audience module and its integration with Marketo’s marketing automation platform, Macfie is able to leverage Xero’s video analytics to determine a highly-focused, highly-effective customer retention process. More importantly, the data provided by Brightcove Audience helps Macfie in assessing the impact of Xero’s video marketing initiatives.

When the two technologies combine, they work together to share detailed information on video viewership among Xero’s customer database. Or simply put, Xero is able to see who among its entire list of customer contacts have watched video content and for how long. After identifying interested viewers, Marketo then provides them with a lead generation form—the first step to customer acquisition.

“Audience integration provides us with the information we need to have highly focused, contextual conversations with customers,” says Macfie. “Without it, it’s difficult to move beyond this point in the sales journey.”

Those contextual conversations happen with the help of Salesforce, Xero’s CRM platform. Similar to Brightcove’s Audience integration, Xero links Brightcove’s video platform to its Salesforce CRM interface, giving Macfie a detailed profile of user engagement. By tracking a variety of engagement metrics among viewers, the digital team can not only (1) modulate marketing efforts to reflect more impactful video content, but they can also (2) provide Xero’s sales team with a comprehensive list of prospects, their preferred viewing behavior, and subjects in which they’re most interested. From this point, the sales team can then qualify leads and create personalized communications tailored to these viewers’ video preferences.

Education is Key to Customer Satisfaction

But for Xero, it isn’t just about conversion. The company maintains a large constituency of satisfied customers, providing them the education necessary to leverage Xero’s products and boost their own businesses. Macfie explains how important it is that Xero remains committed to their customers’ needs, even after the closing of a sale.

“To help customers really enjoy the benefits of our products, we need to give them a fundamentally different type of video content and user experience that reflect this stage of the customer journey.”

Macfie has already migrated about 2,000 pieces of video content to the Brightcove platform. Using Brightcove’s customized players, complete with advanced chapterization, text-to-anchor-point links, and product simulations, these video assets are distributed to Xero’s customers, where they can then keep up-to-date on all of the company’s products and technical know-how.

“We’re committed to ongoing customer and product support through our integration with Brightcove,” says Macfie. “We plan to support our customers’ entire content journey throughout their lifecycle, all within our app.”

Want to hear other ways Brightcove can help boost your company’s sales and customer retention? Join us next year at Brightcove PLAY 2018.

To get on the invite list, just RSVP to play@brightcove.com from your work email address.

And to learn more about how Brightcove can help increase your reach and revenue with video marketing, click here.