Hay Group wanted to align its MarTech stack and its use of it with partners and technology that would enable them to grow at the same pace. For Hay Group, it wasn’t just about implementing an enterprise-grade marketing automation platform with all the bells and whistles, it was about finding a partner that understands their business opportunity and its evolving plans for growth. Brad Pidgeon, Head of Digital Marketing at Hay Group said, “Acoustic is a solution that can grow with us. We are focused on sustainable growth as a startup, but we also want to grow our MarTech stack in the very same way. We learned some hard lessons with a large enterprise solution provider, where we felt we were treated as a number. This wasn’t how we wanted to work, we wanted to be a true partner and we found this level of partnership with Acoustic.”

In 2020, Hay Group launched their embedded finance platform, Shaype,
that allows companies to build unique financial experiences faster, smarter and with
more confidence.

Alex Lloyd, Chief Brand and Marketing Officer at Hay Group said, “The rebrand from 'Hay-as-a-Service' to 'Shaype' helping us to be more distinctive and position around to the key benefits of the platform, product and services we provide, was also representative of changes we made in marketing team processes and tools to be more streamlined and effective. The first application of this was to inform a large and complex audience of customers, partners, suppliers, industry bodies, investors, regulators, etc. of the change and that the new brand would be launched in May 2022. These relationships are all extremely important and we needed a MarTech solution that was going to help us to build and manage complex personalised campaigns with ease.”

Hay Group used Acoustic to segment CRM data across these key audiences and deliver tailored communications to each.

Shaype is growing quickly and working with some of the largest financial businesses in Australia. They are also getting a lot of attention from international businesses so they wanted a marketing stack that would help them to grow their business beyond Australia. The company is in start-up mode but needs to scale its brand awareness and products to a larger audience. To do this, they are relying on targeted digital (email and SMS) marketing campaigns to communicate their business model and offerings.

Alex Lloyd said, “As a start-up focused on sustainable growth, having solutions that give our marketing team the same control and flexibility to build campaigns as we deliver for our clients to build unique payment experiences is vitally important to us. Acoustic gives us the power of an enterprise-grade solution while also being easy to use.”

Brad Pidgeon shared that for them, Acoustic just made total sense as a marketing automation partner, “When we did the assessment of Acoustic’s solution, it was impressive to see how much Acoustic ticked all the boxes for a marketing automation platform, including that we could use it for both B2B and B2C campaigns. We also liked that the licensing could be done in stages aligned with our growth trajectory.”

The fact that Acoustic was so supportive of Hay Group’s integration partner in Helium was also key to partnering with Acoustic. “Everything has just aligned and we haven't had any major issues. It’s going smoothly.”

Hay Group’s first use of Acoustic was an incredibly important one —announcing the Shaype embedded finance brand to several critical audiences such as current and potential investors, clients, and prospects. Several additional announcement opportunities arose as launch day approached, which required the campaigns to be rebuilt almost from scratch.

They were able to do this in the face of a rapidly looming hard deadline because of the drag-and-drop capability in Multichannel Composer and the fact that no coding or development team was needed. Brad added, “With Multichannel Composer, we can independently create and roll out email and SMS campaigns that are personalized to our customers all without writing a line of code or involving other teams.”

Brad Pidgeon said, “While having all the capabilities of Acoustic on hand to create and amend the campaigns filled our team with confidence, the success of an announcement EDM campaign is measured by its metrics. We were overjoyed to have a campaign open rate of 72% and a click-through rate of 29%, while also achieving a delivery rate of 97% for our first ever campaign for the Shaype domain. Ensuring delivery and engagement were critical and the Acoustic empowered us to achieve both these objectives.”

Hay Group is using marketing automation as a baseline for how it will grow, and with Acoustic they’ve found a partner that can scale with them to support their growth in a thoughtful and measured way.