You never know which touchpoint will be the one
October made me realize how non-linear the customer journey can be after a few demand gen “firsts” that happened over the past few weeks:
Someone responded very early in a pre-show sequence, requesting to meet before the show
One booked a last-minute meeting the day before a trade show
Another prospect clicked the meeting link in the follow-up email after a show was over
Someone responded weeks into a nurture campaign
Four people. Four very different moments.
I’ve been tinkering and executing these campaigns for 1.5 years and historically, none of these touchpoints ever saw a conversion. You can only imagine how pleased I was to see these results!
As a marketer, I spend a lot of time trying to identify the ideal touchpoint, cadence, CTA, or conversion moment. These examples are a reminder that I can’t predict everything and prospects will bring their own timing into the campaign. Still, my job is to give them enough relevant reasons to engage while maximizing my opportunities to get information along the way.
Revisiting prospects who already told us no
I also worked on a new email campaign for a very different audience this month: prospects who previously went through the sales process with us but ultimately chose a competitor.
I liked this project because the starting point was different from most outbound: These people already know who we are, we know they had a need, and at some point, they made the decision that another provider was the better option.
So instead of introducing Xplor Pay from scratch, the outreach campaign was designed around a simpler question:
How are things going with the provider you chose?
From there, we can give them reasons to reconsider based on what we now offer. The campaign covers areas like our Flex Framework, dedicated partner and merchant support, transparent pricing, and embedded payments resources.
The goal is to acknowledge that circumstances change. It’s very possible that:
Their current provider may not be meeting expectations.
Their payments strategy may have matured.
Their priorities may be different now.
And all the while, our own offering has continued to change. It’s another example of why I’m interested in finding more demand within audiences we already have instead of always assuming the next MQL needs to come from someone brand new.
More verticals, more workflow-specific messaging
October is peak trade show season, and I built campaigns around funeral, storm restoration, roofing, and more.
The more vertical campaigns I build, the more specific I need the messaging to become. “Embedded payments can help you grow” isn’t enough of a message on its own. Instead, the more interesting story is buried a level deeper in how money moves through that particular business.
For funeral and cemetery software, that means understanding workflows around at-need and preneed payments, payment plans, recurring transactions, reporting, and reconciliation.
For software supporting storm restoration and roofing businesses, the payments story looks different: deposits, progress payments, collections in the field, financing handoffs, card and ACH options, and reconciling payments back to individual jobs.
And since we’ve been doing this process for over a year, I had the luxury of being able to look back at the results from previous campaigns when building these new ones. Historical performance gives me clues about which topics or styles of messaging earned engagement before, but I’m increasingly using that as a starting point rather than a formula to copy.
Looking for the next payments growth opportunity
My content work covered a pretty wide range of payments topics this month.
One Payment Pulse episode focused on why credit cards get declined and what businesses can do to keep an awkward checkout moment from automatically becoming a lost sale.
Another looked at least cost routing and a very different question: two SaaS platforms can process similar payment volume but have very different processing economics. Transaction mix, available debit networks, routing eligibility, interchange programs, and compliance can all affect what that volume is actually worth.
Toward the end of the month, I also worked on and was featured in an episode about why great payments programs need marketing. Building the technology is only one part of growing payments. Customers also need to understand the value, adopt it, and keep using it.
Those topics eventually came together in our October Payment Pulse newsletter, “Fall Into Your Next Growth Opportunity.”
The newsletter also pulled in content around where vertical SaaS companies should invest next, payments data, faster payments, agentic AI, and how payments can become more closely connected to customers’ everyday workflows.
That’s one thing I like about working on the newsletter each month. Individual pieces of content may start with very different topics, but putting them together forces me to zoom out and ask what larger conversation we’re actually having with the audience.
This month, that conversation was less about adding something completely new and more about finding additional value in what’s already there.
What October Taught Me
October reminded me that growth doesn’t always require starting from scratch. Sometimes it comes from a prospect who finally responds to a touchpoint you’ve used for months, a former opportunity that’s worth revisiting, or a campaign you can improve with a year of historical data.
I can’t control when someone will be ready to engage, but I can keep building better opportunities for them to do it. After 1.5 years of testing, adjusting, and learning from these campaigns, seeing some of those new conversion moments show up made October an especially rewarding month.