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SurePayroll

Direct marketer acts and acts quickly to optimize paid search and display campaigns with creative landing page design.

ion makes landing pages as fluid as the SEM that drives traffic to them

"I'm never married to anything. Whatever gets results in testing is all I’m interested in. With ion's platform, I can try everything easily — without IT — I have total control."–Scott Brandt, Vice President of Marketing, SurePayroll

Their slogan is “payroll in 1-2-3” and SurePayroll delivers on that promise as the leading online payroll solution for small businesses. When Scott Brandt brought his direct marketing background from Monster to SurePayroll as the Vice President of Marketing he was already an ion convert. Now his ‘test everything’ approach has SurePayroll converting 6.7% of pay-per-click search and display ad traffic into leads. He’s doing it with 169 landing experiences and 220 sources of traffic. Here’s the story Scott told to ion CEO Justin Talerico.

background

Founded in 2000, SurePayroll is the online alternative to ADP® and Paychex®. The company is dedicated to providing a simple, convenient and accurate online payroll service at a price small businesses can afford. SurePayroll revolutionized payroll by introducing the first completely online payroll and payroll tax-filing solution for businesses within 1-100 employees. Since then, they’ve quickly grown into the #1 online payroll company — recognized by industry experts as the top choice for small businesses.

challenge

As is typical in many technology businesses, the IT team developed and maintains SurePayroll.com. The proprietary system allows for rudimentary A/B testing but when SurePayroll’s SEM buys became more and more sophisticated — their website was having a harder and harder time keeping pace. Scott Brandt, VP Marketing says, “as a direct marketer, I’m conditioned to act and act quickly. Our IT people are great, but quarterly releases were too few and far between for the speed of our campaigns. I needed my landing pages to be as fluid as my SEM buys.”

solution

Scott went on to say “I had used ion's platform previously. I knew what it could do. We started by quickly building templates that enabled us to make fast, easy changes.” Scott’s testing strategy was to use the first three quarters of 2009 to test and find landing page design champions that would be optimized for SurePayroll’s critical Q4 period. If all went according to plan, there would be no need for new tests in Q4 — they would simply ride the champions for great results.

Scott says “I’m never married to anything. Whatever gets results in testing is all I’m interested in. With ion's platform, I can try everything easily — without IT — I have total control. ion's platform lets us use automatic optimization to find champions or manually weight alternatives. I like the manual weighting because I like to closely manage the tests. It lets me use my experience combined with the technology to make fast but not rash decisions. I don’t like to waste traffic on poor performers, so ion’s real-time reporting gauges really help me keep the numbers up while I’m challenging champions. I can just take a small percentage of my traffic and route it to the challenger and keep the overall performance high.”

Another important objective of SurePayroll’s program is attribution. The platform automatically passes collected lead data to SalesForce in real time. In addition to the data entered into the lead-gen form, ion includes a great deal of system-level data like traffic source, medium, geographic location, behaviors, referrer, keywords, device, and much more. Since all of that can be passed into SalesForce, SurePayroll’s follow-up sales calls can be much more personalized and much more specific to the needs of the prospect.

what's next?

SurePayroll is currently letting their proven champion landing page design experiences generate great results in their busiest quarter. Going forward, they’re getting even more specific in their attribution — passing into SalesForce which specific search engine ad creative drove the conversion, and ultimately the sale. Scott says “ion's platform gives us all the data we need to optimize our marketing spend from end to end. There’s full transparency and accountability that lets us confidently allocate our budget to the keywords and ads that generate the most impact to our business.”

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