Braintree: Fintech Marketing Case Study

THE SETUP

Developers picked it but finance had to sign it.

Braintree came out of a capital raise ready to take on decades of terminal processors running on outdated transaction rails. They were early. They were not alone. Stripe entered with similar positioning and the race started immediately.

Both companies needed the same thing to win, which was developer adoption at speed.

Braintree had built a real following in the Ruby on Rails community. That following was loyal and it was small relative to the opportunity. Taking share from enterprise merchants meant scaling developer buy-in by an order of magnitude.

The complication was who actually signs. At an enterprise, a developer can champion a platform without having the authority to choose it. So the work had to reach two audiences at once, and one of them was openly hostile to marketing.

Our work helped lead to an $875M acquisition by PayPal.

THE SOLUTION

Selling through developers

We went into the sandbox and talked to the developers already using the platform, plus Braintree’s own engineers, to understand how devs think and where they sit in a buying decision. First-party research, gathered from the people the campaign had to reach.

Three things came out of it. Meet developers on the platforms and media they already respect. Stay honest and unobtrusive, because this audience finds the seams in anything else. And map the enterprise journey, where a developer influences a decision that finance signs off on.

Program highlights include:

The Thoughtfully Braintree campaign, built so every statement, experience, and publisher placement had to justify itself
Messaging shifted from product features to benefits
Campaigns built around a use case, since content without utility does not hold engineers
Content that gave developer champions what they needed to make the case to a C-suite
The company’s first automated email program, integrating Silverpop with Salesforce
Sandbox signup nurture built to move trials into transacting accounts
Paid media running across four continents

THE STRATEGY

Arm the champion, reach the check writer

As Braintree scaled, sales got stretched and close rates suffered. Nurturing became the bottleneck. The automated program we built took MQLs out of the developer sandbox and moved them toward becoming customers without a rep touching every step.

Drip education did the second job. It gave developer influencers the material to convert decision makers above them, which is the part most developer marketing skips.

As Braintree expanded internationally, we extended media programs across four continents. At peak the agency managed more than $1 million per month in program investment, with paid search gains across Australia, Canada, and the EU.

Then Venmo arrived. The acquisition added valuation and integration challenges at the same time, and gave marketing a new value proposition to build against as the company moved toward its own exit.

THE RESULTS

A developer community that moved enterprise revenue

Over four years, we built support inside the developer community and buy-in from the financial leaders who approve the contracts.

14X

Increase in MQLs per month

60%

Decrease in sales investment per converted client

32%

Increase in average monthly conversions

Why it matters:

Close rate improved 13.9% while the cost of closing went down, so the nurture program replaced sales effort rather than adding to it
Average cost per acquisition dropped sharply as the developer community grew, which is the opposite of what usually happens when volume scales
The program ran globally at more than $1 million per month in investment, and PayPal acquired Braintree for $875M

Envisionit played an instrumental role in the success and growth of Braintree. Their partnership with our marketing team, and deep understanding of payments, allowed us to develop campaigns that drove positive ROI and positioned Braintree as a fintech leader.

Tracey Weinberg SVP of Marketing, Braintree