Bread partners with all kinds of retailers to offer pay-over-time financing solutions by offering simple, white-labeled financing solutions earlier in the funnel with transparent, flexible terms. They are modernizing financing for the 21st century consumer and merchant; working with the merchant to weave financing into the right points in each customer’s journey. In this edition of The State of Marketing, Bread's Vice President of Merchant Success talks marketing challenges and solutions.

Tell us about your partnership with Listrak.

We see Listrak as a great complement to our financing technology here at Bread. Together, our teams work with partners to evaluate how financing should be positioned throughout the email program to maximize engagement and conversions. Bread and Listrak have built an integration that allows retailers to programmatically embed financing offers into email messages. This has increased revenue generated through the abandoned cart channel by 155% in recent tests.

Tell us about your philosophy/approach to working with your various retailers on marketing?

We take a merchant-first approach to everything we do. From the beginning of our relationships, we get to know how a merchant markets to consumers, and, in partnership, we model tactics to increase customer acquisition, conversion, and retention through Bread’s financing options. From there, it’s all about using the outcome data we gather to continually make improvements until we can meet and exceed their sales and AOV goals over the long term.

Can you provide an example of that marketing philosophy/partnerships in action?

One that comes to mind was actually profiled in a case study we conducted with one of our retail partners, The RTA Store. We think that financing is a massive draw for driving sales, so, with the help of Listrak, we integrated Bread directly into The RTA Store’s cart abandonment email campaigns. We conducted a simple A/B email campaign to test the impact of offering financing in cart abandonment emails. One used standard language and messaging, while the other offered financing options through Bread. The results were wildly successful—emails that included a personalized financing offer saw a 3X improvement in email conversion rates and drove a 155% increase in revenue. We also saw that personalized financing checkout links saw a 38% lift in CTR and 86% higher AOV.

What are the biggest marketing challenges facing retailers right now, particularly with respect to how they make use of data?

On a very high level, we’re collaborating internally and with our partners to discover the best ways to use the data we have to get a retailer’s customers back into the sales funnel for a repeat purchase. We want to take data that focuses on, for instance, financing interactions and create a clearer picture of what it will take to build long-term customer loyalty, possibly in the form of cross-selling or re-targeting, for our partners. Few in our space are thinking about this post-purchase path nearly enough, and as a data-minded company, we want to use those tools to our advantage because we measure our success by that of our partners.

How can retailers increase their probability of digital marketing success today?

For us, it’s about creating a dynamic and personalized financing experience. Once a customer is approved for financing through Bread, they get to see how much more they can purchase throughout their shopping journey. That level of personalization enables greater buying power and intent. There is so much competition in retail, and personalizing the journey for shoppers can be a conversion game-changer. We accomplish that by engaging customers earlier and putting their purchase choices in digestible terms. We then aim to keep that positive momentum in the post-purchase path.

What does the digital marketing playbook for retailers look like five years from now?

The customer conversation will become increasingly integrated across channels, and our definition of omnichannel will continue to evolve as the retailer’s knowledge of the customer deepens. We’ve built solutions that are cognizant of this convergence—we need to create a seamless and relevant customer experience, questioning and testing every touch point throughout the life cycle.

What can we look forward to from Bread in the coming months?

We have a really robust product road map that we’re excited about. That includes taking a proactive approach to building omnichannel solutions for our retailers, testing products that can address that longstanding fragmentation between online and in-store shopping experiences. It’s just one of the many areas we see as an increasingly valuable part of our business moving forward.