Clearent EDU and Clearent Connects

The Problem

The COVID-19 pandemic created a real strain on our roster of retail shops and restaurants. Cancelation requests to our customer success team grew at an alarming rate, and our merchants were looking for help. We stood up the same “We’re Here to Help” page that everyone else did, but we needed to do more quickly to become a voice in the industry.

The Solution

We had a wealth of knowledge on security, mobile payments, and technology, it was just scattershot though-out our marketing campaigns and website. We wanted to create a hub for all of this information. So my team created Clearent EDU, a resource hub for our merchants and software partners. 

Visit Clearent EDU
Podcast Landing Page

Findings

  • We built a custom post type on Clearent.com to handle these resource pages, keeping the design fully open videos, posts, step-by-step guides, downloads, or redirects. Because the site is built in WordPress, indexing and categorizing was built in. We just needed to build out the landing page and search functionality.
  • All content is either hosted in Pardot as downloads, or tracked through campaigns. We try to ungate as much as possible since this is meant to be an SEO / Inbound tactic, but with call to actions on each page.
  • We created “Clearent Connects” as a content campaign to go along with EDU. This included:
    • Clearent Connects Podcast – A weekly podcast that allows us to highlight new technology, talk about the current state of payments, and highlight success stories from our merchants
    • Newsletters – Weekly newsletters for each of our channels with the current payments news, product updates, and guides.

The Results

  • Even though this was meant to be more of an outreach program, we got a fair amount of traffic for new business, especially with our mobile payments program. On average, driving around 5-8 opportunities per month, which becomes a net positive ROR.
  • For the merchants that our customer success team were able to talk into account suspension rather than cancelation, 3/4 of those retuned active merchant status.
  • From The Strawhecker Group secret shopper report:
    • “Clearent’s support of its merchants appears to be top notch. Clearent has created a dedicated team of customer support agents dedicated to helping merchants struggling with the pandemic. Representatives were able to answer questions quickly, accurately, and provide additional information and resources.”