Keap is an all-in-one marketing and sales automation platform that helps small businesses improve their customer relationship management. Its mission is to simplify growth for its customers. Since those customers represent a wide range of sizes and maturity levels, there’s no one-size-fits-all fix for their challenges. Keap is constantly looking for new ways to help all of its customers streamline business practices, including payment processing and sales tax compliance.

Challenge

Because Keap wanted to make it simple for businesses to join its platform, Keap allowed its customers to connect to whichever payment provider they were already using.

However, by early 2019, Keap was managing more than 20 payment providers, and it was difficult to make any updates to its payments infrastructure. In some instances, Keap was missing out on revenue because customers were managing payments outside of the Keap platform.

This was not only costing Keap money—it was also forcing its customers to spend more of their limited budgets on additional software and integrations. “We had customers who were adamant about using Stripe,” said Danny Diede, product manager and head of payments for Keap. “We saw that people were willing to pay for the platform, so we dove into Stripe’s integration architecture. It just made it immediately clear that partnering with Stripe was the right path forward.”

Solution

Keap chose to consolidate its finance infrastructure with Stripe. Keap wanted to work with a payment provider that would help its customers grow while enabling it to scale its own platform. The platform was excited to introduce two key features: additional payment methods, such as ACH, and sales tax automation through Stripe Tax.

Prior to Stripe, the only payment option Keap’s customers could accept was credit cards. Credit card fees on individual transactions were costly, and Keap wanted to offer an alternative. Now Keap’s customers can accept bank account payments, and Stripe Connect allows them to manage all of their transactions directly through Keap. “Being able to integrate Stripe and still have everything feel like our product was amazing,” said Diede.

As Keap grows, it can also immediately offer new payment options for new markets. “Some payment methods are more common in other regions. Implementing a one-off project might have cost more than it was worth. But with Stripe, I can go into the backend of the system and flip a payment method on in a matter of minutes,” said Diede.

Most small business owners aren’t experts in navigating variations in state and local sales taxes—or at handling the ins and outs of filing and remittance. Keap’s customers were stuck manually setting up error-prone tax tables that required specific local tax knowledge. Keap turned to Stripe Tax to help all of its customers automate and standardize their tax management. “The cost is so low, especially compared to paying a CPA [Chartered Public Accountant] to fix tax problems after the fact. Knowing that Stripe understands all of the regulations and keeps everything up to date removes a ton of our customers' fears around managing taxes,” Diede added.

Since the Tax integration works across payment processors, Keap has been able to offer tax automation to all its customers, even those who don’t use Stripe as their payment processor yet.

Results

Removing third-party costs and transaction fees

Since Keap is an all-in-one solution, it needed its payments platform to support its customers’ payments from start to finish. Some payment providers charged additional fees on payment transfers, and customers were incurring those costs. By consolidating payment solutions through Stripe, Keap’s customers no longer have to pay those additional costs and can grow faster.

Achieving an 85% customer retention rate with a more streamlined payment process

The ease of adoption, along with thousands of dollars in transaction fee savings, has contributed to an increased customer retention rate. Keap saw a significant increase in retention rate for customers that use Stripe as their payment provider. Its rate is currently at 85%, which is above average for the industry.

Launching tax automation months faster than its competitors

Tax is a key part of Keap’s retention strategy, and the short deployment period has allowed it to provide a highly requested service in record time. Other solutions the company evaluated would have taken six months to a year to deploy, but Keap was able to launch Tax in less than eight weeks. “Month over month, we’re seeing more of our customers migrate to Stripe. Every three to six months, Stripe has something new and revolutionary for our small business customers, and I know it’s just going to be a couple lines of code for my team to integrate it,” Diede said.