Colombian Fintech Start-up Tributi Chooses Brevo to Support its Growth and Value-driven Conversion Strategy

Growing too fast for their previous email provider

Tributi, a Colombian fintech start-up, is changing the way people do their taxes. Motivated to make the process easier and less expensive for Colombians, Tributi set up shop in 2017 and offers 48-hour and 2-hour tax declaration services. Users answer a series of questions and select the turnaround time they need. Then, Tributi’s software calculates what they owe minus any and all deductions they qualify for, saving their customers time and money.

Primarily focused on B2C operations, Tributi caters to individuals and households filing their taxes. That said, the start-up maintains a number of B2B partnerships with banks, pension funds, and other financial institutions that offer Tributi’s services to their own employees and clients, further expanding their customer base.

Growth Marketer Simón Gómez joined the Tributi team two years ago. At that point, the start-up had a solid marketing strategy, but Simón and his team knew there was room to grow, especially given that Tributi gains 200,000-300,000 new contacts each tax season.

Tributi’s previous email service had plenty of nice features, but it charged the start-up by the size of its contact list, making Tributi’s impressive growth unnecessarily costly. “Simply put, it made no sense for us to pay by contact,” Simón explains.

To fix this, Simón and his team embarked on a thorough survey of email service providers, considering 23 platforms and trialing five finalists. 

For Simón, Brevo’s pricing by email volume, intuitive user experience, and range of advanced features made all the difference, which is why he chose the platform to support Tributi’s growth.

Switching to Brevo and striding toward success

Connecting Tributi’s software to Brevo was the main focus of onboarding. Teams from both companies worked together to configure vital data across the two platforms via the Brevo API. 

As a result, Tributi is able to keep track of customer journeys and create automation scenarios accompanying users each step of the way. Simón says, “Connecting our software with Brevo  was super important to us, especially for sending targeted pre- and post-purchase emails. We now have all our client data and targeted communications nicely mapped out.”

Improving Tributi’s deliverability and open rates was another one of Simón’s goals with Brevo. For starters, the team successfully set up two Dedicated IP addresses with the help of their Customer Success Manager, allowing them to separate their marketing campaign and transactional email sending.

Before switching to Brevo, Tributi’s marketing team sent only one or two email campaigns during low season, later ramping up their communications as tax declarations were due. This strategy had a negative impact on Tributi’s overall email deliverability, so their Customer Success Manager at Brevo suggested they even out their sending pattern throughout the year. 

With a revised strategy, Simón and his team saw their deliverability rates start to climb along with other key email metrics. “This year we’ve started sending monthly newsletters and we’re already seeing nice results. Open and click-through rates are climbing, and unsubscribe rates are dropping,” Simón says.

As for transactional emails, Tributi had been struggling to achieve open rates above 50%. Simón’s team feared the issue stemmed from something related to Tributi’s product itself. Whereas other businesses facing this problem may turn to highly-promotional subject lines as a means to bait contacts into opening emails, Simón had a more creative solution.

By sending customers downloadable content via transactional emails — rather than directly downloading from the online platform — Tributi’s open rates skyrocketed. Simón goes on, “Once we switched to this strategy, which took only two hours to set up, our transactional email open rate increased to 95%.”

Achieving a 5% email conversion rate

With onboarding completed and some new processes in place, Simón and his team felt confident about using the platform and were impressed with its capabilities. “I love the email dashboard — it’s super complete. I love to get there, check the stats, see what contacts are doing, and how they are behaving. The drag-and-drop editor is great too, and I love the fact that I can just save blocks and build campaigns easily,” he adds. 

Brevo has supported Tributi in rolling out an impressive conversion strategy that offers an incredible level of value to Colombians. For context, depending on the last few digits of their ID numbers, Colombians tax payers have different deadlines to submit their income declarations. 

Tributi sends automated and personalized reminders to their contacts, simplifying the tax process and saving them a huge amount of stress. Simón emphasizes that “people see a lot of value in these reminders. No other entity reminds them of their deadlines, so it’s really easy to forget.”

Free from bells and whistles, these reminder emails have a conversion rate of more than 5%. On Tributi’s part, this strategy is an excellent example of value-driven marketing and goes to show how understanding customer pain points, no matter how big or small, is often the simplest, most effective way to grow a business.