The fastest way to grow any business is through strong, trusted partnerships—for no one has ever built an empire alone. And the most successful partnerships provide a plethora of benefits and support in various forms. Katapult not only allows merchants a way to offer customers lease purchasing options, but also a full team of agency-like support.
Modern Tire Dealer sat down with Robbie Lester, Director of Client Success at Katapult to discuss how a partnership with Katapult can help master your marketing, boost transaction volume, and increase customer retention by offering lease purchasing options.
How would you describe Katapult to someone who may have not heard of the company?
Katapult is a lease purchasing option for consumers. Essentially, we allow customers that have either developing credit, or no credit at all, a pathway to purchasing durable goods that traditional finance doesn’t provide. Durable goods can be anything from a mattress to sleep on, kitchen appliances, furniture, or in the case for this article, certain automotive parts.
Could you explain how Katapult acts as an agency and a lease purchasing provider?
An agency is going to provide expertise and recommendations—anywhere from design, to marketing, to training and support. And that's really what we do here at Katapult—and we do that, in essence, for free. Our goal is to help shop owners understand how to unlock an entirely new customer segment by combining their product expertise with our expertise in lease-purchase payment options..
On the retail side of things, we have a store locator page right on our website. The locator is phenomenal for the consumer who has either done business with Katapult before, or maybe has been pre-approved through Katapult. We spotlight different merchants over the timeframe of the year. Owners can promote free shipping offers or discounts on tires through the site.
What kind of marketing and cross-promotional capabilities does Katapult offer?
We offer shops and merchants a marketing toolkit which includes assets for their site from a merchandising perspective. The toolkit includes logos, banners, and pre-approval buttons, coded and ready to insert on their website. We also offer email banners and templates that work really well. Regardless of whether or not owners have technical expertise, we make it super easy for them to update the site merchandising within the email or marketing realm. We even offer social media marketing templates for Facebook and Twitter. Katapult packages these assets in a way that makes it easy for the small business, and gives guidance along the way.
We pride ourselves on properly educating the customer, and we highly recommend that owners add landing pages to their websites so customers can learn more about Katapult. That way, we do everything in our power to properly educate the consumer so they have a great experience, and come back again.
Does Katapult offer support for owners throughout the partnership?
That’s where my team steps in, we're the dedicated advisor for the merchants as they're working on getting their offerings up and running. Not only do owners have the client success team, but they also have the support of the integration team to assist throughout the integration process. We are very fast to the marketplace, and I believe that we're the technology leaders as well.
Our dedicated team is not only marketing for Katapult, but is also ready to assist in any of the marketing requests from merchant partners about Katapult’s program. Our goal is to make sure merchants are as successful as possible. If we can give them just a little nugget here and there of marketing advice, that's going to boost results. We've got the client success team that plays in a lot of different arenas, but then we've got dedicated teams even behind the client success team as well.
Why should Modern Tire Dealer readers partner with Katapult?
We differentiate ourselves by driving value for our merchants. It's not just about providing a payment option on a website. It's how we take that payment option, draw in a new customer segment, and then remarket to those customers to make sure they keep coming back. Katapult provides that additional layer of support.
I believe that we're the dedicated adviser to these merchants working to drive even more traffic through promotional opportunities by leveraging some of those keyword searches and ads through social media. And on top of that, we have connections with many different marketing agencies and partners that add even more value.
To learn more about Katapult, visit katapult.com or email Robbie at [email protected].
