About Candidly
Candidly is an AI-driven student debt and savings optimization platform that addresses the full lifecycle of education expenses and empowers people to make simultaneous progress on paying down student debt and building wealth.
Candidly partners with leading employers, and financial services companies serving the workplace like 401(k) and 403(b) recordkeepers, retirement plan advisors, and more, creating a holistic and inclusive workplace benefit and embedded finance solution.
Kevin's Bio
Kevin Solan is a dynamic marketing leader with a track record of driving growth and innovation in the fintech industry. Currently serving as the Vice President of Marketing at Candidly, a B2B2C SaaS platform, Kevin oversees growth, product, customer and lifecycle marketing efforts where he is responsible for driving pipeline growth and end-user platform utilization.
Prior to his role at Candidly, Kevin held key positions at LendingTree and Valore, where he honed his expertise in product marketing and growth marketing. Kevin graduated from Ithaca College with a degree in communications. Outside of his professional endeavors, Kevin enjoys playing baseball and spending quality time with his wife, Shelly, and their three children, Braeden, Mackenna, and Blake.
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Iterable has helped us manage all of our communications under one roof, while also giving us far better insight into key performance indicators via their insights and reporting dashboards.
Interview
What brings you joy in your role?
As a performance marketer at heart, I find joy in creating campaigns or processes that drive meaningful results at scale. An example of this was standing up a B2B inbound motion via digital campaigns and operational processes that drive a repeatable pipeline for our sales team.
How do you stay inspired or motivated in your work?
I stay motivated in my work as a result of being a lifelong learner and taking pride in the process of iterative improvement. The beauty of marketing, especially digital disciplines, is how rapidly changing it can be. Working at a hyper-growth startup further accelerates and necessitates the need to be scrappy and agile. I routinely look up to other subject matter experts for inspiration, regardless of company stage or age, and adapt accordingly.
What challenges was your team experiencing before Iterable? How has Iterable helped address these challenges?
Prior to using Iterable, our team was using three disparate systems to communicate with end-users: one system for marketing (blasts), one system for transactional, and another for triggered drip campaigns. With our data siloed across various systems, we desperately needed to streamline our martech stack to effectively drive engagement at scale. We ran a rigorous selection process in which Iterable checked all of the boxes. Iterable has helped us manage all of our communications under one roof, while also giving us far better insight into key performance indicators via their insights and reporting dashboards.
What led you to choose Iterable over others in the market?
Moving to Iterable was paramount to solve our acute short-term challenges of federated systems. However, more importantly, we chose to partner with Iterable because of its superior breadth of product offerings which will help us achieve our vision of delivering a multi-channel engagement approach via SMS and in-app as well. Additionally, we’ve been impressed with Iterable’s continued innovation which is significantly leaning into AI-driven solutions and making their platform more accessible to marketers from a data perspective.
Besides Iterable, what are the other tools in your marketing toolkit that you can’t live without?
- For holistic performance tracking, I heavily rely on a combination of Hex and Google Data Studio.
- For operational needs, I can’t live without Zapier which helps us maintain agility and serves as the bridge between other key tools.
- For workflow management, Asana has been the go-to for building our content calendar across channels.
How do you stay up–to–date with the latest trends and developments in marketing?
In today’s virtual office setting, I’ve been staying up-to-date with industry trends by following SME’s on LinkedIn and listening to marketing podcasts. Though, I’m eager to connect more with peers in real life which is why I’m so grateful to be a part of this Marketing Masters program.
If you weren’t a marketer, what would you be?
College Sports Information Director.
What is one goal you’d like to achieve in your lifetime?
Scratch golfer.
Campaign Portfolio
Return to Repayment Campaign
Rapid Response Email
In June 2023, the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s widespread relief plan, ending a 3-year moratorium on federal student loan payments. As a result, 22 million federal student loan borrowers were faced with their first monthly payment in years. This presented an opportunity for Candidly to emerge as a thought leader to its end users who leverage our platform as part of their employer’s financial wellness benefit.Â
Following the Supreme Court decision, we embarked on a return to repayment campaign series from June through October to ensure end users were prepared to face their first bill. We deployed the following types of campaigns as part of this series:
- Breaking news rapid response email
- Blast emails to promote upcoming webinars with our Certified Student Loan Professionals (CSLP’s)
