Transforming your Banking App with Mobile Marketing
“An overview of how CMA transformed an emerging Mobile Banking App by redefining their Mobile Marketing Strategy from user acquisition through to retention & engagement”
For an infographic summarizing some of the key findings in this case-study, please click here
Introduction
Mobile banking is transforming the way customers view their banking services, but along with this comes a higher expectation of the digital experience on offer. In order to improve their traction in an increasingly busy market, our client had invested heavily in reviewing their App end-to-end to see where improvements could be made from their customer acquisition strategy through to onboarding, retention, engagement and customer monetization.
The CMA team established a 4 month project plan to work with the client in a collaborative manner whilst we evaluated and then redefined their Mobile Marketing strategy, which ultimately led to some powerful results at the end of the project.
Customer Acquisition & App Downloads
One of the most obvious places to start was to look at the customer acquisition strategy, as the old computer science saying goes ‘garbage in, garbage out’. There was no point in refining user retention, if users were simply installing the App through an incentivized download, and never likely to use the services. The existing media mix was fairly varied, although focused heavily on several ad networks we know to be successful in gaming, but not necessarily with more traditional industries. A quick review of the full acquisition funnel revealed a big problem – 20% of downloads never got to session 1, and a further 60% didn’t make it to sign-up. This meant 80% of the traffic was potentially wasted media spend.
The CMA team started from the ground-up, testing the basics of brand identity again, attempting to see which copy and creatives resonated on which acquisition channels & target demographics (using a small budget for testing). We then matched the downstream in-app behaviours with download numbers to judge which combinations performed best. Unsurprisingly, we found the highest number of downloads, with the lowest number of valuable users came from our suspect ad-networks. We found the brand resonated best targeting several key, younger demographics, on social media channels.
Thankfully, as a significant amount of media spend was going towards the low-performing ad networks, we were able to switch this over to our proven channels, and started to see the effects immediately. By the end of the engagement, we were driving slightly fewer downloads of the App, but the quality of each one was far higher. Monitoring the install->sign-up conversion funnel, we saw it had increased by a whopping 23% - needless to say, a great result in terms of new customer growth.
Driving first-time depositors
One of the next issues to address was the challenge of getting a new customer to deposit. They may have signed-up, but getting them to put money in the account was the next critical step to securing them as a longer-term valuable customer. The existing new user journey focused largely on welcoming customers, but didn’t educate them on the benefits of using the bank, or how to deposit, or move their existing provi-der services across. CMA developed a 30-day roadmap, targeting 5 core groups of users (as well as some sub-groups), pushing them through the steps from 1-5;
- Those that hadn’t yet signed up
- Those that had signed-up but couldn’t yet use the account (KYC restricted)
- Those that had an active account but hadn’t yet deposited money (these are the ones that still need convincing)
- Those that have signed up and completed their first deposit, but little else.
- The ‘power’ users that have taken more than one product and are showing heavy engagement.We suggested a new mobile marketing vendor that could support a mobile message centre (App inbox), email and interstitials as well as push notifications, which we helped the client integrate and deploy, as well as provide training on. A newly designed multi-channel 30-day new user/early life journey was then deployed, and the results were measured at the end of the engagement. The CMA team had increased the number of people completing KYC requirements by 11%, and increased the number of first-time depositors by an incredible 13% - a double-digit improvement to the number of valuable Customers the client was onboarding!
Gamifying the banking experience
The client had already taken a novel approach to encouraging its customers to maintain a healthy balance – they had a 3,4,5, 6, 9 and 12-24 month accumulator challenge, similar to those we see in the gaming sector.
These sorts of mechanisms are valuable as they not only help focus Customers on saving, but also drive strong retention rates over the initial critical period. At the end of each stage, the customer was rewarded with free items such as gift vouchers, a higher (or lower) interest rate, hidden product features, or merchant discounts. After consultation on the mechanics of this setup (we advised on a few minor improvements), the team set about creating an engaging marketing strategy around this feature. Again, using the additional message channels we now had available, regular encouragement, attainment updates and progression indicators resonated exceptionally well with the client’s younger customer demographic as expected. 3 months after we launched this campaign, we measured the effect on account balances amongst our client’s customer base, and on average the balances were 6% higher than before which was an incredible result, not-least as it increased the bank’s liquidity. This wasn’t the end result as the figures showed ongoing, continuous improvement…
Reducing Delinquency
Late payments are nothing new to credit products and the banking sector, and sadly even a Mobile-only bank must contend with these. Whilst this wasn’t a primary focus for our client, we had experience of implementing marketing strategies to reduce delinquency rates with other financial services clients, and designed an innovative, ‘remind & educate’ campaign that embraced delinquency propensity modelling & fairly advanced data analytical techniques to identify when users were likely to be idle (and therefore had time to process payments).
The campaign also used interactive push notifications to simplify the process, making it far easier to pay their credit card bill, largely from the notification itself. Coupling this with real-time segmentation and a 3 month test-and-optimise strategy, instances of late payments for their credit card products dropped by 8%. Customer’s also loved this messaging, as it helped them keep on top of their financial arrangements at a time that worked for them – reflected in the improved NPS score.
Summary
At the end of the 4 month engagement, CMA had truly transformed the client’s Mobile Marketing strategy, not only by better educating, reminding, communicating and gamifying the experience for their customers, but also by optimizing their media spend and acquisition strategy to drive far higher quality installs. The results speak for themselves;
ConsultMyApp
A bit about us…
We’re an independent Mobile Marketing consultancy practice based in London with years of experience across multiple industry verticals, from financial services, retail, travel & leisure & hospitality to games and iGaming. Significant experience working in the financial services space with some of the world’s largest banks puts CMA in a unique position to advise our banking clients on areas of Mobile Marketing specific to F/S. We focus our work on the 4 pillars of the user lifecycle - acquisition, retention, engagement and monetization. To deliver exceptional results we design and implement innovative media and marketing strategies for each of our clients and their Mobile products, not only driving high-quality users to their App, but also ensuring those users are retained and fully engaged throughout their lifecycle with a comprehensive messaging programme.
For more information on the team or to have a look at some of our other educational material, you can visit our website at www.consultmyapp.com or please reach out to us by email: [email protected], as we’d love to hear from you and see how we can make your App the best it can possibly be!
For an infographic summarizing some of the key findings in this case-study, please click here
