The world of fintech is continuing to enjoy a boom period, as more and more innovations are reaching the market from ambitious start-ups all the time. Furthermore, the public is benefitting from more choice and flexibility in the financial services and functions available to them – Fortune says nearly 90% of Americans now use fintech in some way. This is helping fintech remain an attractive proposition to investors, too: according to a report by CB Insights, fintech companies raised $13.4billion in the first quarter of 2021 alone.
This success doesn’t come without its own challenges, though. As the marketplace becomes more saturated, it becomes harder and harder for fintech businesses to stand out from the crowd, and this makes effective marketing more important than ever. This can be difficult to achieve for a variety of reasons specific to fintech: a lack of customer trust, regulation, complexity, security, and limited marketing budgets all play a part.
As Andrea Linehan, CMO at CurrencyFair, put it: “What is true for traditional financial institutions is true for fintech; trust, credibility and reliability come first. Even the most ambitious early adopters will expect these attributes to be true before moving their money to or through a fintech.”
In this blog, we’ll explore the biggest marketing challenges for fintechs in more detail, and the best fintech marketing solutions for navigating past those challenges.
The main concerns for a fintech marketer
Of all the concerns that a fintech faces as they grow, two in particular stand out. The first is in attracting and retaining customers. Fintechs generally invest heavily in trying to bring new customers in, through discounts, cashback and other incentives.
However, as these offers expire and competitors’ incentives look more alluring, customers are very quick to jump ship. In 2020, the average finance app was subject to an uninstall rate of 35.5%, according to ThoughtLab – and that’s before considering anyone who hasn’t uninstalled an app but simply isn’t using it anymore.
The second concern relates to security, especially regarding customers’ personal and financial data. Innovating through more flexible functionality, and using customer data for targeted marketing, has to be carefully balanced with a need to keep funds and information protected from malicious activity. Not only is this a challenge in its own right, but it also influences efforts to retain and attract customers, too.
Fintech marketing strategies and trends that can boost growth
The best thing fintechs can do to create marketing that inspires confidence and loyalty among customers is to explore marketing automation as much as possible. Automated technology can not only make marketing more efficient, but it can also help make it more secure, more personalised, and better integrated across channels and devices.
In particular, we recommend automation to support these four important areas:
- Focus on customer retention: a little customer retention goes a long way: Harvard Business Review research says that a 5% improvement in retention can boost profitability by 2%. Getting detailed data on user engagement, and using analytics tools to gain insights from that data, can help you target customers and inspire loyalty. Actions like gifts, appreciation messages, referral programmes and loyalty points, sent out automatically, all inspire long-term custom. This kind of automation helped Wint Wealth grow its user base from 15,000 to more than 100,000.
- Automate lead nurturing: marketing emails that are targeted to the right customers with the right information at the right time are vastly more effective. This means qualifying and segmenting audiences, and using lead management to follow up qualified leads with relevant real-time information. This work can be time-consuming, but for personal loan app CASHe, relying on automation to do it instead reduced the human time required for lead nurturing by 75%.
- Improve digital customer experiences: customers want a seamless, stress-free, intuitive experience from start to finish, every time they use their chosen fintech service or app. Delivering that requires understanding all their interactions, and where certain areas are doing well or badly, so that changes can be made as a result. Automated testing and reporting, which can quantify the strength of the links between individual touchpoints and engagement or revenue, is vital for making this possible.
- Explore personalisation: connected to the previous point, these experiences must be personalised to individual customers. That way, customers feel valued by the fintech, and get a service that’s perfectly tailored to their needs. This can be achieved through automation in many ways, such as: multi-channel communication at specific points throughout their journeys; automated workflows and lead qualification that help co-ordinate and refine these comms; and chatbots for fast-response customer support
In summary
At a time when fintechs have to work hard to stand out from the crowd, marketing automation is vital for delivering excellent customer experiences without compromising the safety and security of data. That’s why it should form a core part of any good fintech marketing strategy, so that you can win more customers, retain them for longer and give them the personalised treatment they’re looking for.
Retainly’s marketing automation platform is ideal to help you manage all your leads, communications, and personalisation in one place. Find out more on how it works and book a demo here.
