Jan 05, 2020
Implementation of marketing automation in a fintech organization reveals a series of opportunities for the business. There’s a chance to create a cross-channel user journey with connected, inspired experiences. It helps deliver the right content at the right time to the right customer.
EarlySalary is India’s first platform that offers advance salaries to earning employed professionals. Any salaried professional of age 18-55 can sign up on the app to receive an advance salary or an instant personal loan. From inception in 2016, they have already dispersed around 1 million salary advances to different professionals.
Anuj Ranka, Performance Marketing Head of India, EarlySalary, joined us for a webinar with Nikhil Iyer, Emails and DPM Product Manager, MoEngage.Â
EarlySalary targets millennials (aged 24-45) – digital-savvy customers. Since this audience is already used to a seamless experience in other industries, they look for smooth experiences when they are taking a loan or salary advance.
Therefore, from a marketing perspective, it is necessary to ensure that marketing automation serves users in a manner matching other leading industries. However, we still need to ensure that the right information is utilized to cater to user demands.
“We want to make sure that we don’t create any experience which dilutes the trust of a customer. Hence, marketing automation is a bit different in the Fintech industry.”Â
To start with marketing automation, think from a customer’s point of view.
Map the customer’s journey end-to-end. For example:
Understand every stage along with the drop-off at every stage. For instance, how many users are entering the funnel but dropping off before reaching the final outcome?
Based on the understanding of the drop-off of the user at every stage, EarlySalary defined channels that were useful in changing the outcomes.
For instance, if they are facing high drop-off at the bank statement stage, they identify the reason behind this drop-off:
According to the state of the mind of the user, the marketing automation channel can be identified. For example, email marketing can be utilized to resolve trust issues that the customer is experiencing.
“Fundamentally, it is important to understand the user’s perspective and put yourself into user’s shoes to experiment different scenarios and find a scenario which reduces drop-off.”
In Fintech, users must have valuable data available to make a decision. For this reason, email marketing automation is an optimum choice.
This technique improves communication, helps you offer key data to users (which is not necessarily promotional), and raises awareness about the product.
“In Fintech, we need more than just a push notification or SMS. Here, a user needs confidence, understanding of the step-by-step process of the funnel, and a customized way of performing any action.”Â
The most crucial issue in marketing automation is email deliverability. MoEngage has a converting consulting strategy for email deliverability issues, and EarlySalary was one of the firsts to utilize this service.
Here are top factors that impact email deliverability:
Before they start any email strategy, they need to check the authentication of the email domain. With this, they are able to build credibility with different ISPs.
They also need a dedicated IP for emails; it ensures that your email performance is isolated from other companies.
One of the underrated factors is audience list management. For this, they need to organically acquire users authentically and organically. Additionally, ensure that the list doesn’t contain inactive or unsubscribed users.Â
The last part of the email deliverability issue is the content they are sending across to users. Decreasing triggers that mark our email as spam, such as words like a free prize, cash, etc.
They also need to maintain the image-to-content ratio, such as using 30-40% text in the email.
EarlySalary’s emails were going straight to the spam box. However, email marketing is an important channel for any Fintech company. Hence, EarlySalary utilized the following 3 strategies with the help of MoEngage to reduce drop-off by 5%.
The first strategy was to completely audit the entire email marketing architecture. This includes performing checks on infrastructure, IP and domain reputation. Ensuring that the IP or domain was not blacklisted and performing multiple other checks to find issues in email domains.
For example, for EarlySalary, the image hosting domain was causing an issue. The domain that was being used to host images was priorly utilized to host spam emails.
The second strategy was to improve the content planning for EarlySalary. It was important to improve the text-to-image ratio to appropriately include images and content in an email campaign. This was paired with user personalization to improve results.
“When personalization was done on subject line and content, we observed that more than 80% emails were landing in the primary folder.” – Nikhil Iyer
The last part of the 3-fold strategy was revamping the segmentation of users. As they were in the early stages of domain repair, they created microsegments of historical data.
For every user segment, everything from image generation and content formation was personalized. Different content templates were created and sent according to optimized frequency and time.
As a result, it was possible for EarlySalary to improve the following metrics with MoEngage:
“It is normal to face challenges when you introduce email marketing channel in your marketing automation strategy. Sometimes the data is not clean, and other times the domains are not the best. The most important part is connecting with a partner who can help you go in-depth and analyze challenges in email marketing.”
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