In a digital age where convenience is key, online banking apps have become the cornerstone of modern finance. However, amidst their popularity, the industry has its hurdles and challenges to overcome. Crafting effective marketing strategies for these apps requires finesse and expert industry experience, especially when confronted with legal limitations, feature disparities between web and app versions, and the complexity of keyword discovery.
The Redbox Mobile team has a decade-long experience in growing and scaling mobile apps. The comprehensive insights presented below, stem from their extensive expertise with Digital Banks and Finetch apps. Their strategies, meticulously crafted to address the challenges inherent in Digital Banks and Finetch apps, hold relevance in similar use-case scenarios within the broad spectrum of Fintech applications. Draw on them for your own growth, or engage our team to convert these challenges into opportunities for your fintech app.
Challenges at hand for digital banking apps
1. Legal Conundrums in ASO: Navigating the legal maze governing what can or can’t play as part of your ASO strategy, poses a unique challenge. Compliance with financial regulations while creating captivating and effective keywords and creatives, demands a delicate balance. Masting this balance is crucial as some ASO keywords and creative messages promise great results, from an app marketing standpoint, but have to be handled within the financial regulations that apply in each region.
2. Feature Disparities: Oftentimes, there are certain disparities between the web and app versions of your financial product offering. Some financial apps may not allow account opening in-app, but instead for security reasons, handles this via the web. The lack of ability to convert in-app hinders the seamless user experience and can also impact attribution data. Bridging this gap requires not just technical solutions but also effective communication to manage user expectations.
3. Unconventional Keyword Discovery: Generic keyword approaches, which are often employed by young and/or inexperienced marketers (with all due respect to their skill sets), need to catch up in the realm of fintech and online banking apps. The specificity and sensitivity of financial terms necessitate a more tailored and nuanced keyword discovery process, something that the Redbox Team has a lot of experience with.
4. In-market Non-banking Competitors: Some markets offer non-banking brands the opportunity to bring financial retail bank products to the consumer market, which directly compete with pure banking brands. It makes sense that trusted household brands such as the UK’s big grocery chains (Sainsbury’s and Tesco, for example) now have their own banking offering. Additionally, in some markets Nonbank Financial Companies (NBFC) operate legally, but without a banking license or the same level of regulatory scrutiny. Whilst they can’t offer the breadth of financial products that licensed banks can (such as checking or savings accounts), they do offer banking products such as currency exchange and credit, including mortgages
How does this challenge impact your app growth strategy? Market competitors can influence consumer search behavior, limiting your choice of target keywords and exposing your brand to non-banking rivals. Prioritize safeguarding and promoting your strategy over worrying about competitors.
Our Strategies for Triumph
While some of the above challenges are to be taken care of by the product teams, below are the strategies that we’ve employed and tested to produce measurable results.
1. Custom Product Pages (CPPs):
Crafting specialized App Store landing pages for targeting different user segments, can be a game-changer. Tailoring content to showcase specific features like Personal Banking, Business Solutions, or Budgeting/Savings speaks directly to user needs.
This enhances conversion, and in turn, grows the business. Our clients have experienced +30% CR uplift from well conceived custom product page strategies.
2. Feature-Centric Promotion:
Highlighting key app features can significantly drive conversions. Emphasizing functionalities such as quick travel-related banking solutions during vacation seasons or mortgage and loan options during home-buying periods can capture user attention and encourage fast take-up, especially if driven in-app where user trust is high and the experience is secure.
3. Seasonal Targeting:
For all kinds of mobile apps, aligning marketing efforts with seasonal events presents a unique opportunity for short-term gain. Digital Banks and Fintech apps can use this opportunity to tailor campaigns to correspond with different seasonal needs of the users like vacation plans, tax filing season or other events can attract and convert users effectively.
This seasonal targetting goes a long way in acquiring users who shave an interest in your app and upsell possibilities with them.
4. Strategic User Acquisition Campaigns:
Measuring success not just by the mere number of downloads but by specific user actions like account openings, first transactions, and salary transferred (in some cases), is pivotal.
Redbox team optimises user acquisition campaigns to these metrics, which allows for focused scaling and enhanced user retention.
5. Referral Programs:
The power of referral programs can’t be underestimated - referring users are advocates for brand trust. This includes personalised offers, cashback offers, word-of-mouth, reward tokens, or even referring a friend, which can go a long way in growing these apps. Implementing referral programs can be a potent tool for neo and digital banks to expand their user base, reduce acquisition costs, increase brand awareness, and enhance customer loyalty.
Additional Insights
1. Seamless Omnichannel Experience: In addition to the marketing of your mobile app, it’s important that current and potential customers engage with your app via a multi-channel strategy, and that your tone of voice is consistent to each cohort, across those channels. Having an omnichannel (TV, radio, print, outdoor, etc.) presence should enhance brand understanding and trust and deliver more customers into your acquisition funnel.
2. Embrace Personalization: Leveraging user data to personalize marketing efforts helps to evolve and retain users. However, your ability to do this for your banking app may vary, depending on regional advertising and financial regulations. But once a customer is engaged and in-app, your ability to deliver engagements tailored to each customer increases. It’s worth remembering too that an engaged user is often the best source of product development ideas, so make this a two-way street and invite your customers to tell you their personal experiences of your app, good and bad.
3. Invest in Education and Transparency: Another nice-to-have strategy is to empower users by providing educational content about financial topics, to improve personal literacy; it’s also a great way to build trust and credibility among potential and current customers. In addition to this, communicate the ability to easily undertake major banking actions in-app, which might traditionally have been done online or in branch. Build confidence in the in-app experience and security of carrying out big transactions in-app.
Conclusion
While challenges persistently confront growth and marketing endeavours for Digital Banking and Fintech apps, harnessing bespoke strategies tailored to your app's unique identity and tone of voice, and staying abreast of user-needs (and of course, the associated legalities), will pave the way to success.
By focusing on a user-centric approach and investing in your brand to create clear water between your banking brand and the rest, the potential for exponential growth in the Fintech app sphere is vast and promising.
Ready to embark on this transformative journey and implement our team’s proven strategies to propel your app's growth? Our team of experts would be more than happy to delve into the intricacies of your Fintech app, navigate challenges with your team, and facilitate its ascent. Let's work together and start growing your app.