How 3 fintech companies tackled the challenges of retaining users

Consumers and brands alike are well-aware of the importance of user acquisition. But the benefits of acquiring new users diminish when insufficient effort is placed on ensuring that they stick around.

Customers that stay for the long term are paramount to a company’s success. Acquiring a new customer can cost a business up to 5x more than it would to keep an existing one, whereas just a 5% increase in customer retention rates can increase profits by up to 95%.

The importance of strong customer retention strategies is especially clear in the fintech industry.

Illustration: Centaine Lim

Unlike other businesses, fintech companies’ inventories are typically limited, as they don’t have an exhaustive supply of new and attractive products to offer customers. Communicating their services’ intangible value is also more of a challenge, in comparison to ecommerce firms, for instance, where buyers get immediate gratification when they check out their shopping carts.

What then can fintech companies do to ensure that they keep the customers they acquire?

Ahead of CleverTap’s upcoming exclusive networking dinner with Tech in Asia, which will dive deep into the question of customer engagement and retention, let’s look at how these three startups overcame their customer retention hurdles and flourished.

BukuKas: Automating engagement to improve in-app conversions

Based in Indonesia, BukuKas aims to help millions of small and micro-sized businesses in the country grow through simple software solutions. Founded in 2019, its app acts as a digital ledger that replaces the physical books that more than 90% of Indonesia’s businesses typically use to track sales, expenses, and credit. By January 2020, BukuKas was serving close to 2 million monthly active users and has raised a total of US$22 million to date.

One of the key challenges the company faced was ensuring an ease in transition for new users. The app’s target customers are mainly merchants who had previously relied on physical ledgers for bookkeeping, so educating them on how BukuKas’ offering is superior has been critical to driving retention.

BukuKas’ team / Photo credit: BukuKas

To assist in its customer retention efforts, the startup relied on CleverTap. The mobile marketing platform crafted user campaigns that created “trigger-based journeys,” identifying user actions that contribute to increased engagement.

These journeys act as conversion funnels that allow BukuKas to track users throughout the process, from onboarding to when they drop off before reaching a conversion step such as completing their first transaction.

By analyzing user patterns, BukuKas was able to customize its app to target users at specific points of their respective journeys, progressively revealing relevant features to users as they mature and become more familiar with the app. This has greatly eased user friction and resistance, increasing app stickiness and culminating in a 60% improvement in in-app conversion rates over a period of six months.

Boost: Increasing user retention rates with personalized campaigns

Launched in 2017, Boost is one of Malaysia’s fastest-growing e-wallet platforms. The startup’s mission is to empower both merchants and consumers with the ease and security of cashless transactions and aid in business visibility and security against counterfeit currency.

Between 2020 and 2021, Boost saw a 50% growth in users, along with a consistent growth in users’ aggregate spend. But this progress gave rise to a new challenge: With a vast user base of 7 million customers, tracking both user behavior and marketing returns became increasingly difficult.

With the help of CleverTap’s recommendations feature, which presents meaningful content for each user based on their unique historical data, Boost was able to prioritize personalization in its app’s user experience, creating relevant campaigns for specific user categories and accelerating product discovery for customers.

By tracking crucial metrics from user responses – such as click, open, and conversion rates – and optimizing user content accordingly, the e-wallet was able to double its monthly active users and increase its user retention rate 5x over a 90-day period.

PayMaya: Tailoring user experiences to boost app launches

Based in the Philippines, fintech startup PayMaya is the most widely used digital payments processor for some of the country’s largest retail, food, gas, and ecommerce businesses.

On top of providing over 28 million Filipinos with access to financial services through the app, it also allows users to pay, deposit, withdraw, and remit cash through over 200,000 digital touchpoints nationwide.

PayMaya One point-of-sale device deployed in Manila’s roving stores / Photo credit: Voyager

At the center of its success is PayMaya’s ability to build great in-app experiences. This is crucial to building app loyalty, as a single bad experience could come with monetary consequences on the users’ end.

The startup’s user experience was crafted with the help of CleverTap’s user segmentation features, which group customers based on their app behavior. Segmentations can be as simple as users who have launched the app for the first time in the past 30 days or users who were acquired via a Facebook campaign and have made transactions two or more times in the succeeding months.

By building habits in users’ app behavior through these segmentations – for example, nudging certain users to perform desired actions, and cross-selling and upselling products and merchants – PayMaya was able to grow customer engagement and increase average transaction value by between 5% and 10%.

To target dormant users who have not opened the app in over two months, the PayMaya team deployed a CleverTap remarketing campaign that combined push notifications, emails, and relevant ads on Facebook and Google, which then achieved an 18% rise in monthly reactivations.

With the app experience tailored to be engaging and habitual, PayMaya’s efforts in building app loyalty and turning committed users into brand advocates have culminated in monthly app launches that are 10x more frequent than the industry average.

Join CleverTap at its upcoming event with Tech in Asia called “Unraveling the Value of Customer Engagement.” Held at CTY Kitchen + Bar in Ho Chi Minh City, the exclusive dinner and networking event invites executives and senior product, data, growth, and marketing leaders in the D2C segment to apply for a seat. Discover best practices in designing, implementing, and optimizing personalized customer journeys at scale.

Apply for your seat now and get free-flow drinks!

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This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.