Practical application of Internet finance: Who touched your promotion fees?

If you are attracting new customers for an Internet finance product, have you ever thought about: what kind of traffic do we actually get with our promotion fees? Which traffic is worth our in-depth development? What are the investment decision paths for users? Which promotion costs can be saved? How to evaluate the customer acquisition quality of promotion channels ?

1. How to make users become fans

Scenario 1:

User A is a newbie. While watching a TV series, he accidentally saw an advertisement for Internet finance platform A, which told him that he would receive a cash red envelope after registering. With the mentality of "getting a bargain", he might first ask Baidu what platform A does? The search results will definitely open the door to a new world for him/her, where he/she will discover many platforms similar to A. After comparison, user A is likely to choose platform B, which has a more reliable brand endorsement.

Scenario 2:

User B is a senior user who knows the operation modes and investment methods of various financial products and has also invested on the B platform. At this time, if he also saw the advertisement of platform A, he had already invested all his spare money in the bank and platform B.

Scenario 3:

User C is a veteran "onlooker" who has been paying attention to various financial products, but has never dared to take action to bind his card to any platform. At this time, he also saw the advertisement of platform A on the news client. Based on his trust in the media, he began to try to register and learn about platform A. He found it was very suitable for him and invested in it for a while.

Scenario 4:

User D is a classmate of User C. One day, the two chatted about how to make some extra money. C said that he had put all his spare money in platform A, which had a good interest rate and no problem with recharge and withdrawal. After hearing this, D also searched various major Internet finance platforms, but thought that since his classmate had invested in platform A, they could discuss it together if there were any problems, so he started investing in platform A.

Based on the analysis of users’ investment decision paths, we roughly summarize the four types of traffic brought by promotion expenses:

User's investment decision path

1. Education Market

In scenario 1, when the audience is not familiar with financial products and the Internet finance brand has not yet been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, such promotion expenses are undoubtedly making wedding dresses for others, and the ROI (cost-effectiveness) of the budget is not high.

2. Guide and stimulate user needs

When users have no demand, we need to first provide interest incentives, repeatedly reach out to users, guide and inspire them. This type of traffic often has a very low final conversion rate .

3. Conversion brought by brand building

In scenario 3, users have great trust in the platform brand. Once such users have financial management needs, our promotion will reach such users and will naturally convert them into loyal users.

4. Word-of-mouth conversion from loyal users/ KOLs

In scenario 4, users transfer their trust in relatives and friends to Platform A. Such users will take the initiative to learn about Platform A and try it out. Reaching out to these users will also enhance their confidence and strengthen their decision-making conversion.

Among the four types of conversions, loyal users and brand building require long-term accumulation, while for acquiring new users through channel promotion , we need to quickly find high-quality promotion channels to improve customer acquisition efficiency on the one hand and reduce customer acquisition costs on the other. Below, let’s discuss them one by one.

2. Quickly measure promotion channels

Competition is fierce and the cost of online customer acquisition is high. If the KPI of the marketing department is still based solely on customer acquisition, without focusing on user retention and business conversion, and online customer acquisition lacks refined thinking, then it will inevitably lead to a large number of new online users being of low quality. Although a large amount of cost budget has been spent, there has been no significant improvement in the long-term user scale and business growth.

Channel evaluation dimensions

In an era of data-driven refined operations , we need to achieve user growth through refined data-driven operations. To do this, we need to take promotion and new customer acquisition as the starting point from the perspective of the user's entire life cycle, improve the quality of channel customer acquisition through evaluation, and achieve subsequent traffic conversion and order conversion.

Scenario solutions for each stage of the user life cycle

The current situation of most companies is that promotion data and business data are not connected, so it is impossible to measure how many paid conversions are ultimately completed in each channel, and thus it is impossible to screen out the best promotion channels with the highest ROI (return on investment) and optimize the marketing input-output ratio.

Looking at the solutions we currently provide for Internet finance clients, firstly, we will provide a complete solution from advertising to in-app analysis and finally to marketing; secondly, we will integrate other business data within the enterprise through API or secondary development, including CRM data, customer service data, order data, etc. This enables complete insight into the portrait of a single user and infers the quality of the channel from the perspective of the user's lifetime value.

Use core business conversion data as the basis for measuring channel quality and find customer acquisition channels that are truly valuable to business growth, thereby avoiding spending a lot of promotional costs but incurring short-term false growth that has no real value for long-term user scale and business growth.

3. Effectively increase transaction volume

The 80/20 rule applies not only to traditional bank operating customers, but also to Internet financial products. If you want to increase transaction volume, you may need to make value creation more sustainable in the following two aspects:

1. Core user group: loyal users

Haidilao and Xiaomi have both achieved success by providing excellent services to their old users. In addition, a certain financial product that year grew from 100 seed users to 1 million in less than three months through friend invitation activities, with monthly transaction volume even reaching over a billion.

Therefore, when facing the core user group, it is not impossible to increase their number to 100,000 or 200,000 and contribute to the transaction volume by providing them with better services, more attractive activities and greater benefits. Users recommended by loyal users of Internet finance products often have similar characteristics to them, so they are more likely to become loyal users of our platform and contribute greater transaction volume.

Figure 2: Finding high-value users

At the same time, the users recommended by old users, no matter they register through SEM or application market channels, are the real traffic owners who are loyal users on our platform. This part of the traffic owners is our exclusive traffic. Compared with the general traffic on search engines / advertising positions , this is the traffic that only we can use, so it is more cost-effective.

In order to better maintain the stickiness of loyal users, we can establish a dedicated customer service team and a refined service system to ensure the experience of old users; regularly hold exclusive communication and interactive activities that cater to the financial management preferences of old users to enhance their sense of belonging; give greater recommendations and concessions to high-value users to maximize the results of their fission, etc.

2. Continue to build your brand

For users, the investment in purchasing financial products may be money for buying a house, getting married, or educating children, so they will be very cautious and the decision-making cost will be high. If we want users to make long-term, sustainable investments in our platform, we must make them trust the platform. We must build our brand to give them confidence and make them feel that our platform is safe and reliable. At the same time, brand building is a long and arduous task that requires long-term maintenance. Often the effects of brand promotion in the first half of the year will not be reflected until the second half of the year. Therefore, brand investment cannot rely on short-term conversions; its value lies in the long-term future.

In addition, when we convert new users through word-of-mouth and brand promotion from old users, we must ensure the usability and stability of our products so that users can easily search and use our products without losing them. In short, maintaining loyal users and attracting new customers will make us run faster in the short term; building a good brand will allow us to run further.

The author of this article @朱葛io数据学院 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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