“Why are my customers leaving, how can we make the product better for customers, how can we retain customers?”
If you’re a product marketer, you’re well familiar with these questions. To answer them, I sat down with Olamide Adurota (Risevest), Peace Obinani (Piggyvest), and Grillo Adebiyi (Cowrywise), Product Marketers at leading Fintechs in Nigeria. And they shared how investment platforms can reduce customer churn from their experiences.
What Causes Churn in Investment Platforms?
The general indication of churn is when a customer stops paying for your product or using your product’s free version. However, in the investment business, churn is subject to the type of investment platform. In our conversation, Olamide Adurota, Product Marketer at Risevest shared the two stages of churn. The first is when users break their monthly funding habit — even when they have money on your platform —and the second is when they withdraw all the money from your platform.
Now, this doesn’t just happen out of the blues. Something usually spurs their disengagement from your product. It could be as a result of the following:
1. Limited Investment Options
Users may want to explore different investment options, which may result in them scouting competitor platforms to get investment opportunities that meet their needs. For a platform like Risevest, which focuses on dollar investments, a cause of churn may be users wanting to explore other investment options. There will be more on this later.
2. No Proactive Customer Engagement Strategies
Customers appreciate proactive and personalized communications that help them achieve their goals quickly. When this is absent, it is easier for your product to be out of mind for them. For example, if users break their funding habit, there should be communication to remind them to invest. If this doesn’t happen, there’s a high chance they’ll churn soon. Every step of the customer journey should be carefully thought out to tackle situations that may cause a leakage.
3. Product Complexity
Users churn once they’re unable to achieve value with your product seamlessly. Your signup and onboarding are the first touchpoints to ensure users have a seamless flow. It needs to be simple and clear. There should be in-app guides that help users take the next actions that get them to their Aha moment.
In addressing the issue of onboarding, Olamide Adurota said,
Not all signups translate to action within the app. Say you have 20,000 signups and just a few of them take the first action you want them to take, maybe fund their wallet, others churn on the way to take that action, or during KYC, they are trying to fund their wallet and they encounter some technical issue or they don’t understand the product, these are some of the problems that hinder growth. It’s important to look at your activation metric and know where users have a problem. Maybe your product is complex.
Peace Obinani, Head of Marketing at Piggyvest said,
If there’s a disconnect in your onboarding flow, part of marketing is working with products and engineering, and relaying feedback. There are certain things that communication will fix and there are things you just need to work on. The goal is that people have a seamless flow. If customers are stuck and you have to communicate too often, it’s an indication that something might be broken, and you probably have to revisit the entire process to make sure it’s smoother. So it’s a lot of iterations pretty much around the product and engineering.
Despite your team’s good intentions for customers, a complex product is one channel for churn. But Grillo Adebiyi shares something insightful about Cowrywise worth noting.
I wouldn’t call it a faulty onboarding flow, maybe just not optimal. Over time at Cowrywise, we have embraced the core value of failing fast and doing a lot of experimentation. We have seen that we learn a lot when we take as many actions as we can, we take feedback and retreat as often as we can.
This mindset will make product teams develop a product customers love.
How Risevest, Piggyvest, and Cowrywise Reduce Customer Churn
The landscape for investment platforms differs from other fintechs like loan and payment companies. This is because loan and pay techs are integral to people’s lives. People make payments every day and may need to collect loans.
These days, you definitely have to make payments, whether you’re a business or an individual. When you go shopping or go to a restaurant, you make payments. For wealth tech, it’s slightly trickier because it’s a different ballgame to get people to use your product in the first place and another ballgame to retain them in the long term simply because we can’t separate ourselves from the reality of the economy. Right. Inflation is up, dollar keeps going up.
Grillo Adebiyi
For investment companies to curb churn, they must constantly study customer behavior and seek ways to deliver top-notch customer experiences.
If you’re a fintech marketer at a startup and your team is struggling with churn, you’ll find the contributions of Peace, Olamide, and Grillo insightful.
One thing Risevest, Piggyvest, and Cowrywise have in common is that they are wealth tech companies with different opportunities and operations.
Risevest:
Risevest is an investment platform that lets users invest and earn returns in dollars. They are present in 5 countries, Nigeria inclusive. This is a thrilling opportunity for users to grow their assets in dollars.
Piggyvest:
Piggyvest is a savings and investment platform that gives people easy entry into the investment market with opportunities to start building wealth with as little as Five thousand Naira.
Cowrywise:
Cowrywise is also a savings and investment platform that helps users save and invest with as little as a thousand naira in diverse portfolios, breaking the barrier to entry for first-time investors.
Despite the unique case of dollar fluctuations in the case of Risevest, the global economic crisis, and other challenges faced in the investment market, these brands have developed customer retention strategies to curb churn and build customer trust.
1. Easy Access to Investment Opportunities
As mentioned earlier, an economic crisis is one of the major reasons people don’t invest. This isn’t due to a lack of interest in investing but little to no information on the diverse opportunities to invest with the much they have. It’s why brands like Piggyvest and Cowrywise position themselves to break the entry barrier to investment with affordable investment opportunities suitable for every socio-economic class. As Grillo said,
Money is harder to come by, which is why you see over some time, you might experience some level of churn. But what we have always tried to do from a retention perspective is to be able to make saving and investing as flexible as possible for our users. So one of the first things we did was to make the minimum balance NGN1000. What that does is that it makes sure that regardless of your socioeconomic class, you should be able to save or invest as frequently as possible, because the barrier to entry is pretty low. If you have NGN1000, you can start saving and investing today. So I think that’ll be the first thing.
Making investment flexible encourages users to keep investing despite the global crisis.
For Risevest with strictly dollar investment opportunities, the fluctuation of exchange rates impacts user behavior. Olamide responds to the peculiar case of churn at Risevest.
Ours at Risevest is a peculiar situation because the investment is in dollars and dollar rates affect user behavior. Sometimes, some users are trying to speculate to see if the dollar will come down so they can fund and get some return from the investment. And sometimes they may want to explore other platforms to diversify, because of the kind of investment we do. Maybe they want to try out other naira investments. Some people churn when they’ve reached their savings goal, maybe I’m saving for a car and when I meet my goal, I withdraw the money. This has affected our AUM, that is asset under management which is an important metric in the business of investment.
Regardless, Risevest still has strong customer retention strategies, which you’ll learn as you read.
2. Good Customer Service
Good customer service is a strong preventive measure for churn. Risevest dedicates an account manager to premium users and users who have churned to discover why they stay or churn.
“We have dedicated support for premium users. For example, we have account managers who reach out to them and ask burning questions, and reasons why they keep using the app. This gives us a hint as to why people love our product. For users who have withdrawn, we also have support that reaches out to them to find out why.” Olamide.
In doing this, they can get adequate feedback for the product team and other teams involved, like the marketing and sales teams.
3. Omnichannel Engagement
Omnichannel customer engagement position brands to be present across channels where their users are and to ensure the user experience is not broken at any point.
Omnichannel engagement is important because your users are not in one place. We use omnichannel engagement to automate journeys to enable our users to take particular actions or take them through the product funnel. We send them emails, if they don’t convert, we send them push notifications. You can’t reach everyone with a single platform so you have to employ different channels.
Olamide Adurota
Exploring different channels allows you to reach your users where they are and convert them through the appropriate channel. You also need to monitor what channels convert better for engaging your customers.
This is how Cowrywise doubled down its efforts on email marketing and push notifications.
We tried SMS in the past, but it didn’t work as optimally as we would have liked. And like I said, we have a culture of trying a lot of things. We figure out what works, and what doesn’t, so we know what to double down on. Now, we are focused on email marketing and push notifications. Technically, what we have also done is to be able to set up our email marketing campaigns from a data-driven perspective. This means that we have different campaigns for different segments so that we can attend or we can engage with people who fall into a certain segment depending on how we have categorized them.
Grillo Adebiyi
4. Product Iteration
Product roadmaps encounter changes over time as the product and customer evolve. Implementing customer feedback is a great way to achieve customer satisfaction and retention; all three brands get this right.
When we found out that many users withdraw when there are FX fluctuations, we started making product iterations to address that. Our process is–we get feedback, look at what causes churn, and try to solve it across board, from product, customer success, marketing. We also do a lot of communication like sending out emails to try and alleviate their fears. So whenever there’s a new policy or general news that users might start panicking, we try and communicate.
Olamide Adurota
It’s a bit of both communication and product as well. We try as much as we can to be very clear with communication across all our channels, social media pages, and in-app chat with customer support staff.
Our messaging is clear. Also, we’re constantly working on product updates and making sure that what caused a problem yesterday or two weeks ago or one month ago, is not recurring, because you don’t just build a product and abandon it and expect that communication will solve any other problems. Right. It’s a continuous process.
Peace Obinani
Over time at Cowrywise, we have embraced the core value of failing fast and doing a lot of experimentation. We have seen that we learn a lot when we take as many actions as we can, we take feedback and retreat as often as we can.
Grillo Adebiyi
5. Active communication
Communication is a solid tool against churn, and Piggyvest uses this to their advantage. In Peace’s words,
At every point, you should always communicate with the users. Just because a user has money that does not mature in the next year doesn’t mean you go all silent. If you don’t communicate, maybe at the end of that one year, the person just takes their money and goes off. Also, if it’s an app with constant investment opportunities, you need to constantly update users on new opportunities, despite their existing investment. You also need to communicate how their investment is performing so that there is a connection between you and the customer. Once they are connected, or if they feel connected, the likelihood of them churning is lower.
6. Customer data analysis
Three things customer data analysis is sure to do: show how your product is being used, the segment of users engaging your product the most, and where there’s friction in the product.
There are different ways to dig into your customer data, from using product analytics tools to customer engagement tools and talking to customers to discover and fix a problem that may cause churn.
It’s why Olamide said,
As a product marketer, try and use your product to understand the particular problems users are having. Talk to your users to know what part of the onboarding flow they have problems with. Use your data to find what part in the flow has the most drop-off. That way you can know what part of the flow to tweak or fix. Also, engage them through different channels. Create different user segments, for example, users that went from signup to the next step, you engage them and try to make them come back and complete that step. Maybe during KYC, you create a segment for users who are yet to complete KYC and engage them through emails and push notifications, through SMS to make them come back and complete it.
Analyzing customer data is one way to understand user behavior and needs to prevent churn.
7. Customer Segmentation
“The business of investment is about understanding customer behavior”_Olamide Adurota.
Segmentation helps you keep tabs on the changes in customer behavior and helps you reach out to them appropriately.
There are different use cases for customer segmentation, from upselling to reactivation and retargeting. When you segment customers and engage them effectively, you position your brand as customer-centric rather than revenue-obsessed
An interesting example is the way Cowrywise engages its customers, who may have stopped saving or investing as a result of the tough economy, by empathizing with them.
There’s no such thing as a bad customer in our eyes. Whether you have churned or not, we believe you will come back because we believe you know and understand the value of the product. Most of the time what we try to do is after we have segmented users in that category, we typically send them emails that say, hey, we understand what you are going through, things will get better.
Grillo Adebiyi
What this does is show users that they care about them, and keep the brand top of their minds.
8. Automated User Journeys
Every customer touch point requires different experiences and calls to action. Automating customer journeys moves the customer faster through the product funnel, ensuring they get the best customer experience and increasing customer retention.
On customer segmentation and automation, Peace said,
The whole point of communication and reducing churn is so it doesn’t happen again. It’s important to have clear messaging, and this is specific to the app or the product. So, it just makes sense to have these users in buckets, depending on where they are on their customer journey. So you can have specific messages or processes or flows for different journeys. If the customer does this and they encounter this, then this should happen…
In essence, eradicating churn entirely may not be feasible, but it is possible to reduce it. Churn reduction will evolve.
Bunce as an Omnichannel Customer Engagement Platform
Filtering through the conversations with all three product marketers, one thing is certain: smart customer engagement is key to retaining customers.
You engage customers when you:
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- Create and automate user journeys to keep customers using the product and extend their lifecycle,
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- When you need to assuage fears about an update in the product that may affect the users
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- And when there’s an economic crisis that may affect how customers invest.
A good product is important and can sell itself, but the customer experience determines if customers can trust the brand even in uncertain times. Omnichannel customer engagement helps you to deliver experiences that stick, expand your reach to convert customers and position the brand as customer-centric potentially.
This increases customer lifetime value and translates to more revenue for your business.
As Olamide shared, “Omnichannel engagement is important because your users are not in one place.”
Neither do they have exact customer journeys. That’s why creating automation flows that guide and engage users based on their needs and unique journeys is important.
This makes customer data and engagement tools like Bunce invaluable for businesses to deliver highly personalized customer experiences across different channels like Email, SMS, WhatsApp, In-App, etc.
Our powerful customer engagement tool helps businesses assemble customer data from different data sources like payment, accounting software, and other third-party sources and analyze data in real-time. This helps you make smart decisions on segmenting, automating customer journeys, and effectively targeting each customer segment.
You can also see the revenue attribution for each customer segment and how they impact your revenue pipeline.
This way, you curb customer churn, increase customer lifetime value, and target customers with precision for increased revenue growth.
To see how this works, sign up on Bunce now.