Fintech investment skyrocketed in 2021, but funding tanked in the following two years. A -63% decline in fintech investment in 2023 saw the worst year in funding since 2017. Luckily, the correction quickly floored, and the fintech industry will recover in 2024, but companies will have to work much harder to secure funds.
F-Prime’s The 2024 State of Fintech Report called 2023 the year of “regulation on, risk off” amid market pressures and regulatory scrutiny. Funding is rising again, but investors want regulatory compliance and stronger growth performance from fintech ventures.
Here are seven fintech marketing strategies to generate the growth investors seek in 2024.
Top fintech marketing challenges in 2024
Following the worst global investment run since 2017 in 2023, fintech marketers need to readjust their goals to adapt to the current market challenges. The fintech honeymoon is over for Wall Street with regulator scrutiny, closures, and a distinct lack of profitability giving investors cold feet.
Here are the biggest challenges fintech marketers face in 2024:
- Market correction: With fewer rounds and longer times between them, securing funds is a major challenge for fintech businesses. F-Prime’s The 2024 State of Fintech Report warns of “a high probability of significant shutdowns in 2024 and 2025,” highlighting the importance of allocating resources and budgets effectively.
- Contraction: Aside from VC funding decreasing by 64% in 2023, the payments category now attracts a large majority of fintech investment, meaning there’s a smaller share from a smaller pot to go around for everyone else.
- Competition: The biggest names in finance have navigated heavy disruption from startups and, for the most part, emerged stronger than ever. Meanwhile, fintech is no longer Wall Street’s hottest commodity as investors turn their attention to AI.
- Regulations: Regulatory scrutiny of fintech intensified in 2023 – particularly in the US – contributing to the “regulation on, risk off” summary of F-Prime’s report.
- Investor scrutiny: With market and industry challenges intensifying, investors are putting their money behind “safer” ventures that demonstrate real, sustainable profitability, not short-term growth.
- Customer loyalty: Even in traditional baking and finance, switching is surging as customers seek providers who better meet their needs. To achieve the sustainable growth investors are looking for, fintech startups need to know their ideal customer profile (ICP), tailor their products/services and fintech marketing campaigns to them, and retain them throughout the customer lifecycle.
The good news for fintech marketers is that the market correction is leveling out in 2024. In The 2024 State of Fintech Report, F-Prime says that “heading into 2024, we see the fintech market amid a rebound,” while McKinsey expects fintech revenue to grow “almost three times faster than those in the traditional banking sector between 2023 and 2028.”
Winning back investor confidence won’t be easy, though. F-Prime acknowledges that investors are prioritising high-performance fintech ventures, particularly those with high gross margins. Fintech marketers need to abandon the growth-at-all-costs mindset and switch to a data-driven optimisation, growth and revenue system.
7 fintech marketing strategies
Given the current state of the fintech industry and relatively low levels of investor confidence, fintech marketers’ priority is building a new culture of sustainable profit. This starts with rethinking priorities and switching up the marketing goals to reflect longer-term ambitions.
So, here are the fintech marketing strategies that matter most in 2024.
1. Optimise for profitability over growth at all costs
To progress from the growth-at-all-cost mindset, fintech marketers need to optimise for different KPIs. Instead of flexing metrics like customer growth rate, fintech companies need to take a more balanced approach to measuring sustainable profitability.
This means holding on to existing customers – and maximising their value – while they acquire new customers. It also means that, instead of trying to make everyone a target customer, you concentrate on targeting the most valuable prospects, even if it results in a smaller overall user base.
Optimising for profitability starts with putting vanity metrics in their place and pinpointing the KPIs that represent valuable business growth:
- Gross profit margin
- Revenue growth rate
- Cash flow
- Monthly active user growth (qualify “active” as completing a transaction)
- Customer acquisition cost
- Customer retention rate
- Customer lifetime value
- Avg. revenue per user
- Avg. transactions per month
- Avg. transaction value
With a more focused acquisition strategy, you can feed these insights into every company level. For example, you can prioritise customer engagement, revenue, retention, and customer service in product development and customer experience (CX).
To ensure all marketing efforts are pulling towards these KPIs, you need an attribution system that accurately measures the contribution of each channel.
Marketing attribution (aka multi-touch attribution) should be used to measure every touchpoint in the customer journey and accurately credit them for driving revenue. This helps you allocate the correct budget to the channels and campaigns, adding real value to the business (e.g., social media marketing vs content marketing).
Example: Mastercard helps a digital bank acquire 10 million high-value customers
For example, Mastercard helped a digital bank in Latin America achieve sustainable growth beyond customer acquisition. The fintech company wanted to increase revenue through targeted acquisition and profitable engagement metrics.
Strategies included:
- A more targeted acquisition strategy for high-value customers
- Increasing avg. spend per customer
- Reducing acquisition cost
- Customer retention
As a result, Mastercard’s advisors helped this fintech company acquire 10 million new customers in two years. More importantly, they increased customer spending by 28% while reducing acquisition costs by 13%, creating a more sustainable and profitable growth model.
2. Use web and app analytics to remotivate users before they disengage
Engagement is the key to customer retention and lifetime value. To prevent valuable customers from disengaging, you need to intervene when they show early signs of losing interest, but they’re still receptive to your incentivisation tactics (promotions, rewards, milestones, etc.).
By integrating web and app analytics, you can identify churn patterns and pinpoint the sequences of actions that lead to disengaging. For example, you might determine that customers who only log in once a month, engage with one dashboard, or drop below a certain transaction rate are at high risk for churn.
Using a tool like Matomo for web and app analytics, you can detect these early signs of disengagement. Once you identify your churn risks, you can create triggers to automatically fire re-engagement campaigns. You can also use CRM and session data to personalize campaigns to directly address the cause of disengagement, e.g., valuable content or incentives to increase transaction rates.
Example: Dynamic Yield fintech re-engagement case study
In this Dynamic Yield case study, one leading fintech company uses customer spending patterns to identify those most likely to disengage. The company set up automated campaigns with personalised in-app messaging, offering time-bound incentives to increase transaction rates.
With fully automated re-engagement campaigns, this fintech company increased customer retention through valuable engagement and revenue-driving actions.
3. Identify the path your most valuable customers take
Why optimise web experiences for everyone when you can tailor the online journey for your most valuable customers? Use customer segmentation to identify the shared interests and habits of your most valuable customers. You can learn a lot about customers based on where the pages they visit and the content they engage with before taking action.
Use these insights to optimise funnels that motivate prospects displaying the same customer behaviours as your most valuable customers.
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One of the biggest issues with Google Analytics and many similar tools is that they produce inaccurate data due to data sampling. Once you collect a certain amount of data, Google reports estimates instead of giving you complete, accurate insights.
This means you could be basing important business decisions on inaccurate data. Furthermore, when investors are nervous about the uncertainty surrounding fintech, the last thing they want is inaccurate data.
Matomo is the reliable, accurate alternative to Google Analytics that uses no data sampling whatsoever. You get 100% access to your web analytics data, so you can base every decision on reliable insights. With Matomo, you can access between 20% and 40% more data compared to Google Analytics.
With Matomo, you can confidently unlock the full picture of your marketing efforts and give potential investors insights they can trust.
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4. Reduce onboarding dropouts with marketing automation
Onboarding dropouts kill your chance of getting any return on your customer acquisition cost. You also miss out on developing a long-term relationship with users who fail to complete the onboarding process – a hit on immediate ROI and, potentially, long-term profits.
The onboarding process also defines the first impression for customers and sets a precedent for their ongoing experience.
An engaging onboarding experience converts more potential customers into active users and sets them up for repeat engagement and valuable actions.
Example: Maxio reduces onboarding time by 30% with GUIDEcx
Onboarding optimisation specialists, GUIDEcx helped Maxio cut six weeks off their onboarding times – a 30% reduction.
With a shorter onboarding schedule, more customers are committing to close the deal during kick-off calls. Meanwhile, by increasing automated tasks by 20%, the company has unlocked a 40% increase in capacity, allowing it to handle more customers at any given time and multiplying its capacity to generate revenue.
5. Increase the value in TTFV with personalisation
Time to first value (TTFV) is a key metric for onboarding optimisation, but some actions are more valuable than others. By personalising the experience for new users, you can increase the value of their first action, increasing motivation to continue using your fintech product/service.
The onboarding process is an opportunity to learn more about new customers and deliver the most rewarding user experience for their particular needs.
Example: Betterment helps users put their money to work right away
Betterment has implemented a quick, personalised onboarding system instead of the typical email signup process. The app wants to help new customers put their money to work right away, optimising for the first transaction during onboarding itself.
It personalises the experience by prompting new users to choose their goals, set up the right account for them, and select the best portfolio to achieve their goals. They can complete their first investment within a matter of minutes and professional financial advice is only ever a click away.
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If you want to create and optimise a signup process like Betterment, you need an analytics system with a complete conversion rate optimisation (CRO) toolkit.
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6. Use gamification to drive product engagement
Gamification can create a more engaging experience and increase motivation for customers to continue using a product. The key is to reward valuable actions, engagement time, goal completions, and the small objectives that build up to bigger achievements.
Gamification is most effective when used to help individuals achieve goals they’ve set for themselves, rather than the goals of others (e.g., an employer). This helps explain why it’s so valuable to fintech experience and how to implement effective gamification into products and services.
Example: Credit Karma gamifies personal finance
Credit Karma helps users improve their credit and build their net worth, subtly gamifying the entire experience.
Users can set their financial goals and link all of their accounts to keep track of their assets in one place. The app helps users “see your wealth grow” with assets, debts, and investments all contributing to their next wealth as one easy-to-track figure.
7. Personalise loyalty programs for retention and CLV
Loyalty programs tap into similar psychology as gamification to motivate and reward engagement. Typically, the key difference is that – rather than earning rewards for themselves – you directly reward customers for their long-term loyalty.
That being said, you can implement elements of gamification and personalisation into loyalty programs, too.
Example: Bank of America’s Preferred Rewards
Bank of America’s Preferred Rewards program implements a tiered rewards system that rewards customers for their combined spending, saving, and borrowing activity.
The program incentivises all customer activity with the bank and amplifies the rewards for its most active customers. Customers can also set personal finance goals (e.g., saving for retirement) to see which rewards benefit them the most.
Conclusion
Fintech marketing needs to catch up with the new priorities of investors in 2024. The pre-pandemic buzz is over, and investors remain cautious as regulatory scrutiny intensifies, security breaches mount up, and the market limps back into recovery.
To win investor and consumer trust, fintech companies need to drop the growth-at-all-costs mindset and switch to a marketing philosophy of long-term profitability. This is what investors want in an unstable market, and it’s certainly what customers want from a company that handles their money.
Unlock the full picture of your marketing efforts with Matomo’s robust features and accurate reporting. Trusted by over 1 million websites, Matomo is chosen for its compliance, accuracy, and powerful features that drive actionable insights and improve decision-making.
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