Today, a whole generation of people doesn’t understand the idea of updating a bank account passbook, or filling up a cash withdrawal form in a bank to collect cash. Very soon, the notion of carrying physical money in leather wallets may become absurd altogether.
How and why?
The growing popularity of mobile payment apps!
Mobile payment apps facilitate the payment for products, services, and transfer of money through smartphones.
With the steep rise in the demand for hassle-free payments for goods and services, more and more consumers are moving towards digital payment app transactions. Like smartphones have almost completely replaced digital cameras, they are well on their way to reduce the dependency on physical currency.
The Future of Mobile Payment Apps
The mobile payment app industry is expected to grow at a CAGR of 33.8% from 2017 to 2023 to attain a market size of $4,574 billion by 2023. Back home in India, demonetisation has given the much required push to digital transactions, including mobile payment wallet transactions.
In fact, the total value of mobile wallet transactions has been on a rise since 2016. Paytm, the leading player in the industry, has the largest market share, almost 78%.
The industry, domestic as well as global, is already experiencing intense competition with a host of service providers securing their positions in the market. While the likes of PayPal, Amazon Pay, Google Pay, and Apple Pay rule the global market, players like Paytm, MobiKwik, Freecharge, and PhonePe are scaling new heights in the Indian market.
As customers are adopting these apps, even for day-to-day transactions, you need to increase focus on providing a seamless payment experience to your customers. Set in this backdrop, you need to keep your expanding user base engaged through personalised mobile marketing campaigns.
It is critical for smart app marketers, like you, to constantly deliver a superior customer experience through behaviour-based, hyper-personalised, and contextual marketing for sustainable revenue and business growth.
1. Deliver a quality first-time onboarding experience
Mobile payment apps are relatively new in India, especially for the non-millennial segment of the user base that isn’t as internet and smartphone literate (which is a major chunk – think of the grocery store owner and the elderly cab driver whom you pay through Paytm or PhonePe).
Given the diverse distribution of user segments, it is far more important for you to ensure that users are provided proper onboarding assistance.
A great first-time onboarding experience provides users with their first Aha! Moment and lays the foundation for greater user adoption.
Here a few sequential steps that can be of help:
- Welcome new users with a well-crafted in-app message. Briefly introduce them to the features of your app.
- Educate and encourage them to register through an in-app message. Share the benefits that registered users can avail.
- Send attractive push notifications that encourage users to register, if they haven’t, even after 24-48 hours of app install. Incentivise sign-up through offers and coupon codes.
- Welcome the app users with personalised in-app messages once they have registered. Encourage them to add money to their wallet, use the app for transactions, or highlight key app features you offer to get them started quickly.
- Urge users to make their first transaction by offering cashback and discount coupons.
The time users take to register and log in to your app is an important metric to monitor. It can give you insights into the effectiveness of your onboarding process.
2. Keep your users meaningfully engaged
Successfully onboarded users are likely to stick to your app, use it regularly for transactions, and stay engaged when they see value. For sustainable revenue growth and brand building, it is very critical to keep the users meaningfully engaged, not just in the initial phase, but consistently throughout.
Diligent tracking of app usage pattern empowers you with valuable data. You can leverage these user-specific behaviour insights to drive personalised in-app messages and push notification campaigns.
Keep reminding them to recharge their wallets, complete their profiles, introduce new features and benefits, and reward them for their loyalty by offering coupons, cashback etc. You can strengthen customer relationships by delivering compelling offers on the services and features they use the most.
India’s leading mobile payment app, Paytm nails it when it comes to engaging customers through cashback offers.
3. Retain users before they churn
The key metric that determines your app’s growth is your user retention rate. It is important for you to prioritise the retention rate for sustainable inflow of revenue. You need to keep a track of the number of users that drop off while adding money to their digital wallets, or abandon their carts while transacting through your app, or have not launched the app for 2 weeks.
This number indicates that these users might churn, i.e. likely to stop using your app or uninstall it completely. The smart thing to do is to consistently track your users’ behavioural trend and proactively re-engage with these at-risk users.
Target such users with marketing campaigns that show them value in your app. Engage them with timely and personalised in-app messages and push notifications that encourage them to relaunch the app, remind them to recharge their wallet and pay bills, entice them to avail discounts and cashback offers, and urge them to transact with their preferred merchants.
Seeking feedback is also an effective way to show that you value your association with users.
Cohort Analysis can help you accurately track user retention rates for various user segments. With cross-channel automation, target the dormant users through their preferred channels to bring them back to your app.
RFM analysis is another powerful analytical tool to identify different user segments based on the level of risk.
Related post: How PhonePe Leveraged Smartech’s AI-based Email Delivery to Power Customer Engagement by 2X
4. Retarget your churned users
Users stop using your app if they stop seeing value in it. While it is a bitter truth that some users will churn, but as a marketer, you should and you must retarget these users to bring them back to the app. Revive their trust and liking for your app to re-establish the relationship.
It is important to understand the reasons for churn, so that the issue can be rightly addressed. It could be UI/UX issues, below expectation app performance, or better services offered by a competition. Asking for feedback from churned users can give you valuable insights which you can use to prevent future uninstalls.
Re-engage users who’ve gone inactive by sharing “we miss you”, “here is what you are missing” themed push notification campaigns. You could also choose to share the latest features on your app and the latest merchants and billing partners added.
To win back uninstalled users, you can send promotional emails and SMS and launch remarketing campaigns to drive app reinstalls. Track campaign ROI by measuring your reinstall rates.
Ensure that once you re-acquire a section of your lost users, you follow the first three steps mentioned above, to nurture a long-lasting customer relationship with them.
Pamper them, thank them, reward them.
Related post: Win-Back Email Campaigns: 7 Best Examples to Help Re-Engage your Customers
Smart Tips:
While these best practices are sure to help you elevate your mobile marketing game for your app, there are a few additional tips you should take note of to make your user engagement and retention strategy more effective:
- Deep link your push notifications to boost the effectiveness of your mobile marketing campaigns. The faster you redirect your users to the relevant page in the app, the higher the chances of conversion.
- Create attractive notifications with images, GIFs, and optimised titles that raise the chances of performance. There is too much clutter in your user’s smartphone, and your app may not be the only mobile payment app that he is using. So, do the best you can to stand out to get noticed.
- Do not overwhelm your users with too much of anything. Place a cap on the volume and frequency of marketing campaigns you send them. Furthermore, optimise your send times to make sure you reach your users with the right message at just the right time, i.e. when they’re most likely to interact with your campaign.
Concluding Thoughts
While the mobile payment app industry is focusing quite heavily on print media and TV commercials also, to target the masses in general, mobile app marketing remains the key focus area because the industry is app-centric, and the smartphone is the direct bridge between your brand and the user.
A well-thought-out, constantly-calibrated data-driven mobile marketing strategy is the most powerful weapon at your disposal. And, integrating your app-marketing ideas through seamless cross-channel automation platforms can be the needed accelerating force behind delivering superior quality customer experiences. With your growth-partner by your side, only sky is the limit!
To learn how Netcore Smartech can fuel your mobile payment app marketing efforts, get in touch with us, today!
