Marketing credit builder to the U.S. market

User Persona

There were a lot of persona who could benefit a lot from a credit builder product like Azpire. From international students and immigrants from Mexico (10M in SAM) to the U.S. who want to build their credit scores without having any SSN to dependents of the working professionals who go along under L2 and H2B visas.

As far as the native U.S. residents were considered, there were debit-preferred users (who are wary of using credit cards), New To Credit (NTC), or people looking for credit repair services, and gig workers (60M in SAM).

Marketing Mix

Since we were operating out of India, marketing a product like Azpire to the US audience has it’s own challenges. After doing a competitive analysis and considering the challenges of execution and attribution that we would face with the offline advertising, we froze on the following marketing mix;

1. Building In-house affiliates and Ad networks like Rakuten and publishers like (NerdWallet, Pennyhoarder and WalletHub) (30%)
2. Paid marketing across AdWords, Facebook, TikTok, Taboola, and Reddit (30%)
3. Influencer marketing across Youtube, TikTok (20%)
4. Community engagement across Reddit and Facebook (10%)
5. Email and direct mail marketing to Experian database (10%)

Execution of strategy

For us to implement the cold-warm and hot strategy
1. People are driven to the different landing pages according to some key interactions on the videos/collateral/landing pages to access where tier they belong to.
2. People who go to the Cold landing page are re-marketed through cookies to the warm landing page
3. We experimented with video replacements of the landing pages and capture intent by the avg watch time on a video to gauge interest. Eg: a video on how credit builder card/ secured credit card works to build credit can replace the warm landing page

Caveats:
1. If we drive people to credit tracker page, wouldn’t that increase leakage?
No, as the credit score tracker itself takes the user inside the funnel
Also, we don’t always need to re-market people, the users have the option to go inside the funnel by themselves by clicking on hotlinks on all the pages that takes them from Cold to warm to Hot Landing pages
2. The ads need to be click baity for the cold and warm strategy to work as there is no product placement but sheere content value on those pages

Positioning test

To get through the initial phase of positioning tests, we had some hypotheses around what would appeal to what kind of audience, we created a way to integrate a Google Sheet with the Hot landing page to dynamically change the above-the-fold text on the product page. This helped us create offers on the fly and test value propositions by appending a query parameter with the URL of the page.

The sheet looked like this;

The above shows the various positioning that we were able to test. We started the digital campaigns with search ads (targeting people searching for credit builder products), video ads on youtube videos related to credit card/credit builder cards, targeting affinities like gig workers, and immigrants along with custom affinity audience targeting competitor traffic with ads and landing pages that showcased about Azpire was better than other competitors including Chime, Credit Sesame etc.

Link to competitor comparison page: https://zolve.com/azpire/credit-builder-card/comparison

Tackling Fraud

In the last leg of the product launch, we started a waitlist campaign to get people excited about Azpire and get some early sign ups. The campaigns then were very limited to Zolve existing users that we couldn’t cater to as they might not have a good credit score in India or belonged to countries other than India.

As soon as the product was launched, we started the paid digital with highly targeted campaigns on Google and Facebook, some organic posts on Reddit and some bit of cold emailing to databases bought from third-party vendors (of people with low credit scores in the U.S.). Soon people started joining the program and we saw a humongous increase in sign-ups, profiles and account creations. So much so that we once thought that the product had gone viral.

Soon the reality hit and we realized that we were hit by a fraud ring and the number of ACH withdrawals increased to 70% which had to be capped to a maximum of 15%.

Next couple of weeks, there were a lot of stringent checks implemented from Sardine to Socure to Plaid integration along with additional checks on email vintage to make sure that we minimize fraud along with putting limits on ACH reversals.

This drastically hit our conversion rates and KYC costs. 

But ACH reversals were one thing, if these fraudsters would continue to be in the system, they would soon be a big chargeback fraud. After placing all checks on the fraud, we figured out that marketing would now need to be in full coordination with the fraud team to understand the risk level on a user id level. Thus we passed our internal User id as a custom dimension in GA to optimize campaigns and pass on our fraud learnings to the channel and audience resulting in more fraud.

While the situation came under control, fraud is one of the biggest problems plaguing the U.S. finance market owing to the ACH system. While FCRA promotes the accuracy, fairness, and privacy of consumer information contained in the files of consumer reporting agencies, it poses restrictions on how this data on fraudsters is shared among other financial institutions. Thus giving fraudsters an incentive to continue being in the system.

While we continue to refine the fraud engine and work seamlessly with the marketing team to optimize the campaigns, making a product like Azpire successful requires a fine and real time balance between fraud and marketing, taking into account the cost of KYC as part of the CAC.