How FinTechs Can Grow With Incentive Marketing

If you’re anything like most people, you’ll love gifts. So it’s little wonder that they work as enticements; you can offer them to other people as a reward for taking the action you want from them.

Businesses are leveraging this love of freebies through what’s called incentive marketing. This means that they promise (and deliver) extra products or discounts to customers who do a specific thing—whether it’s buying a certain number of goods, getting their friends to purchase things from the business, or completing tasks that the business lays out.

FinTechs, like many other organizations, can reap immense benefits from incentive marketing if they deploy it correctly. Here we’ll talk about a few steps they can take to do this.

Set Up A Customer Loyalty Program

FinTech platforms can run a customer loyalty program, which recognizes regular users and rewards them for their frequent, long-running patronage. The reward could be anything from a simple gift to extra services and even a trip to the cinemas or a fine dining restaurant.

The benchmark for gifting users will largely depend on the type of service that the FinTech in question provides and how much of that service the customer who benefits has used. For example, a savings app may grant users an extra ₦5,000 for saving up to ₦200,000. On the other hand, a wealth management app could add an extra 1% gain on investments for people who invest up to ₦800,000 in it.

The great thing about customer loyalty programs is that they make customers feel appreciated. This could be crucial to keeping them, especially when there’s significant competition from other FinTechs that offer similar products.

Give Bonuses For Referrals

A business can award bonuses and discounts to people who refer their contacts. In the case of FinTechs, these benefits can be a fixed amount of money, or a commission, which is transferred to the referrer’s account on the FinTech app after the person they’ve invited begins to use the app.

Here are a couple of examples. PiggyVest, one of Nigeria’s leading digital savings platforms, gives a ₦1,000 bonus to anyone who gets one of their contacts to use the app. Risevest, which provides dollar-denominated investments to Nigerians, pays its users 3% of whatever is invested by the person they’ve invited to use the Risevest app.

Referral programs are brilliant because they help FinTechs achieve multiple things at once. Existing users get the chance to earn more, thus increasing the likelihood of remaining users. And FinTechs will have their customers conduct brand evangelization and lead generation on their behalf. That’s a win for everyone involved.

Organize Competitions

One way businesses can ignite brand interest and excitement is by organizing contests. And there are so many ways to go about this. One example would be to ask users to share their experience with the business’s product and reward persons with the most compelling stories. Another approach would be to award prizes to people who reach a certain milestone concerning the number of the business’s products they’ve used.

Some FinTechs could have contests which promise no other gift besides the satisfaction of saving and investing certain amounts of money with them (plus the interest that accrues as a result). Cowrywise (a digital savings platform) has several regularly occurring, months-long savings challenges designed to encourage saving more with it. Risevest has run something similar in 2022 as well.

Competitions can generate more business for FinTechs, either through the publicity they drive for these startups, or the buying and selling, savings and investments that happen as part of the competitions.

Final Words

There’s a lot that FinTechs can achieve by presenting their customers with incentives. But for an incentives-based marketing strategy to work, it must offer rewards that FinTech users consider valuable. If startups and bigger companies in the space get this right, they’ll be closer to reaping great gains from their engagement with their customers.

Featured Image Source: Marquee marketing