Increasing internet penetration and the need to improve the existing level of financial inclusion is giving rise to immense innovation in the fintech space across Africa. Smartphone users now have a better choice of apps to choose from to fulfil their financial services needs, whether seeking a small loan, making mobile payments or making a money transfer. Brands are faced with the challenge of standing out from the crowd, attracting and acquiring customers, and retaining them – all while delivering a seamless experience at all stages of the customer journey.
Here, Daniel Junowicz, RVP EMEA & Special Projects at AppsFlyer, shares how to use marketing measurement and attribution to enhance your app users’ experience.
Understanding attribution
Understanding the purpose of attribution is an essential first step. More than just knowing exactly where users found your app, this will also show actions customers took along their user journey. Starting with the moment they clicked on an ad for the app, right through to installing and adding their user information, attribution offers a holistic view of the various touchpoints experienced by an app user.
Adoption
Customer adoption of a financial app is a vital step in digital marketing, as it enables the brand to build a picture of the entire customer journey. Using data, it becomes possible to understand, model and predict user behaviour, for example, whether the key driver for trying the app is easier mobile money transfers or a more accessible mobile wallet. This enables better-targeted marketing, as well as giving insight into how customers are interacting with a service. In turn, this allows fintech apps to efficiently cross-sell other products to an audience that modelling shows will be receptive to it.
Personalisation
Personalisation is at the heart of today’s efforts to enhance the customer experience with many of the new apps jostling for dominance in the growing African app space. It underpins the communication flow between customer and business, enhancing trust between the two. It can also streamline processes through automation and targeting. Most importantly for the brands themselves, it allows for accurate attribution of value in both marketing efforts and general business practices.
Analytics
Advanced analytics enable businesses to attribute and predict customer behaviour, with the purpose of providing an enhanced, customised service. Through intelligent management of large amounts of data, businesses are able to identify individual customers (or micro-audiences) with targeted messaging and services, all of which can help to meet a range of KPIs. Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs) offer an end-to-end solution that allows for flexible, configurable and scaleable attribution and targeting. They are ideally suited to helping businesses gather, manage and utilise customer data to meet a wide range of KPIs.
Privacy
In 2020, Apple announced a major privacy-focused change for apps on iOS. With the introduction of iOS 14.5, users will need to grant specific consent in order for apps to use their data for the types of customer experience purposes we listed above. This is intended to give users greater control and visibility over what data apps can access and use. Google has recently announced similar plans for its Google Advertising ID.
While this is a welcome move from a privacy perspective, there’s no doubt it will impacting a company’s ability to create personalised marketing campaigns, and measure their success.
There are several solutions that were put in place by MMPs after this announcement by Apple, designed to give businesses the same scope of customisation without compromising on user privacy.
Fraud
Ad fraud is growing across the African continent, as app engagement grows and more money enters the mobile app market. Marketers need to watch out for bots that can mimic typical user behaviour on mobile devices, such as clicks, installs and in-app events. The bots and malware produce seemingly legitimate activity reports, making the engagement appear genuine and therefore extremely difficult to detect. All of which can have a negative impact on the overall customer experience of an app, as marketers may struggle to tell what engagement is genuine and what is fraudulent. Measurement and analytics tools, as well as dedicated anti-fraud software, can be key to helping marketers stay one step ahead.
A competitive and fast-growing fintech space across Africa means more choice for users and therefore brands need to ensure an impeccable customer experience for users. Mobile marketing attribution empowers apps to compare campaigns, understand which ads worked best, which platforms to focus on and ultimately makes it clearer how to spend your marketing budget more effectively. It is also relatively straightforward to implement. With a large market ready to be served, ensure you have all the data points you need to not only acquire new customers but to also keep them.
