What’s it like managing user acquisition for a consumer-facing investment and financial planning app during an ongoing trade war?
A little tricky.
Markets are turbulent, trade policies are unpredictable, and retail investors are trying their best to navigate it all.
But Betterment’s customers “have largely stayed the course,” says CMO Kim Rosenblum, who oversees the app’s acquisition, growth, consumer marketing and product marketing teams.
Betterment is a fin tech and robo-advisory company that helps users manage their money by automatically investing savings based on their objectives, like retirement or buying a home.
“Recent market volatility has understandably caused some investor anxiety,” Rosenblum said. “[But] as a platform built for long-term investors, it’s not surprising that our users tend to be more patient and committed to their goals.”
Turning on a dime
Even so, Rosenblum and her team adapted Betterment’s marketing messaging and strategy “to meet the moment,” she said.
For example, they whipped up new social ad creative to emphasize the importance of being “tax-smart” and diversifying investments across multiple geographies, then quickly trafficked the ads into Betterment’s existing Facebook buy.
They also created new content for Betterment’s site, including a piece on “making sense of market volatility” that swiftly became the company’s most-read article of the year.
And they updated other articles to make them more specific to the current climate. A refreshed post on the benefits of tax loss harvesting, which involves selling investments at a loss to offset taxable gains, was a big traffic driver for Betterment.
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According to Rosenblum, Betterment harvested nearly $60 million in tax losses for its customers between March 26 (the day President Trump announced a 25% tariff on almost all imported cars) and April 10 (the day the White House said it would suspend a planned increase in reciprocal tariffs on many countries, except China).
“Our marketing aims to reassure users without sugarcoating,” Rosenblum said, “showing how personalized plans and automated strategies help people stay on track, even in turbulent markets.”
Smart CAC-ulations
Regardless of what’s happening in the markets, there are certain tenets of growth marketing and user acquisition that always remain stable and constant.
For instance, Betterment invests a lot of its budget in direct-to-consumer and performance marketing, but not to the detriment of brand-building.
“We see our growth strategy as full cycle,” Rosenblum said. “We’re both always on when it comes to acquisition and we’re also regularly promoting our brand and doing upper-funnel work on awareness and consideration.”
Focusing too much on performance can lead to short-term gains at the expense of sustained brand equity. And as your campaigns saturate your target audience, the cost of customer acquisition rises.
“It’s like fishing again and again in the same pond,” Rosenblum said. “To stick with the metaphor, you’ve got to find bigger lakes, because if you’re not raising awareness and bringing more customers into the consideration set, your performance won’t be efficient in the long term.”
One strategy Rosenblum applied to improve Betterment’s customer acquisition cost (CAC) was to “recalibrate our thinking about return on ad spend,” she said.
Rather than calculating CAC only based on the amount it cost to acquire a customer, Betterment started taking other factors into account, including the person’s lifetime value and a projection of how much they’re likely to contribute to revenue during their first month as a user.
“Shifting to focus more on ROAS helped us acquire higher-quality customers rather than just chasing lower CACs,” Rosenblum said. “That shift has made a really big difference for us.”
