‘8 Days of Moneyhub’ Campaign

This is a Campaign Spotlight article - part of a series of articles where we ask marketers in the South West to share their recent campaign successes.

Iain Russell, Head of Performance Marketing, Moneyhub

Please introduce yourself, your business and your role and responsibilities.

I'm Iain Russell, Head of Performance Marketing at Moneyhub and I re-joined the company in January 2020. I have been in the area of mobile app marketing for over ten years now, working across the media, healthcare and finance sectors.

I am responsible for the consumer version of the Moneyhub personal finance app that sits within the wider business Moneyhub Enterprise. 

Moneyhub Enterprise has been at the forefront of Open Banking and Open Finance since 2014, powering solutions that enhance the lifetime Financial Wellness of people, their communities, and their businesses. We work with businesses throughout the UK to either offer them white-label versions of Moneyhub itself or use our developed APIs to power their own apps.

The consumer version of the app is free to download with 6-months free access and enables you to see all of your finances securely in one place, using our market-leading tools to achieve your financial goals. In my role, I am looking to implement sustainable consumer growth of the user base with fairly limited acquisition budgets, making engagement and retention even more crucial.

Can you tell us about a recent campaign that you've worked on? How was it planned and implemented? What were the objectives and was the campaign successful?

Recently, at the start of this year, I wanted to capitalise on the New Year period, as this is always a key moment for an app like ours as people make resolutions to get on top of their finances and save up for big purchases. Knowing that acquisition costs for app downloads would also be inflated at this time of year, I knew I had to approach this differently and focus on engagement and a way to make our existing users shout about the product outside of a traditional referral scheme.

I came up with the concept of #8DaysOfMoneyhub, which would constitute 8 tips over 8 days that we would share on our social channels to encourage people to like, share and tag friends in the comments. This would enter them into a competition for a lifetime subscription to Moneyhub and an Amazon voucher. 

The key for this to take off would be to make this a three-stage process (Register, Like/Share, Tag a friend), stage one was something our existing users have obviously already achieved, so I leant on that when sharing details of the competition to them via email and in-app messaging.

What do you think made this campaign a success?

I think the structure really helped to get existing users involved immediately, with the last two stages very simple to achieve and the opportunity to earn a lifetime subscription to a product they already love and actively use.

We had such a great response from our existing users where daily base install rates almost doubled during the campaign period and it also did a great job of making them aware of our social channels too in order to enter the competition (Instagram followers rose over 200%!).

What did you learn from this campaign? What would you do differently to make it even better next time?

I learned that an existing active user base is a hugely powerful source for new acquisition, which might sound obvious but we don't have an established referral scheme in place within the app yet. This is something I am keen to implement before the start of 2022, as I think having this within the app can take this concept to the next level by enhancing what would be on offer normally to really take advantage of that New Year period. 

This would also mean that I don't have to rely on social channels to spread the word of the competition, as that also posed problems with promoting posts to increase reach (Facebook and Twitter prohibit this kind of activity as it inflates likes/share of a post unfairly - they would prefer you pay for that separately in their dedicated campaign type!)

What one piece of advice would you share with fellow marketers?

Trust your gut instinct, it goes a long way as more often than not your initial reaction to a situation is the correct one, this is what we have studied and trained for after all! 

Plus, join relevant Slack communities for discussion and knowledge sharing, these are invaluable in fast-moving environments like mobile marketing.