MANILA, PHILIPPINES – PayMaya knows how to grow a band of loyal app users. After all, it’s one of the biggest mobile money and payment services provider in the Philippines.
The adobo magazine team caught up with Raymund Villanueva after his insightful talk at Digicon 2019 entitled Right Person. Right Place. Right Time. How to Make Your App Your Best Marketing Tool. He opened up about how user retention is an important element that elevates an app further than enticing new users.
Villanueva says that while most marketers look at user growth as a basis of how well an app is doing, a more difficult task to accomplish is keeping people active on the app. He shares that in PayMaya’s case, initial marketing efforts bode well for the app as they were quickly able to attract new users to sign up, but about 90% of them would stop using the app after the first three months. He calls this the Leaky Bucket problem. He adds, “Once your app has been put into a folder, the user is effectively burying you into a graveyard as well.”
“When you go into a board room, or a presentation with your Management Committee, people love the whole ‘vanity metrics’ on how many downloads have you had, how many installs have you had, how many new users have you had this month. Quite honestly, it [user retention] is as important as user acquisition. If you keep acquiring users, and users, and users, and it’s a leaky bucket situation, your investment is a waste.”
He urges marketers to look at the bigger picture when choosing where to put their budgets, flashing some striking numbers on the screen: According to INC, 67% more revenue is what you can expect from a repeat customer compared to a new customer; He shares figures from Harvard Business Review too, showing that it’s 25x more expensive to acquire a new customer instead of retaining your existing base; and you can expect a 75% increase in profit by increasing your customer retention rate by just 5% as shown by studies by Bain & Company.
He also pointed out that in the Philippines, users are consuming content directly from their mobile phones now, and less from their laptops. This was a major factor in how PayMaya was built and designed half a decade ago. The group strongly believes that mobile will be the next step necessary to solve the country’s financial inclusion issues. This also reflects how services should now be moving towards apps as having your own app lets you control what the user experiences.
So, how does a brand know if it’s right for it to launch an app? “If you are going into app development, before you even start marketing the app, make sure you have MARKET FIT. If you actually test it out, give your app to a hundred people, will four of them actually say ‘you know what, this is really useful. Thank you for having this? Once you have that answer, that’s when you start your marketing.”
Through the app, PayMaya is now providing unbanked Filipinos (which is majority of the population) easy access to financial services previously unavailable to them. Villanueva proudly announced that just last year, PayMaya got the biggest investment from global firms looking to support a Philippine tech company.
“I think we’re one of the few really major players inside the Philippines where it’s fully home grown. That takes a lot of pride for us.”
“I think we’re one of the few really major players inside the Philippines where it’s fully home grown. That takes a lot of pride for us. If you look at PayMaya, it’s really a Filipino tech company. By being able to achieve the biggest tech investment, it opens up the rest of the Filipinos from being able to be noticed. If you ask me what does it take, it has to be FOCUSED. You cannot do everything at once. If you’re able to bring a solid situation to a customer problem, and you’re able to display that you’re actually solving it, I think that’s when investors will start to take notice.”
Villanueva reiterates that the range of services PayMaya provides is only part of their mission to be the economic tide that lifts all boats, and points out that opportunities to share their expertise to other brands and marketers in platforms like Digicon is among their efforts to help empower other businesses. He also revealed the exciting news that small businesses can now easily fund their Facebook Ads through their PayMaya account, completely removing the hurdle of having to use a credit card to do so.
Visit PayMaya online to learn more about the app.
