Fintech mobile advertisers unlock the potential of mobile OEM app stores
By Ashwin Shekhar
Over the past decade, India has witnessed tremendous growth in the fintech industry landscape. This trend accelerated with not only the expansion of internet services but more recently in the wake of economic developments such as demonetisation and the implementation of Goods and Services Tax (GST). These changes have changed how people conduct financial transactions, with digital banking increasingly replacing traditional banking systems.
With demonetisation, COVID-19 increased the use of digital payment services and online transactions for suppliers – both large and small. Additionally, this area has seen tremendous growth as traditional banking systems in India are gradually being replaced by digital banking, with leading banks such as Yes Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, HDFC Bank and PayTM bank encouraging the adoption of digital payment systems.
Considering the market trends for 2023, one can clearly bet on the growth of fintech services across verticals such as digital payment services, crypto trading, Buy now, pay later (short term financing), lending, personal finance and insurance apps.
The outbreak of the pandemic in 2020 pushed payment services and stock market investments to go digital, in line with consumers’ growing reluctance to handle cash amid the COVID-19 pandemic. India led the financial app installs globally with 149 crores downloads as of March 2021.
Apart from this, innovative reforms initiated coupled with technological advancements including UPI (Unified Payments Interface) in the digital payments arena increased the number of first-time adopters of digital payments. UPI has seen tremendous growth in India in recent years and is now used for a wide range of transactions, including peer-to-peer payments, bill payments and e-commerce transactions. According to NPCI data, the number of UPI transactions in India increased from around 1 crore in August 2016 to over 400 crores in December 2020, a fourfold increase in just four years.
The growth of new banking in India has been significant in recent years. The increasing availability of affordable smartphones and internet connectivity, along with the government’s push for digital financial inclusion, has contributed to new bank growth in the country. According to a report by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the number of digital transactions in India increased from around 2 crores in 2011 to over 2,000 crores in 2020, a tenfold increase in just a decade. There are several neo-banks operating in India including Paytm, Google Pay, BharatPe and PhonePe. These firms have gained a large customer base through their apps by offering convenient and user-friendly digital banking services, often at a lower cost than traditional banks.
Fintech marketers and app developers who think outside the traditional search and social boxes like Google and Facebook; advertising within the OEM ecosystem can increase scale and find new audiences efficiently and safely. So let’s decode their success mantra.
Giant Indian fintech apps such as Navi, Money Tap and WazirX have tapped alternative app stores and leveraged mobile OEM advertising to achieve incremental user growth and ensure maximum ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) for their apps.
Investing in mobile OEM alternative app stores has helped these fintech apps unlock newer audiences, thereby contributing to a more profitable revenue stream. With more and more fintech companies like PolicyBazaar, Razorpay, Cred, Paytm and Groww diving hard into app marketing, it’s time to get ready to make wider inroads in 2023.
Major Android mobile OEMs, such as Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo, have launched their own app stores, offering users a new channel to discover and download apps. These app stores are pre-installed and placed on top of the Google Play Store on all new Android smartphone devices and cover almost 90% of the total Android market share in India. Mobile OEM inventory is increasing rapidly, with year-over-year growth of 3.8%, and shipments are expected to reach 1.43 billion by the end of 2022.
Fintech companies in India can use OEMs as an additional channel to the marketing mix for user acquisition – Any mobile user in India who owns Vivo, Oppo, Xiaomi or Samsung smartphones should be a potential user for fintech companies, where apps promoting such services can run ads on the device aimed directly at their end customer. In addition, fintech brands can influence users through display ads, recommended ads, and even having the apps pre-installed on these smartphones, where users are most likely to use digital financial services integrated by default.
Mobile OEMs enable Fintech advertisers to reach potential customers at multiple touchpoints throughout the lifetime of the device. Unlike most other user acquisition channels, it allows them to strike a chord starting with app suggestions or device activation preloads, right at the initial stage. In addition, marketers place ads at multiple touchpoints to discover previously untapped customer segments throughout the journey. While using a performance-based approach, you can rest assured that the down-funnel events are optimized for the highest user engagement with the app.
OEM is a source of more transparent, fraud-free inventory compared to other user acquisition channels. They are the inventory sources with the highest data points aside from search and social. It strengthens their ability to target the right customers accurately. Mobile marketers gain access to a completely fraud-free and transparent user acquisition ecosystem simply because there are no more layers between the budget holder and the mobile OEM itself. The mobile OEM controls the reach of ad placements.
On-device ads enable fintech advertisers to go hyper-local and target users in precise locations. Fintech advertisers can now hyper-target the areas they want to reach using the area codes. Whether looking to expand into new markets or amplify reach in cities that may have been proven winners, OEMs can help marketers achieve their goals. Appographic targeting helps market apps to users with similar interests beyond category and ownership to increase app install rates. Furthermore, mobile OEMs offer customized push notifications to target high-value users during key events to enable app discovery, thereby helping them achieve broader distribution capabilities and reach larger audiences.
Fintech apps can use retargeting capabilities with mobile OEM advertising using components such as user behavior, device model and location.
Deep links can also be used to retarget dormant fintech app users in several different ways. For example, if a user hasn’t used the app in 30 days, the app can send a push notification with a deep link to a relevant feature or new content in the app to encourage the user to open the app again and engage with that feature. promotion. This can be particularly useful for promotions and offers related to local financial services.
Marketers from the fintech arena benefit from the power of varied ad formats offered by OEMs. For example, with mobile OEM app advertising, marketers can take advantage of an exclusive app store with multiple ad formats per day and on specific dates, such as video ads, rewarded ads, native ads, and banner ads with unique placements. In addition, OEMs allow them to get exclusive screen takeovers with splash ads, allowing them to showcase the best of their app features on a full smartphone screen. All this is done in a video format, which creates immediate brand awareness and users’ interest. With dynamic ad placement offers, brands can experiment with on-device display ads and in-app store ads to get the most eyeballs.
While setting up the advertising campaigns, integrations can be seamless and available with most MMPs (Mobile Measurement Platforms), such as Adjust, Appsflyer, Singular, etc., where mobile marketers can track all activity – from impressions to installs – as well as activity after installation. This allows them to understand each new channel’s user journey and performance.
The author is a co-founder of AVOW
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