5-fold Increase in Savings Account Open Rate

The challenge:

How to help the most vulnerable clients to build a financial reserve? This question became a priority for our client – an international banking group. 

One thing is certain – saving is much harder when you try to save on a regular account. The money is always available – and that can be quite tempting. 

That’s why the first thing on the list was to encourage vulnerable clients to open a dedicated savings account.

The approach:

At Mindworx, we know that customers’ behavior is a complex challenge to tackle. Especially when it comes to the more vulnerable. Such a complex challenge requires a complex approach. 

So, with behavioral economics and consumer psychology in mind, we focused on three main areas:

• Behavioral triggers
• Elaborated customer journeys
• Behavioral copywriting
  

The solution:

1. Behavioral triggers

Many companies still miss a crucial piece of the puzzle – customers will react to an offer differently depending on when they receive it. 

According to research, people are more likely to start saving when their salary increases. It means they can make it through the month even if they put something aside. And this is exactly what we used as a trigger to start communication with vulnerable clients.

2. Elaborated customer journeys

If you use timely triggers, it will make your customers more willing to listen. However, that doesn’t mean they are ready to buy. Purchasing is a process, not a single point in time. 

That’s why you need to take customers on a journey – to provide them with the right information at the right time. 

We proposed multi-channel communication with several emails, in-app banners, push notifications, and remarketing. Each piece complemented the previous one, building a coherent journey that answered the following questions along the way:

3. Behavioral copywriting

To help vulnerable clients understand that saving is possible even for them, we stacked the copy with several behavioral principles. The most important ones were:

Making benefits concrete and specific

We explicitly stated situations that savings can help them with. Do they struggle to cover monthly bills? With replacing broken appliances due to a lack of funds? Do they need loans even for essentials? By saving, they can leave all these concerns behind. 

Showing how easy it is to start saving

When we choose whether to do something or not, the first criterion is how easy it seems. If opening a savings account seems like a hassle, clients won’t do it. So, we highlighted that opening the account was a matter of a few clicks and wouldn’t take longer than 3 minutes.

How a saving account prevents you from losing money

Loss aversion is one of the most powerful behavioral principles – we feel the pain from losses about twice as much as we feel the joy of equivalent gains.

We used this principle by showing the clients the possible loss when saving money on their regular account, or even in cash at home. And, of course, how it can be solved by opening a savings account.

The results

We tested the new communication and compared it with the control group. The results showed that our new communication led to 5x more conversions compared to the control group and 4x more conversions compared to the previous year’s campaign.