Digital technology has brought increased opportunities for entrepreneurial Indonesians wanting to start a new business. As of September 2021, there is one small-to-medium enterprise (SME) for every five Indonesians* and 99% of these are either newcomers or emerging businesses. Having easy access to funds is key not only for the growth of these businesses, but also for Indonesia’s growth as a nation. This is where our customer Akseleran plays an important role.
Akseleran is a P2P lending startup that focuses on lending funds to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Akseleran aims to empower SMEs with easy access to capital at competitive interest rates along with flexible loan terms, payment models, and collateral inclusion. Founded in 2016, the startup received its Series A funding in 2020.
To understand their journey and how CleverTap has been a part of their growth, we spoke to Andre Madian, the Head of Growth at Akseleran. He collaborates with various teams such as marketing, creative, product, and UX to formulate growth strategies for the company. His key focus is to improve the user lifecycle — increasing both user acquisition and retention rates, thereby increasing Akseleran’s growth. The KPIs he monitors when it comes to acquisition include the number of new registrations, user verifications, agreements signed, first top-up made, and first investment made. For user retention, he pays close attention to month 1 and month 4 retention rates.
Month 1 retention rate matters as Akseleran doesn’t want its users to drop off after making their first investment. As their campaigns have an average tenure of 3-4 months, the Month 4 retention rate is an early indicator and foundation of the product-market fit, according to Madian.
The ideal marketing automation partner for any rapidly growing startup is one that’s built for both complexity and scale. Madian wanted an engagement platform that could help him understand how users would respond to his campaigns in real time, thereby bringing immediacy and data science to their growth marketing strategy.
Attracting users to download your app is just one part of the mobile app user lifecycle. The real challenge lies in keeping them engaged and retaining them over time. The not-so-secret technique to keep users retained is by ensuring a successful onboarding. Madian was well aware of the role of user onboarding in the overall customer experience and wanted to ensure they were providing a captivating experience for first-time users.
As Madian is responsible for increasing Akseleran’s growth, he oversees various data-driven growth experiments across all stages of the acquisition funnel. He knew he needed a marketing automation platform that was specifically designed to retain users and fuel rapid growth.
Having worked at a previous organization that used CleverTap, Madian knew that CleverTap was the perfect engagement partner for any fast-growing organization. With A/B testing, automated segmentation, campaign analytics, CleverTap was the perfect fit for all the rapid experimentation he intended to do.
“Compared to another platform we were using, CleverTap could easily solve the use cases we had, making it my first choice here at Akseleran,” he states.
Funnels show how a user progresses through the app and pinpoints where they drop off before converting. Funnels also form an integral part of the growth experiments conducted at Akseleran.
“I use funnels to measure the initial conversion rate. For example, if I want to improve the funnel from top-up to first investment, I check the conversion rate for a specific period and segment of users,” explains Madian.
Find People View helps him segment users by the actions not taken and user profile activities that match the predefined set criteria. “This helps me to choose the right sample size and also to estimate the duration of my experiment,” says Madian.
He uses Past Behavioral Segmentation for users who successfully signed the agreement but have yet to make their first investment. “Since our app is for both borrowers and lenders, we segment users based on user properties like borrower, lender, individual, or company,” he adds.
According to Madian, the main channels used to communicate with users are emails, push notifications, and in-app messaging. He notes that “emails form an essential part of our engagement strategy. CleverTap’s intuitive drag-and-drop email editor makes building impactful emails easy for us.”
Personalization helps him to ensure that the communication is both relevant and targeted to his audience. “By personalizing the text in the referral code using dynamic values, each recipient receives a unique code. We use the same campaign to send different codes to different users,” notes Madian.
Push notifications and in-app messaging helps him drive product awareness and adoption for newly launched features. “We use campaigns to inform our customers about our auto-lending feature, so that the users don’t have to go through a manual process to lend money. We target users who haven’t made an investment during a specific time period due to time constraints, and we educate them about the ease of using this feature,” explains Madian.
One challenge he tackles using CleverTap is non-transacting users that occurs after the first month. “We have a specific campaign to get our users back on the app after the first month or the first investment,” he says.
The retention campaigns deployed by Madian have resulted in a 14% boost in average M1 monthly retention. This has helped to reduce the overall number of non-transacting users.
Andre Madian Head of Growth Andre Madian Head of Growth Akseleran intends to launch new products geared toward borrowers. Focusing on profitability is a key priority, which means more organic user engagement initiatives and less focus on paid campaigns. Also, Madian intends to implement Product Experiences in upcoming quarters. We’re elated to be a part of their success story as they fuel the success of millions of Indonesians’ entrepreneurial endeavors.
