Challenge: New customer acquisition.
Solution: Targeted e-mail communication to engaged, active Mint.com users, asking them to refer their friends and families to try the site.
Result: The best performing e-mail segment saw a 48 percent open rate and a 61 percent clickthrough rate. More than 10 percent of this group invited an average of five friends and family members to join, resulting in one new user signing up per 2.6 invitations. New members numbered in the five figures.
Mint.com, the site that helps people who are fanatical about tracking their money, is fanatical about tracking its marketing results.
So when representatives of the Mountain View, Calif.-based online personal finance service decided it was time to enter the social networking scene, they weren't going to play games with the unquantifiable.
When Mint.com learned during the summer of 2009 that Redwood City, Calif.-based e-mail marketing software and services provider StrongMail Systems could handle that granular detail, using its e-mail-to-social networking tool, Influencer, the financial services company decided to go for it.
"We're a culture here that likes to quantify everything," says Donna Wells, Mint.com's chief marketing officer. "It's one of our core company values."
Emphasizing that point, Wells mentions that a quick survey of the site's 1.6 million users guided the segmentation and incentive choices for the customer acquisition campaign. Asked when they referred family and friends to the site, most survey respondents said they waited until a couple months in. As for incentives, which could include cash or charitable donations, most chose a "minty green" iPod nano or a chance to partake in the Financial Fitness beta program.
So in August, Mint.com deployed social e-mail to users who had checked their finances during the past 30 days and had used the site for four months or longer. But that's as far as the behavior-based segmentation went.
"We know everything about your finances here at Mint," Wells says. "But we don't know who you are, and we don't capture any demographic or behavioral information on you, other than what we see in the way you use your money."
So the single-deployment e-mail campaign saw recipients evenly and randomly divided into three groups. One group received no incentive. The second and third groups, whose social networking resulted in three friends or family members signing up, got either the iPod or access to the
beta program.
"We're a free service, and our business model is lead generation," Wells says. "So it's very important that we acquire new users cost effectively. And referrals from friends and word-of-mouth is not only the highest praise we get, but it's a very, very cost-effective channel."
The beta program incentive won handily. "It goes back to the nature of our users," Wells says. "They're a very passionate, very engaged group. And particularly the slice of our users that we were mailing to. So the privileged access and the advance sneak peek component of what we were offering … [was] something that was very motivating to them because it meant that not only were they going to see it first, but they knew that it would be a step up in their ability to better manage their finances."
Also, she says, Mint.com's marketing efforts probably will continue as they were, despite the fact that Mountain View-based Intuit, the makers of Quicken and TurboTax, bought Mint.com in September. "So expect us to apply this same successful approach, just across a much wider audience of many more millions of users together."
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E-mail Marketing that Works
