Increasing Retention, Lowering Acquisition Costs, and Helping People Improve Their Financial Future

Insights/Action/Outcome: The WeMoney team noticed in Amplitude that users who set money goals within the first three days of onboarding had a higher retention rate at the 12-month mark than those who didn’t. They built goal-setting into their initial onboarding process, which led to a 20% increase in retention—and after creating lookalike audiences and personalised messages, they reduced customer acquisition costs by 2x.

A short time to value is critical for success. If you don’t understand what your customers are doing and take too long to meet their desires, you’re missing an opportunity to create a better customer experience—and a better business. The surest way to do that is to look at your data.

Great data leads to great success, and I’ve seen that firsthand at WeMoney. We aren’t a personal finance website or a self-help platform. Instead, we’re a social and economic wellness mission driven company that believes in personal transformation. WeMoney is a small team, but we have to move fast, and the only way we can make real-time changes to our platform is by having deep, high-quality, real-time metrics.

A short time to value is critical for success. If you don’t understand what customers are doing and take too long to meet their desires, you’re missing an opportunity to create a better customer experience.

Removing the stress of money management

Through no fault of their own, people are bad at managing money. An individual’s approach to finance has a lot to do with how they were raised to think about money. Thinking about money is stressful, so when someone doesn’t have the mental capacity to manage their financial environment, they end up making poor financial choices that keep them in a cycle of debt.

More financial literacy is a good idea, but it’s not enough. Automation is key. WeMoney aims to alleviate the burden of thinking about money by automatically rerouting funds to the most appropriate location, whether it’s a bill, credit card, or savings. Customers set their parameters, wire in their paychecks, and let money work on their behalf—without the stress and anxiety that usually comes with managing it. Our platform was designed to abstract the complexity and remove the tension of personal finance, helping people see real progress towards their goals.

Automation is just half of the financial empowerment puzzle. The other half involves the collision of social and community.

There’s a generational change in how we talk about money. People aren’t tuning into traditional financial commentators anymore to get scolded on how they spend their money. Instead, they’re having honest, open, gritty discussions about their financial lives and sharing stories that resonate with them. We host those conversations on WeMoney and speak to audiences through the power of ‘finfluencers.’

I’m proud to say that around 70% of our platform growth is organic, so we have to surprise and delight users enough to get positive referrals. Our product roadmap is vast, but our bandwidth is limited. We need to narrow our focus to adjustments that make the most difference—namely, increased retention and lower acquisition costs.

But how do we get from here to there? And how can we punch above our weight in terms of output and delivery? We know the answer is data, so we turned to Amplitude from the start.

Why Amplitude works for our team

After spending so many years in the fintech space, I knew we wouldn’t have a business without access to our data. One of the first things we did was decide on a BI platform.

Our selection came down to a choice between Mixpanel and Amplitude. Amplitude had a better overall product lineup for what we needed, and it felt much easier to use than anything we had tried before. Our decision boiled down to a few key elements:

• Amplitude had better event-driven architecture. It’s easier for developers to use and easy for untrained folks to learn, which is a perfect system for our smaller team.
• Multiple API connections. All the API connections point out of Segment, which we use as a data warehouse that pipes straight into Amplitude.
• Incredible taxonomy and governance around data. WeMoney probably creates 20–30 new event labels each week, and we can track them freely within Amplitude.
• The flexibility of charting. We love charts. We live and die by numbers and manage both our product analytics and business performance through Amplitude. How many members have onboarded today? What does retention look like? What’s the cause of that issue? It only takes a click to find out.

We all use Amplitude religiously. From the growth team to the engineering team to myself as the CEO, we all check the data quality and monitor events to keep an eye on success. My favourite feature is cohorting. We currently have six pages with 40 cohorts per page.

Amplitude has become invaluable to WeMoney, and it’s paid for itself 20X over in terms of ROI.

Amplitude has become invaluable to WeMoney, and it’s paid for itself 20X over in terms of ROI. Compared to my past experiences with data analytics, it’s saved us from the painful process of guesswork or floundering around to answer questions. Data is everything in this industry, so if you can’t easily access data when and where you need it, you’re losing time and money.

Data that encourages iteration and personalisation

Because moving fast is so critical for our business, we have to make decisions as quickly as possible, and Amplitude helps us do that. We’ve enhanced so many conversations in product meetings about things that would move the needle versus changes that would be inconsequential. Amplitude tells us exactly what we need to know, and we can act on it.

In one example, we’d created a ‘Goals’ feature to help users identify upcoming money milestones. However, the feature was buried low on our home page and not always easy to find. Using the data-driven power of Amplitude, our team realised that customers who set money goals within the first three days of onboarding had a higher retention rate at the 12-month mark compared to users who didn’t.

But that wasn’t the end of it. We used Amplitude to build lookalike audiences to find more people pursuing similar goals and pathways. We fed that much earlier into the growth machine to help attract more folks looking to do things like buy a home, get rid of debt, or save for a wedding using very personalised messages. These changes reduced our customer retention costs by 2x.

By building lookalike audiences to find more people pursuing similar goals and pathways, we’ve reduced our customer retention costs by 2x.

Amplitude has continued to support our business as we future-proof our product and its features. We use a lot of life cycle retention charting to monitor performance, especially in the days right after a feature launch. After some significant user testing, for example, we discovered that our members wanted the ability to track debt automatically. Thanks to Amplitude, we were able to develop a Debt Tracker feature that took this into account, which has driven significant word of mouth for our brand and overall vision.

Amplitude allows the WeMoney team to see real-time information easily, better understand our customers, iterate faster, and accomplish daily tasks with more certainty. For us, it’s more than gaining new users; it’s about providing a valuable service for people struggling with personal finances.

Bringing the fintech future closer to today

Amplitude isn’t a company that’s staying still, and this pace of innovation matches WeMoney step for step. We know we can rely on Amplitude as a BI tool and an analytics tool, providing us with plenty of space to explore the future. We’re excited to dig deeper into the possibilities of data and customer satisfaction, and we’re looking into other solutions like Amplitude Audiences and Amplitude Experiment, too.

Most phenomenal products grow by word of mouth which ultimately reduces customer acquisition costs and a higher lifetime value. But good data makes a good platform, which you need if you want to stand out in the SaaS space. We release and ship at least two or three features every month, which are met with resounding applause from users existing and new.

If WeMoney didn’t have Amplitude, we wouldn’t have a business. Amplitude has boosted our product development velocity, making us Australia’s biggest social financial wellness platform. Amplitude helps us carve out a category that empowers people to achieve their financial dreams.