A Story About How We Launched “The Robinhood of China” (And Lost Our Day-One Users to New Millennial Customers)

Like most stories, a reader will typically follow the tale of a dashing, clumsy, or smart hero that embarks on a journey to fulfill a mission.

Along that journey, the hero learns new things about themselves, discovers ways to evolve their talents, and embraces their new identity.

In this story, our hero is actually a phone app that would allow people to invest in the companies they love in the US and Greater Asia markets, saving them from existing apps that are otherwise too cumbersome, inaccessible, or expensive.

As the product marketing lead for the US-based team (and one of the key product managers for the organization), it was my duty to successfully launch a redesigned product while managing project timelines and deploying resources to inform the go-to-market planning; I was the guy carrying the sword and shield for our hero.

With the support of the COO, the Head of Engineering, and the Head of Marketing in Greater Asia, I leaped forward into a new phase of my product marketing journey and spearheaded a 6-month product launch that aimed to innovate our existing product, drive awareness of the app through multiple channels, acquire new daily/monthly users every quarter, and monetize users on the platform using various growth techniques.

But enough about me - let’s talk more about the hero of this story!

Brand Description

Zinvest Global (“Zinvest”) is an online brokerage firm headquartered in Hong Kong, with offices in Beijing, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

With over 250,000 users since inception, Zinvest offers users a convenient stock trading experience that allows people to trade stocks, ETFs, and Chinese ADRs commission-free in international markets (NYSE, HKE, and SSE).

The Zinvest app (Version 2.1) also allows users to diversify their investment options by offering AI-driven RIA portfolio strategies.

Project overview

With competitors eating up marketshare in the trading technology space, the main goal for this project was to build, optimize, and launch a new version of the Zinvest stock trading app that addressed the needs of the everyday investor, helped new users get involved in post-Pandemic stock markets, and filled a hole in the market for a finance product supporting Asian audiences globally.

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We wanted to run fast on multiple social media platforms, testing performance across the board with various A/B tests, multiple conversion APIs (in-house and 3rd-party), install data, and user demographics retargeting. As fate would have it, executive leadership would decide to allocate a total budget allotment of $10,000/month to run the campaign.

Given the responsibility of generating growth within a scrappy startup, I initiated our campaign by collaborating with our Beijing & Hong Kong teams and debriefed them on our campaign. Due to certain workflows, I would be assisting them with region accessibility, service licensure compliance, user onboarding (KYC/AML procedures), and brand optics.

I also quality-checked the nooks-and-crannies of our finance product, such as testing the self-directed individual brokerage account opening process, ensured proper trade execution and settlement of U.S. listed securities in Asia (excluding China and Hong Kong), facilitated A-Share transmission processing (electronically and paper), and maintained protocols for trading (non-commission) fees, such as wire transfer, paper statement, and membership fees.

Note: If you ever jump into fintech, I recommend getting an SIE Certification from FINRA to understand proper financial marketing procedures for retail products (I still need it myself!)

The Breakdown

Results

After running the 15-week campaign, we completed the project by successfully generating over 112,000 clicks and 3500 installs. At an estimated $0.28 CPC and $2.30 CPI, we beat expectations by 40%.

Surprisingly, the adspend metrics in Southeast Asia were substantially lower than metrics I’ve experienced before in North American territories. In addition to the average cost per click being $0.25 USD for Facebook ads, the cost per click for Reddit and Twitter ads were around $0.80 to $1.20 for Southeast Asia countries.

We published a total of 84 ads for 5 social platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Quora, and Reddit) with Facebook being the prime channel for demand generation. Reddit placed 2nd in demand generation, with a total CPI of $1.90. The iOS install data was tracked using our Apple Developer dashboard and Google Analytics.

In addition to the ad units, our team designed and developed a total of 12 in-house landing pages for A/B testing optimization goals.

Lastly, we discovered three major consequences of this campaign:

1. We found that a majority of clickthrough traffic did not have access to iOS devices (particularly in Malaysia, Cambodia, and Vietnam, where the dominant phone model is an Android device). To circumvent this, we excluded Android-based traffic, which increased our costs.

2. New users that installed the application could not resolve the account opening process due to a region accessibility issue. Although we confirmed this initially, our test accounts (configured for Taiwan and Philippines) could not successfully replicate the geographic environment our intended users were experiencing. Therefore, we ended up losing conversion activity and excluding regions over time.

3. New users also could not open an account successfully due to personal identification issues. Since our application is hosted in Beijing, the existing brokerage account creation requirements set forth by the FCC (SEC of China), which outlines compliance procedures on brokerage processes for Chinese residents, slowed the onboarding experience.

conclusion

Our hero was old, slow, and had a customer base of over 60,000 dedicated users. By the end of this journey, our hero would have a following of over 150,000 users in 2021.

The campaign was a success from a performance and creative perspective. Although we nearly maximized our budget with a leftover reserve of $3000, we were able to surpass our key goals for this campaign.

Ads that were highly effective drew the most clicks and highest frequencies of audience reach, but conversion metrics varied. It was only until we found that landing page units received the most performance indications, rewarding us with actionable insights such as conversion activity (CRO performance measured with Unbounce) and user experience (heat maps and on-screen recordings collected with HotJar). This meant that ad objectives that pointed to a landing page performed better than ads that invited users to directly download the application.

We were able to draw results from our tests, merging theories and insights together, and found that users engaged with Western-focused communications and ideas that were not directly focused on the features of an app. Rather, the benefits of investing in their future was the primer in capturing attention.

I had a professional learning experience from this campaign and was able to walk away with a deeper understanding of the financial processes behind retail trading and institutional brokerage as a whole. It was not my first time collaborating with off-site teams, but it was definitely my first time translating business results from user management systems I was uneducated on.

I’m grateful for the team members I could rely on for their support and, in addition, felt privileged to work on a campaign I knew would be a good test of my performance marketing knowledge.

Next Steps

After completing the campaign, we re-evaluated our advertising opportunities and planned to add affiliate strategies to our marketing mix. We placed the campaign on hold until further results could be reported and other channels were explored.

Get in the trenches with me

Want to see more of the project in detail? Click here to see how this project was created, launched, and monitored from the ground-up.