How DiversyFund uses data science to democratize real estate investment
3 min read
Over the last decade, fintech firms have democratized broad swaths of the financial services landscape, whether they be the likes of Robinhood and stock trading to Prosper and personal loans or Lemonade and homeowner insurance. Our client DiversyFund is part of the movement to lower barriers to participation, providing everyday investors access to high-value private market assets, like real estate, by removing net worth and high minimum investments requirements. Its online platform makes investing easy, and its educational content helps to inform first-time investors.
DiversyFund’s Growth REIT was qualified by the SEC in late 2018, and by June 2019 they had established their platform and investment criteria to make a concerted push into the retail investor market. Shortly thereafter, DiversyFund began its engagement with Faraday with the intent of using our platform for a few key initiatives.
Develop a better understanding of their customer base
Being fairly new to market, DiversyFund didn’t have a great sense of who their customers were or how they differed from one another. Faraday enhanced their data and applied machine learning techniques to surface a range of insights about who their customers are and what makes them unique.
DiversyFund’s insight work with Faraday uncovered a fascinating finding: two clearly distinct customer types — aspirational investors and experienced investors. These two groups had unique demographic and financial profiles and used DiversyFund in different ways.
Predict investment propensity to optimize acquisition spend
DiversyFund wanted to acquire valuable customers in a cost-effective manner by aligning acquisition costs with investment likelihood. Building off of their customer insights, DiversyFund created two predictive models to target and attract the two types of customers. To ensure they reached them with relevant content, they curated their ad creative and set CPA goals that aligned with each group. By creating individual modeling strategies, and in turn digital audiences, DiversyFund achieved a strong ROAS for each group.
Learn more about optimitized customer acquisition with Faraday.
Refine and scale their personalization strategy
Serving the broad retail investing market means playing to a highly diverse customer base that requires varied messaging and content.
When leads convert into customers, DiversyFund uses email campaigns to engage with and educate them. Given the varied level of investment acumen across their customer base, DiversyFund needed to find a way to segment their customers to assure the right content reached the right person.
To do this, DiversyFund used the Faraday platform to develop brand-specific personas that let them reach a new level of scalability in their personalization efforts. These personas are assigned at the moment of signup and allow the brand to segment their customers by sophistication level, without requiring a questionnaire or observation of investment activity. With this deeper level of customer insight, DiversyFund has created marketing drips for each persona group and seen a clear uptick in email engagement and deliverability rates.
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We love DiversyFund's work and are excited for more people to take advantage of their services. In an age of increasing economic inequality, DiversyFund is using technology and regulatory advancements to open up new avenues of wealth generation for everyday Americans.