How Happy Money optimizes omnichannel marketing with data-driven audiences

The pandemic has destabilized many consumers’ financial situations, forcing them to reprioritize their finances in order to stay out of debt. Because of this, businesses offering creative solutions that allow individuals to pay back debt, invest, or easily start a savings account have become increasingly popular.

One of these businesses is Happy Money, a fintech company on a mission to turn borrowers into savers, specializing in helping people pay off their credit card debt and save up for the future. Featured by publications like Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and Fast Company, Happy Money has over 100K members and has helped pay off over $2 billion in credit card debt by partnering with financial institutions willing to lend money.

Happy Money started working with Faraday to improve their marketing campaign performance by connecting to the people across the country who are in need of their financial services.

Predicting optimal locations for expansion

In order to reach new leads across their marketing channels, Faraday built predictive models using rich consumer data to find potential Happy Money members, identifying candidates interested in paying down credit card debt. This gave Happy Money access to high-performing audiences that they were able to push directly to Facebook during Q1 and Q2 2020.

This is particularly exciting because, despite the economic downturn in the beginning of the pandemic that accompanied high rates of job loss and hardships for many businesses, Happy Money was able to reach the consumers who would benefit personally from the brand’s services.

Taking a multichannel approach

Facebook isn’t the only platform where Happy Money advertises. Like any smart brand, they know that reaching new leads on one social media platform just doesn’t cut it — they need to utilize their audiences across multiple acquisition channels.

Faraday’s custom audiences are unique in a number of ways. First off, they allow brands to get in front of consumers that they may otherwise not reach via traditional segmentation or Facebook’s own lookalikes. Second, the audiences are portable, meaning they can be optimized for and deployed to any marketing channel — like Facebook, Snapchat, direct mail, and ad display networks like Verizon Gemini — to support a strong omnichannel strategy.

These custom audiences aren’t just one-off lead lists, which is how a number of lead generation tools work. The Faraday platform delivers new, updated audiences every month to Happy Money’s acquisition channels to ensure that Happy Money is always reaching the most qualified leads.

Using customer personas to seed new audiences

Within every brand’s customer base, there are multiple types of customers, which can be analyzed and grouped by persona. To hone in on ideal members, Happy Money is working with Faraday to generate audiences based on existing member personas.

Faraday’s personas are developed with machine learning models to mitigate human bias and eliminate the chance of overlooking a significant customer type. Seeding audiences with these personas has many advantages, arguably the most important of which is the ability to personalize ad content and campaign messaging to maintain relevance with each audience.

As Happy Money continues to strengthen their omnichannel approach, these multichannel audiences will hopefully prove to be useful in reaching more people who look like the members that have grown Happy Money’s business the most.