OppFi Powers Successful Referral Campaign With Braze

OppFi expands access to credit to everyday consumers those previously underserved by mainstream options. The company grew its consumer base with a cross-channel referral campaign built in Braze.

OppFi is a leading financial technology platform that powers banks to help everyday consumers gain access to credit, assisting more than 150 million US consumers locked out of traditional credit options. The company’s best-in-class financial technology platform and award-winning customer service offer quick applications, a superior consumer experience, and underwriting algorithms that power banks to deliver more credit access to people who need it.

In order to better engage existing consumer, acquire new ones, and increase conversion, OppFi turned to Braze.

Changing Consumer Behavior With Targeted Messaging

OppFi was using a legacy marketing cloud for consumer communications, but that solution required coding in SQL, which was not user-friendly enough to be easily learned and used by the OppFi teams that might want to leverage it. With a more intuitive and accessible marketing solution like Braze, OppFi hoped to take advantage of A/B testing, new channels, and better personalization in their messaging campaigns.

One of OppFi’s first moves after integrating Braze was to build out an effective onboarding campaign. To do so, the team used Braze Canvas, our customer journey builder, to design an email and SMS flow that encourages consumers to finish their application with reminders and step-by-step guidance throughout the process:

  • When a consumer takes out a loan, they receive of series of relevant educational emails

  • If a user doesn’t finish applying for a loan, they receive emails encouraging them to come back and finish

  • They send messages that help guide users through the application process and ask for information they didn’t originally provide

With the Braze platform’s robust A/B testing functionalities and Canvas, OppFi could quickly iterate on messaging to find the most valuable approach at every pivotal point on the customer journey. They also used our Intelligent Timing send-time optimization tool to reach the consumer at the moment they were most likely to engage.

For the referral campaign, OppFi wanted to combine its generous incentives with a personalized, data-driven system that would encourage existing consumers to introduce friends and family to OppLoans, OppFi’s installment loan product. They leveraged flexible API integrations with their Canvases to create hyper-personalized referral program journeys. Using Braze Connected Content, our dynamic content personalization tool, with OppFi’s referral program partner, OppFi was able to integrate API endpoint stats with data points such as the specific number of times a referral link was clicked, how many funded referrals a consumer had, and how much money a consumer earned in incentives.

“Braze gives us total flexibility and creativity, in a tool that’s easy for all of our teams to use, even when people don’t come from a digital marketing background,” said Jeff Russo, Sr. Marketing Manager, OppFi. “Even if you’re not an email marketer, you can still jump in and create or test different campaigns. We have 20 different people across many departments accessing Braze, and they all have the freedom to experiment, and quickly see how their campaigns drive results.”

OppFi Results: Increases in Applications and Loans from Referrals

By awarding referrals with generous incentives communicated via a targeted Braze campaign, OppFi built its consumer base while rewarding and engaging existing consumers. OppFi occasionally runs promotions and increases the incentive to encourage program engagement and sharing. Their main way of promoting promos is through emails with Braze. During these promotions, they’ve typically seen application volume from their referral channel increase by 30% and referral shares up 80%.

Final Thoughts

Consumers listen to the people around them when it comes to choosing products and services. To encourage customer enthusiasm for referring your business, it pays to incentivize. Referrals really are a marketer’s best friend, but too often referral programs seem like an afterthought.

For OppFi, whose products are aspirational with the potential to rebuild people’s financial health, referrals are a natural path for growth. With a targeted, personalized campaign built with Braze, OppFi grew its user base while engaging existing consumers with the idea of connecting friends and family to the benefits OppFi can offer.