MONEY MATTERS
After bidding adieu to Twitter, I was eager to lead a marketing organization (not just a big team within a big org). When Wealthfront came calling I was initially resistant, as the thought of working in the financial sector was not appealing. But then I heard the origin story and I was all in.
The company was founded in the late aughts, based on two key insights. The first was that the millennial generation had come to distrust the traditional financial industry after the Great Recession. And for good reason – their fraudulent practices left the economy in shambles. Accomplished young people graduated into a hopeless job market and saw their parents’ hard-earned savings depleted seemingly overnight. The second insight was that millennials willing to invest in the market were frustrated by the hefty advisor fees eating up their returns. The dirty little secret was most of these advisors just plugged your info into a software program and followed its recommendations. But there wasn’t an alternative – until Wealthfront
The company’s mission was to democratize access to the best financial advice and investing solutions by cutting out the high-cost “middle man” with a low-fee, software-only solution. Wealthfront also helped invent the “roboadvisor” category, initially dismissed by the big banks as insignificant. But they quickly saw that this was where the millennial puck was headed, so they rolled out their own robo copycats and started spending a ton on marketing to win over young investors. Wealthfront, once only one of two major players in the space, was now one of many in a more saturated market. Still a darling brand, It was time to play some offense and build a marketing team to ensure the brand was positioned to win. That’s when I came on board as the company’s first marketing chief.
MORE THAN JUST “MILLENNIALS”
One of the main things that drew me to Weathfront was many friends who were clients and bonafide superfans. Rarely are people gushing about a financial brand, so I was intrigued. As I explored the brand through the lens of a prospective customer (and employee), something felt off. The messaging didn’t resonate, and the content was intimidating. So why did my friends love it so much? That signaled there was a meaty problem to solve, so I joined the company and started to dig in.
My hunch was we probably didn’t understand our customers well enough. So my first hire was Andrew Crocco, a brilliant consumer marketer and researcher, who worked with our data science team to identify our most valuable cluster of customers. Once we identified our most valuable cohort, we executed over 300 deep-dive interviews that revealed critical learnings.
The new (and vastly improved!) customer segments of Wealthfront.
First, while our core customers were millennials, we needed a better, less generic description. We landed on “modern traditionalists” because they aspired to achieve many of the traditional things their parents did (and their parents before them), like owning a home or being able to pay for their kids’ education. However, unlike their parents, they preferred using technology to meet those goals faster and/or more conveniently. Next, we learned that two important factors led someone to Wealthfront: their interest in maximizing their wealth and their financial “literacy”, which we defined as consuming a lot of educational content.
However, not everybody in the high-value cohort spiked high across both dimensions. The customer assumed to be in the majority – a savvy, do-it-yourselfer who voraciously read white papers and was an early adopter of all kinds of financial apps – was actually in the minority. Instead, a larger percentage were slower to invest in the market because they didn’t want to do the wrong thing. We referred to them as “responsible delegators.” But the brand was almost exclusively positioned towards those more aggressive investors on a faster track (the younger of whom we called stivers), so how had we accumulated so many responsible delegators? By way of the savvy customers. We learned they were a phenomenal referral engine, so we dubbed them “savvy advocates.”
NEW BRAND, WHO DIS?
Armed with this new intel, the next step was to update our brand to represent our customers better – and what they expected from us. As mentioned, the legacy messaging used terms like “invest like a multimillionaire” and “access to secrets of the wealthy”. While the savvy advocates were on a faster track, that messaging didn’t resonate with them – and it really missed the mark with the responsible delegators.
We executed a significant redesign and positioned Wealthfront as not just a place to invest, but also a partner in our customers’ pursuit of financial wellness. In other words, we were a lifestyle brand. We also referenced the words “easy, convenient, and low-cost” in the hero copy, as we consistently heard these terms from both cohorts when we asked them what they valued in Wealthfront.
But we didn’t just stop at the website – we used these critical insights and updated positioning to inform our content strategy and product roadmap so we could grow the business and better differentiate. And people noticed, including Fast Company, who did an in-depth story on our new brand and named us one of the Most Innovative Companies in 2018.
The old branding, with messaging that didn’t reflect how our customers thought about managing their finances.
The new design and messaging reflected the expectations of our customers and positioned Wealthfront as a lifestyle brand,, which helped us land a spot on Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies list for Fintech..
$Age ADVI¢E
Weathfront didn’t use expensive financial advisors to deliver advice on topics like planning to buy a home to saving to whether or not to buy individual stocks. Instead, we leveraged our impressive think tank of experts (including Chief Investment Officer and famed economist Burton Malkiel) and produced content to educate our customers. However, what we produced was pretty advanced, and at times intimidating.
So in addition to the website overhaul, we reimagined the content strategy to meet people where they were in their financial journey and focus on topics that were in demand. While we still developed white papers and posts that got into the weeds of investing we spent more time on lifestyle topics and made the content more interactive to help make learning easier and more customized. We also made sure that the content gave sound advice that led to a specific action, from engaging with a financial planning tool to setting up a recurring deposit.
The Home Buying Guide was designed to meet people where they were in their homeownership journey and drive people to try planning feature specific to home savings.
While our content was differentiated, one execution that was unique to Wealthfront was the Career-Launching Companies list. A crown jewel in our content strategy, the annual summary was created by CEO Andy Rachleff, who created a selection methodology and tapped his network of prominent VCs to help determine the top companies each year. While accessible to anyone, it was most relevant to people working in (or aspiring to work in) tech, a significant portion of our customer base. What started as a simple blog post became a PR event that drove a ton of buzz and top-of-funnel awareness.
The annual Career-Launching List was a huge brand differentiator and created a lot of buzz in the tech world.
3 SWINGS, 2 STRIKES, 1 HOMERUN
Our consumer insights work influenced our product roadmap and helped us establish a new brand vision that we called (and trademarked!) Self-Driving Money™️. More than a slogan, it was a promise to our clients that we were building such a dynamic, automated solution that all they would have to do is direct deposit their paycheck to Wealthfront and we would take care of the rest – from investing in the market to paying their bills to helping saving up for those big financial milestones.
Growth was mission-critical, so we also focused on new products that could attract new customers, increase our assets under management (AUM), or, ideally, both. While I helped ship about a dozen products and features, there were three really big bets. And as the section title implies, only one hit the mark.
Risk Parity, a complex, and somewhat controversial investing approach, was delivered to customers as an opt-out feature. And boy, were people unhappy. The primary reason was that it violated all three of the values that were heard loud and clear: easy, convenient, and low cost. It was hard to understand, opt-out made it incredibly inconvenient (not to mention invasive), and it actually added cost-basis. Yikes. We ultimately made it opt-in and sent a mea culpa to our customers in an effort to save face. Strike 1.
The Risk Parity fall-out, a painful reminder to consider the customer at all times.
Our suite of financial planning features was very popular with customers and had tremendous product-market fit. The beautifully designed, interactive tools gave people the ability to see what was possible, and we saw a significant increase in recurring monthly deposits when customers used the various features.
To drive growth, we decided to bring those features out from behind the “paywall” and make a “free” Wealthfront financial planning app. But for people to get any value, they needed to link all of their financial accounts, which is a pretty big ask of someone new to the brand. Not to mention, the linking process back then was very clunky and broke down a lot, so even those who made an effort to engage got very little in return. We quickly shut down the app and returned our attention to improving the planning features for our already converted customers. Strike 2.
The free financial planning products failed to unlock the top of the funnel as a standalone app but continued to be a major differentiator and value-add to already converted customers.
The third at-bat knocked it out of the park when we rolled out our high-yield cash product. We knew from our research our customers were interested in banking solutions. We also knew from our data that, despite our frequent messaging to the contrary, our customers would continue to irrationally pull their money out of the market when there was any volatility. That was a big issue, as many people withdrew everything, and reacquiring them was expensive. So we had a “three birds, one stone” opportunity with a competitive savings account: attract more responsible delegators with a low-risk product, increase share of wallet among our hand-raising customers, and build an important moat that would keep more AUM inside Wealthfront when the inevitable market downturns hit.
Timing, they say, is everything, and we launched the high-yield savings product ahead of competitors and growth was off the charts. We added over $1B in AUM in a few months, a milestone that most recently took a year to achieve (and before that, years). But why it worked so was kind of obvious: we were aligned with our customers. Unlike risk parity, our cash account was easy to understand (pretty much everyone knows traditional banks pay about 0% in interest), the mechanism to transfer money into and out of Wealthfront was convenient with just a few taps in the app, and the product was not only low-cost but it put more money into our customers’ pockets. Homerun!
The launch of the high-yield savings account successfully drove record-setting growth in record-setting time.