Financial App: Lifecycle Marketing
& Retention

MEI Gestor took care of what micro-entrepreneurs had no time for: invoicing, tax payments, and annual declarations—compliance tasks that turn into fines and suspended licenses if ignored. This is a highly skeptical audience that gets bombarded with daily messages and deletes anything that wastes their time. My job was to engineer trust and compel them to act.

 

Every lifecycle automation had a measurable impact on activation, billing, and overall retention.

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THE CHALENGE

 

Re-engage a saturated database of 661,000 contacts. The 7 core automations covering the entire customer lifecycle, from account creation to cancellation, had been running on autopilot with zero performance tracking.

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The metrics exposed the scale of the problem. In the onboarding flow, the first email ran at a 1.65% open rate: out of 442,000 sends, only 7,300 people opened it. The entire annual declaration sequence operated between 7% and 13.7%, for an issue that is a legal obligation for the user. The registration update flow had a deliverability rate of just 35%, locking nearly two-thirds of the database out of the automation, and dashboard onboarding emails went out with zero recorded clicks.

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No one had audited this; the automations had been running untouched for too long, and no one knew what actually worked and what just burned through sends.

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WHAT I DID

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I audited the automations one by one: onboarding, billing, registration updates, annual declarations, cancellation, tax slips (DAS), and the customer dashboard. I prioritized based on a combination of database volume and critical open rates: the onboarding flow had 442,000 stalled contacts sitting at 1.65%, so it was the first to be rebuilt.

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I reviewed the complete setup of every funnel: content, CTAs, reply tracking, sender/return addresses, and deliverability rates. That’s when I identified that flows like registration updates had deliverability rates below 40%. A structural configuration issue that no copy optimization could solve alone.

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I rewrote the emails focusing on direct-response copywriting, ran A/B tests on subject lines for the lowest-performing flows and established a clear visual hierarchy, replacing plain text with images and banners where there was previously zero visual support.

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The brand's communication had no prior structure; there was no defined ICP or customer pain-point mapping. I conducted ground-up research: identifying the specific micro-entrepreneur MEI Gestor served, mapping their real daily struggles, and using that to build the Instagram content, which also lacked a strategy.

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Every post addressed a specific pain point mapped during research. Since the fintech and MEI markets recycle the same generic imagery, I designed original 3D assets to build a distinct visual identity.

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Expanding the strategy beyond email, I built in-app banners, help center guides, interactive FAQs, and retention-focused content. Documenting these updates flow-by-flow made it possible to track before-and-after metrics and isolate exactly what worked.

 

THE RESULT

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​The adjustments to the lifecycle strategy drove an immediate spike in engagement and conversion:

 

• Onboarding: The optimized email hit a 19.43% open rate (up from 1.65%), generating over 104k opens and 6,300 clicks in a single send.
   

• Billing Flow: The first email reached a 36.18% open rate, with a 10.41% CTR across the complete flow. In SaaS, an opened billing email is synonymous with recovered revenue.
   

• Tax Slip (DAS) Flows: The segmented automations achieved a 63.13% open rate and a 21.92% CTR.
   

• Overall Performance: In just one deployment cycle, we reached 95.37% deliverability across 631k sends, directing over 21,500 qualified clicks back to the app.