In 2018, the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), as part of its digital strategy planning, launched Mettle, a solution for sole traders and small businesses to manage finances, combining a current account with invoicing, payment chasing and bookkeeping capabilities.

The initiative for the challenger bank came in response to an increasing competitive landscape in that market, a strong customer demand in a generally underserved market and RBS’ general appetite to innovate outside of their core market.

RBS was keen to get some external expertise in launching the platform in order to drive customer acquisition.

HdE AGENCY was selected to attract active mobile app users by encouraging sole traders and small business owners to install the app, register an account and activate their bank card.

As a startup, Mettle needed to build a customer base quickly. We began by building buzz ahead of the service’s launch.

Together with Mettle we designed and ran an ongoing campaign that would build awareness, generate interest and encourage people to take action.

Facebook and Instagram quickly emerged as the obvious choice of platform to reach Mettle’s target audience of mobile-first, tech-savvy founders and sole traders.

The initial brand awareness ads were shown in Facebook News Feed and Instagram Feed to people with a known interest in technology and business, and who typically used online payments.

To demonstrate the advantages of this new way to bank, we used engaging video ads and the eye-catching carousel format.

Then, we needed to encourage people to install the app. We created further video ads that ran on both Facebook and Instagram, as well as in Instagram Stories, aiming for reach and low-cost conversion rates.

People who visited the landing page, but who did not install the app were then shown ads that encouraged them to take the next step to becoming a Mettle customer.

To maintain momentum, Mettle also showed further ads to people who had installed the app, but who had not confirmed their accounts or activated their card.

Conversions counted when people who installed the app actually activated their bank card – were further boosted with ads targeted to lookalike audiences based on people who had activated their card.

We also used asset customisation for ad placements. By customising assets for different placements, we were able to drive down the cost per action and maximise installs and activations by allocating ad spend to the best-performing placements, including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network.

Through this approach we successfully captured the attention of more than 2 million people in the UK through Facebook and Instagram campaigns and also achieved:

– 188,000 app installs
– 142,000 app registrations
– 43% of people who installed the app activated their card