Lendela
How OtterHalf increased Lendela’s CTR by 51% and decreased CPA by 25%
In today’s highly competitive and crowded digital spaces, attention is more scarce than ever. Consumers are consistently bombarded by ads, emails and social media content across multiple platforms. As a result, impressions are easy, but engagement is not. Brands already struggle getting users to click, but getting them to care is much harder.
That’s where Lendela found themselves.
Background on Lendela
Lendela is a personal loan matching platform that matches borrowers with customised loan offers from multiple banks and loan providers. This ensures borrowers receive the most competitive rates, saving them thousands of dollars on borrowing costs. Since 2018, they have helped over 300,000 consumers make better financial decisions alongside over 100 lending partners.
Lendela’s Marketing Needs
Lendela came to OtterHalf with a persistent problem: low click-through rates (CTR) and high cost per acquisition (CPA) across their full-funnel ad mix.
What does this mean?
A low CTR means users aren’t engaged enough to click and interact with the ads they’re shown, which can indicate ineffective messaging and targeting.
Meanwhile, a high CPA is detrimental as it shows that the business is paying more for each conversion.
Overall, this means that Lendela’s ads were ineffective in driving conversions, and making it expensive to acquire new customers.
In this article, we outline how we helped Lendela increase their CTR rates by 51% and decreased their CPA by 25%, by improving their ad concepts and designs to better engage their audience.
Our approach
During the 3-month engagement, OtterHalf reduced customer acquisition costs by 25%, and increased click-through rates by 51% for their META ads. Additionally, we also onboarded 3 affiliate partners for Lendela.
How did we do it? Let’s start with Lendela’s first issue: low CTR and high CPA. We had suspicions that ad messaging was the main reason for ineffective ads.
As a first step, we performed a creative audit of their ads. From there, we constructed the following marketing funnel
Marketing Funnel Designed for Lendela
This shows an outsized focus on bottom-funnel ads for conversion. These were clearly ineffective as they were contributing to higher CPA. However, we also noticed a lack of clear messaging in their top-funnel ads. Without clear product education and memorable visuals in their top funnel ads, or targeted messaging in their lower funnel ads, users will certainly engage less.
Our next step was to rehaul Lendela’s ad concepts and transform their logo into a 3D animated logo to better capture consumer interest.
Here’s a breakdown of our biggest strategic proposals:
Reconceptualising Top-Funnel Ads
For top funnel ads, the main goal is to attract new consumers and increase awareness of Lendela’s product. As such, we redesigned the ads to be clear, concise, and single-minded. In each ad, we focused on only one key benefit of using Lendela, such as the swiftness of their loan application process or the fact that it’s an all-in-one solution. Wherever possible, we also included the most common use cases. This helped audiences instantly understand the value of Lendela, driving initial interest and subsequent click-through rates.
2. Creating Stronger Middle & Bottom-Funnel Type of Ads
The next step is to tailor messages for consumers who were already in the consideration stage. Our objective was to address pain points, double-down on the key benefits, and remove all final barriers in using Lendela’s services. This video ad addresses the most everyday use cases, delivering Lendela as the go-to solution, providing ideal loan offers in just minutes.
3. Logo Animation
Moreover, we created a 3-second animation of Lendela’s logo to boost their brand presence for every video featured on various marketing channels. Surveys estimate that animated logos can increase CTR rates by 18%, with an estimated 62% of brands maximising this trend to better engage their audiences (Design Shack, n.d). With that knowledge, we helped transform Lendela’s logo.
5. Onboarding Affiliate Partners
Besides improving their CTR rates, we also onboarded 3 affiliate partners on Lendela’s behalf. An affiliate partner is a person or company that promotes another business’ products or services in exchange for every lead generated through their unique referral link. Affiliate marketing and partnerships are highly effective in the financial services industry, with studies reporting it can deliver a 1400% ROI compared to a standard ROI of 500% for traditional marketing campaigns (Vested, 2024).
That, coupled with our experience in strategic partnerships, enabled us to partner with trusted experts who could clearly explain Lendela’s loan services on their respective platforms. Through partnerships and affiliates, we managed to more than tripled the marketing exposure of Lendela, yet not tripling their marketing cost.
This strategy resulted in the onboarding of 3 affiliates that played an active role in helping grow Lendela.
For more information on how affiliate marketing works, feel free to read this article.
How we worked together
To achieve these results, Lendela engaged OtterHalf as their fractional marketing team to assist in various aspects of marketing such as:
Full-funnel ad creative audit
Reconceptualising and executing refreshed ad creatives
Creating an animated ident for all branded videos
Securing three affiliate partners
During the 3-month engagement, OtterHalf helped reduce the customer acquisition cost and increased click-through rates for their META ads, as well as onboarded affiliate partners on behalf of Lendela. Through these key initiatives (ad creative audit and execution, along with affiliate partnerships), we helped Lendela optimise their CTR, generate new leads, and reduce marketing costs.
“We engaged OtterHalf’s fractional marketing team because of its flexibility to respond to our immediate business needs. From the onset, we established clear business objectives, which they have met. The collaboration was marked by a constructive exchange of ideas and was a positive learning experience for all parties. I especially valued the open communication and transparency between the teams, as we worked towards our shared goals”
Our journey with Lendela highlights how business growth can be strongly driven by marketing. If you’re looking for a way to drive greater results, work with our fractional marketing to support your company’s marketing initiatives.
