Freepik.comFact Sheet
Company Name: Freecharge Payment Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Type: B2C.
One-liner: “It is this homework that helps you demonstrate a workable solution and helps to make Naa Se Haan possible.”- Kunal Shah
Industry: Internet and Telecommunication/Financial Services.
Available on: Desktop and mobile.
Desktop/App: Desktop and Mobile App
- Android App:
- Downloads: 10 Million
- Rating: 4.3 out of 5 for 11,08,518 ratings.
- iOS App:
- Rating: 4.6 out of 5 for 197.8K ratings
Freecharge’s Journey and Funding:
Table Of Contents
How They Got Their Early Adopters
Top Growth Hacks That Have Stood Out For Them
What Do They Do?
- Freecharge was Founded on August 2010, headquartered in Mumbai, India. Owned by Axis Bank.
- Current employee strength- 200 to 500.
- Founded by Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon with the current CEO as Sangram Singh.
- Freecharge can be used as a wallet to pay bills, recharge a mobile phone, and purchase goods on Snapdeal, book movies on BookMyShow, and tickets on IRCTC, among others. But along with this, the FreeCharge wallet can also be used to transfer money to other users, bank accounts, and to NGOs.
- Freecharge’s Services include Recharges, Bill Payments, UPI Money Transfers, Deals, Gift Cards, and Mutual Funds.
- In 2015 Snapdeal bought Freecharge for an undisclosed amount and later in 2017 Freecharge is bought by Axis Bank which it’s current owner. It raised $177.6M in total from 6 private funding rounds.
How They Got Their Early Adopters?
- The initial idea of Kunal Shah was to provide coupons for “Distributing retail coupons with recharge“. Early on August 2010, Freecharge had around 50 transactions a day with the website launched among their friends.
- The team started working towards increasing usage of credit/debit cards (They targeted Student communities at IIT’s, NIT’s, ISB Hyd and IIM’s) among the public while approaching retailers to accept the Freecharge coupons.
- Offline events
- Presented at Startup Saturday event where they got conversion from college students
- Social Media Marketing
- Freecharge gained traction in twitter in the form of tweets as a response for the offline events they conducted which aimed at spreading awareness about freecharge.
- Freecharge got Featured in
- Apart from all, Freecharge team also worked on Blog posts about various recharges offered by service providers and other blog posts (Cricket match prediction competitions are one of the kind)
- Freecharge observed an increase in transactions from 50 to 500 while the team started facing real difficulties in terms of operations and coupon delivery. (They were depending on the courier system to deliver the coupons).
- Later Freecharge started onboarding more partners and then in later stages upon growth, mergers and acquisitions took place
Marketing Summary –
- Avg Traffic – 7.25 million
- SEO – 75.66%.
- Direct – 52.17%.
- Social – 0.41%.
- Youtube: 55.95%.
- Facebook: 22.28%.
- Whatsapp Web app: 11.73%.
- Quora: 3.51%
- Twitter: 2.60%.
- Others: 3.93%.
Top of the funnel
SEO
- 1 article/month – Check their blog (no new articles in 2019).
- 200 to 500-word articles, few articles have videos(2 to 5).
- 75.66 % of traffic comes from SEO.
Type Of Content They Create:
Business – Primary content.
- Offers
- Product updates
- How to
Industry-based – Secondary content
- Emerging industry trends
Interests & Persona – Tertiary Content
- Content-based on Social Causes
Paid Ads
- Display Advertising
Source: (Semrush) - Facebook Ads
- 5 Facebook ads are running at the time of writing this
- 5 Facebook ads are running at the time of writing this
- Newspaper Ads
- PPC
- Competitors:
Social
- A chat window pops out
- They are actively replying for comments that have been made and are actually trying to help out their customers
- 1,412,142 members
- Posts 5 to 15 times on a monthly basis
- Changes the cover picture to broadcast messages
- Posts are about offers and any new integrations with new companies
- Conducting challenges or a task for freebies like coupons. These type of posts observed much better engagement when compared with others
- Interactive videos which are less than one minute based on Sentiment, Appraisal, Explaining the features of the app, Cashbacks, National events/Special days observed
- In Initial stages, Freecharge ran ads in FB
- Retargeting
- 37,416 members
- 1 post a week
- No much engagement noticed in their LinkedIn channel
- They don’t have LinkedIn Icon along with other social media Icons in the website footer.
Youtube
- 57k Subscribers
-
- All are promotional videos explaining the offers and latest updates
- 134k followers
- Seasonal Contests are working better for Freecharge on twitter
- Actively replying for the comments/queries by users
#KahaniAppraisalKi is being used for creating engagement while Freecharge is awarding prizes for good/interesting appraisal story
Referral Traffic: 5.78%
- Referrers are mainly the payment gateways through which all the transactions happen and few other sites like IRCTC, Swiggy and other partners of Freecharge while the customers avail coupons for every transaction they make from the Freecharge’s partner
- Top Referrers:
Offline
- Initially, they had participated in college events to bring brand awareness and later on there are no notable offline events held.
Middle Of The Funnel/Constant Engagement
- Email
- Sends out promotional emails which include coupons for every transaction, also the offer varies for each customer based on their previous transactions made.
- Text Messages
- Sends out offer messages for customers to make them transact again
- Coupons
- Free coupons valid across Freecharge’s partner outlets/businesses
Bottom Of The Funnel
- Give’s customized offer based on previous transactions
Top Growth Hacks That Have Stood Out For Them
- Freecharge offers coupons for every recharge or a transaction made on its platform.
- Freecharge partnered with very popular brands like McDonald’s, KFC, Costa Coffee, Café Coffee Day, Myntra, Barista, Domino’s, PVR Cinemas, etc which obviously attracted more people to transact using Freecharge.
- Got Mentioned in a viral reality show named Emotional Atyachaar which is based upon the state of romantic relationships amongst the Indian youth. At the end of the particular episode, the following text is displayed: “Issued in public interest by FreeCharge.in.” as Credits which gained the viewer traction.
- Adopting UPI for its payments, Introduced Freecharge on WhatsApp where users can send and receive money
- It’s a win-win situation where the transactor and the service provider are beneficiaries. (Which is the core idea) The win-win situation is one strong reason behind Freecharge’s existence in this competitive field. This may not be a growth hack but this is something which helps Freecharge to standout.
Email us at ani@growthspartan.com with Subject Line: Company name<> Feature Us
Krishna Vamsi
Content Marketer at Technovert
Vamsi is a writer, marketer, and crypto enthusiast. He loves writing and researching about various niches.
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