Author: Caroline Schmid | Categories: Digital Marketing, Customer Experience, Marketing Automation
In a crowded marketplace, where new customers are at a premium, Marketing Automation Platforms (MAP) can help financial services firms drive more effective marketing. Besides increasing customer acquisition, MAP tools can also help provide relevant and real-time experiences to customers. This will naturally result in customer loyalty and enhanced customer satisfaction, which in return can ensure customer retention (and increased book of business).
There are many ways in which businesses can make use of marketing automation platforms to market their services and solve their business problems. Seven specific examples of this are:
Marketing Automation makes segmenting of customers based on demographic, firmographic or behavior, an easy task. It helps update segments in real-time, based on customer behavior. This allows financial marketers the capability to exponentially increase the variables of a single campaign and facilitate marketing to specific personas across the customer journey. This also provides reduced time to market for new offers through effective client/prospect segmentation and an automated process. Additionally, bundling and segmenting offers allow wealth managers to control the cost-to-serve appropriately for different segments.
Marketing automation allows building of customized trigger events that include automated responses to behavioral activities. These triggers can be set up for digital body language where you can send additional documentation on financial investments in areas where the digital foot print has shown an interest. You can also use information on their purchase history to provide automated investment recommendations or even compliance documentation about their investments.
An automated program enables you to nurture your leads throughout their lifecycle. You can offer communication to your customers that are relative to their current position – either in their buying process or after they become customers. Further, this can also act as a platform for you to receive feedback. These communications should include digital client-communication elements including “post-advisory services” such as notifying clients when a product drops off a bank’s or firm's recommendation list. Implementing nurturing and retention activities improve loyalty, and therefore increase NPS.
Below are some nurture activities that are effective within different financial services lifecycles:
Analytics can be used effectively both for firms and their agents/advisors.
Firms: Advanced marketing automation analytics can help to mine demographic, behavioral and other data to build predictive models that improve the accuracy of a firm’s ability to provide tailored investments to targeted segments and different intermediary roles.
By leveraging analytics tools and technologies to generate new levels of insight, companies can improve the decision-making between what they offer a client and how they allow them to establish new business opportunities and revenue streams. Quick adjustment of campaigns, based on ready access to MAP analytics, allow marketers to gain the highest rate of return.
Analytic tools can also identify potential red flags for defection. If a client has made multiple attempts to resolve an issue, or shows certain behaviors that indicate a low NPS, sales enablement tools can help take prompt action from an advisor/agent/sales/customer service representative to resolve the issue.
Agents/Advisors: For agents or advisors, aggregated data can highlight trends that can help them make decisions on the direction they take. By analyzing the information they have on clients, advisors may recognize reoccurring themes on what drives people to make the investment decisions. An approaching retirement, the birth of a baby, marriage – these may influence a client’s key financial decisions.
Automation tools present you the perfect platform to utilize the capabilities of A/B testing. You can test multiple offers – creative or messaging – at the same time, and speed up the process efficiently. You can:
You can’t ignore social media channels while you are marketing to Generation Y. Integrating such channels in all of your communications is critical since people in the digital age want to check out prices, compare products, and confirm their decisions in real time. Social media channels allow this possibility and further facilitate prompt sharing of their experiences with others. Most MAP tools offer social posting and integration capabilities that ensure that all of your communications serve the channel where your customers and prospects want to consume their content.
One of the highlights of using a marketing automation platform is the ability to use it for offering personalized services to your clients. An automated platform allows you to reach a far wider audience with multiple products, messaging and offers at a time and in a 1:1 manner.
Here are some ways to personalize your communications:
These items are just a few of the ways to leverage a powerful tool like Marketing Automation – there’re plenty of others as well. Financial services can reap the benefits of implementing these tools, along with institutionalizing the industry best practices. Some noteworthy benefits to mention here include increased ROMI, improvements in Customer Experience and NPS, and the ability to implement more –efficiently and effectively.
Caroline is an accomplished marketing leader with over 15 years of experience in various marketing strategies for several Fortune 500 companies across 50+ countries. Having seen the marketing automation space grow in the last eight years, she is excited and challenged by the ever evolving marketing automation industry and continues to stay on the cutting edge of latest trends/tools that can get the highest Return on Marketing Investments (ROMI).