Financial Services
Adoption of automated marketing services for finance
Marketing automation lets businesses leverage tools and technology to conduct and monitor marketing campaigns efficiently and effectively. There are several benefits of automating marketing: better lead generation, greater customer engagement with personalised content, higher conversion rates, improved employee productivity, smarter decision making with predictive analytics, and increased ROI. When combined with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions, automated marketing provides powerful insights into customer behaviour, which can be used for hyper-personalisation.
All these aspects are incredibly important and attractive to the financial services industry. However, the gradual digital transformation of the banking and financial services (BFSI) industry has resulted in a slow adoption of marketing automation. Additionally, while the financial services industry has mandates to satisfy several regulatory and compliance obligations, the generally conservative nature of the industry has hampered adoption of marketing automation solutions.
As financial services institutions realise the value of a digital marketing strategy, automation of marketing in the financial services industry has gained traction in recent years. A holistic approach to marketing automation offers several benefits to financial institutions. Let’s look at some of them.
Benefits of marketing automation to financial services
With the digital revolution, customer expectations have increased manifold. To cater to digital-first consumers, financial services industry needs to adapt to and adopt marketing automation solutions for increased customer engagement. Such digital solutions will help the industry leaders connect and network better with customers.*
Customer segmentation allows financial institutions to classify customers into groups and launch specific personalised campaigns. This ensures that relevant messages reach the right target audience and increase the probability of conversions. Firms can build timely and targeted workflows that trigger reminders of policy renewals or loan payments. Automated workflows and responses to inquiries and online forms result in faster response times. Using AI-powered chatbots for initial enquiries lets marketing services be available 24 x 7 and helps understand customer needs.
With trust being a huge factor for any financial transaction, it’s important to pay attention to a consistent branding message. Marketing automation precisely enables this by providing personalised templates for legal disclaimers, terms and conditions, and privacy policies in compliance with local and international regulations. Landing pages, email messaging and ads with a consistent message across all marketing channels help build customer confidence. Automated marketing solutions also cater to loyalty programs and referrals from long-term customers. Financial institutions can reach prospects and customers anytime, anywhere with seamless and consistent messages across multiple channels such as social media, emails, or chat.
How financial institutions can adopt marketing automation
Financial firms can use marketing automation to streamline their campaigns across customer segments and messaging across multiple channels. In wealth and asset management, highly personalised communication, such as interactive emails based on customer segmentation, increases the probability of converting prospects to customers. Firms can create auto-enrol nurturing programs to help discover specific services the customer may be interested in. Commercial banks can use customer segmentation to send relevant newsletters to specific groups. For instance, a student who holds an account with the bank will have a very different interest from an employee who wants a home loan from the bank. Segmentation can also be used for cross-selling and upselling commercial banking services such as account upgrades, credit cards, fixed deposits and so on.
In financial services, marketing automation helps with customer engagement on various fronts. AI-powered automation solutions can be deployed to deal with initial customer enquiries. In insurance, brokers and agents can use live chat to quickly respond to queries, thereby providing enhanced customer experience.
Lead scoring can be used to rank customers and prospects, making it easier to target hot prospects. Customer nurturing can be done at various levels — risk management tools, transparent client relationship management and providing only relevant information, all of which contribute to customer satisfaction.
Analytics give deep insights into customer behaviour and create predictive models that let finance advisors and relationship managers create custom communication and investment plans. Dashboards help managers and business leaders with decision making and highlight any potential red flags. A 360-degree feedback mechanism, which gives insights into what worked and what didn’t, can be built into automated marketing solutions. Choosing and tracking the right metrics help marketers refine strategies.
With traditional financial services firms facing increased competition from new age fintechs and commoditisation of products and services, they need to up the game by adopting marketing automation solutions, which pave the way for an enhanced customer experience. As banks and financial institutions undergo the digital transformation journey*, automated marketing will lead the way into avant-garde marketing strategies.
*For organisations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed organisational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism, will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive, yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organisations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organisations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.
