Customers of almost every financial institution have moved into the digital world. In India alone, the number of the printed newspaper and journal copies per day has slumped from 610 million in 2015 to 380 million in 2021.
This marked shift in where users are focusing their attention has compelled BFSI companies to identify a digital marketing strategy that ensures they continue to have their users’ attention.
While the first wave of digital marketing saw us spending money buying ads on Google, Facebook and Amazon, the next wave is focused on going beyond the media buying frenzy and identifying answers to questions such as:
Who are my most active users?
Are my most active users adding value that justifies, and improves marketing ROI?
Which channels are my users most likely to consume my communications from?
What are the browsing behaviour traits of my most active users?
When are my users most likely to see my communications?
Which set of users is more comfortable clicking on an ad/communication on the web vs mobile?
Platforms that help you answer the above questions, such as Salesforce marketing cloud, CleverTap, Web Engage etc., are now referred to as marketing cloud.
Top 5 benefits of how marketing cloud can help financial institutions:
1. 360-degree customer insights
Having access to a 360-degree customer insights dashboard allows us to identify factors such as:
how many users are active on mobile vs web - which helps tailor messaging and user experience for campaigns accordingly
how many users have used a certain feature vs who has not - this helps us understand what should we be saying.
what have been the LTV earnings from a user, which tell us which kind of products to pitch, and which products to not pitch to any user
2. Real-time campaign and usage analytics
Before the world went digital, we would go to market with a campaign, and then have to wait for the campaign to get over, to understand what worked and what didn’t. Many times, we would not even get to know anything at all - like placing a billboard on a highway - how does one know the impact of the billboard?
But with real-time campaign analytics, the feedback loop is early and instant because we get to see data points such as:
how many impressions did the communication garner?
of the impressions, how many clicked?
how many users dropped off midway?
how many users uninstalled the app, if any?
how many users completed the journey?
Such real-time campaigns help financial institutions identify very early in a campaign’s journey what is working, what needs to be improved, and what should be retained.
3. Segmentation-based personalisation
If you are a private sector bank with a national presence, you can likely create multiple campaigns targeting various kinds of customer profiles.
For example, you might get higher conversions by pitching FD offerings to customers with a family, or beyond a certain age, rather than a young fresher right out of college. Conversely, you might see higher conversions from mobile-optimised communication focusing on an aggressive investment category like stocks from the younger section of your customer base.
This is where the segmentation capabilities of a good marketing cloud can be helpful. It helps you create instant segments out of your entire user base, and create a hyper-personalised campaign on the go. Without any dependency on data scientists, analysts or engineers.
4. Omni-channel offerings
One of the perpetual challenges in marketing is to reach your users where they are. If a person X is not active on email, then an organization will never be able to reach X, even after running several email campaigns.
This is where a marketing cloud can automatically help financial companies send one campaign to each user on the channel s/he is most active on.
5. Automated journey builders
Imagine this scenario - you send an email campaign to your user base, with a CTA inside the email that they will have to click on. There can be 3 outcomes:
some users will open the email, and click on the CTA.
some users will open the email, and not click on the CTA.
some users will not open the email at all.
Now, you can segment your users based on the outcome achieved, and tailor the next communication basis what action a user took, or did not take.
If you had to do this manually, it would be unscalable, time-seeking and demotivating.
A good marketing cloud will instead offer you a journey builder, using which you can define the workflows such that, the system knows:
what communication to send?
to which users?
across which channels?
at what time?
basis which outcome?
To conclude:
Today, there are several good marketing clouds which banks and financial institutions can take advantage of. However, each platform comes with its strengths and weaknesses. Not only that, each platform brings a certain amount of ease and convenience in integration, basis a bank’s or financial institution’s tech stack and tools stack.
If you want more clarity on which marketing cloud will suit your needs the best, or help with the execution of the integration - reach out to us today at info@executepartners.com.
Comments