[et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”4.16″ global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_row _builder_version=”4.16″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”4.16″ custom_padding=”|||” global_colors_info=”{}” custom_padding__hover=”|||”][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.16″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat” global_colors_info=”{}”]The financial services industry has a long-standing reputation for being a face-to-face, relationship-driven sector. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital banking and investment services, forcing financial services marketers to adapt their strategies and tactics. One essential component in this digital transformation is marketing automation. In this article, we will explore how marketing automation can help streamline customer acquisition and retention in the financial services industry.

The Role of Marketing Automation in Financial Services

Marketing automation technology enables financial services marketers to personalize their communications while standardizing their operations at scale. This approach has proven to be particularly useful in improving customer experience, and engagement, and streamlining marketing and sales efforts. To successfully implement marketing automation, financial services marketers need to clearly understand the strategic foundation required, the goals automation can help them achieve, and the benefits it can deliver.

Examples of Marketing Automation in Financial Services

There are various ways that marketing automation tools can be used to create unique, tailored brand experiences that nurture customer engagement, regardless of the team size. The core goals of financial services marketing automation remain the same: streamlining and personalizing customer experiences at scale. By implementing a solid automation strategy, financial services marketers can set up technical integrations, customer segments, and personalized campaigns to drive results with minimal manual effort.

Here are some examples of marketing automation in action for financial services marketers, whether in the context of a bank, credit union, insurance brokerage, or wealth management firm:

• Email Marketing Automation: Automating email marketing for financial services involves activities such as integrating the email service provider with CRM, running A/B tests to improve open and click-through rates, personalizing content, and automating nurture campaigns throughout the customer lifecycle. Examples include enrolling new leads in nurture campaigns that send educational content over time, sending onboarding campaigns to new clients, and promoting new offerings such as credit cards or loan products through upselling and cross-selling campaigns.
• Social Media at Scale: Social media marketing automation can save valuable time by automating repetitive tasks like scheduling and publishing content. Advanced features like social media listening and employee advocacy can help financial services marketers stay on top of conversations and comments while driving positive engagement.
• SMS Marketing Automation: Depending on the usage of SMS marketing for financial services, automation can be used to schedule text messages within ongoing campaigns, track performance, and include engagement data in customer profiles. This may include standard alerts and notifications, promotional texts sent to targeted segments of the audience, or even behaviorally triggered SMS messages sent after a client or lead takes a specific action. Of course, it is crucial for financial services marketers to stay on top of SMS marketing regulations that protect consumer privacy.
• Landing Pages and Web Content Personalization: Marketing automation tools can help personalize and optimize web content and landing pages to deliver better experiences to visitors while improving campaign results. Examples include conducting A/B tests to increase conversions, building templates to create variations of pages at scale, using dynamic web forms to improve lead capture, and gathering behavioral tracking data to personalize site content on future visits.
• Segmentation: Building advanced customer segments is the foundation for providing personalized experiences. Automation tools can help segment prospect and customer lists based on firmographics (e.g., company size), demographics (e.g., location or gender), and behaviors (e.g., webpage visits or email click-throughs). These segments can be used to send more targeted communications and drive results throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

Financial services marketing teams can employ these different automation use cases to achieve bigger-picture goals such as improving the customer experience, generating leads, driving customer lifetime value, and ensuring compliance.

Improving the Digital Customer Experience with Automation

Marketing automation makes it easier for financial services teams to create a better digital customer experience, which has become increasingly important as online financial services continue to grow and branch usage declines across all age groups. Automation allows financial services marketers to improve in this area by achieving two key outcomes: personalizing and streamlining digital customer experiences at scale.

Streamlining: Creating Consistency Across the Customer Journey

Customers typically begin their journey toward selecting a financial services institution with online research. To communicate an organization’s story, value proposition, and services clearly while building trust, it is crucial to deliver a consistent experience across every touchpoint. Marketing automation can help financial services marketers develop the strategy and messaging that should run throughout every campaign and touchpoint, build templates and create assets at scale, develop repeatable communications, and integrate campaigns across various channels. By delivering a consistent brand experience, customers are likely to encounter less friction during their journey.

Personalization: Delivering Relevant Messages at the Right Time

In addition to consistency, financial services clients expect personalized experiences that are relevant to their needs. A survey found that 72% of banking customers considered personalization to be “highly important,” with only 8% stating it didn’t matter at all. Personalization is about providing meaningful relevance by delivering the right message at the right time to meet a current need. Marketing automation tools can help achieve impactful personalization at scale by mapping marketing activities across the customer journey, segmenting the audience according to their current stage, and delivering communications and content tailored to those moments.

Generating Leads with Automated Content Marketing Campaigns

Generating financial services leads starts early, as prospects often conduct extensive online research before reaching out to a bank, credit union, or advisor. For instance, Google reported that 86% of potential investors spend over an hour researching on the web, and over half of online investors do not have a brand in mind when they begin looking for financial resources. This presents an opportunity for financial services marketers to attract new leads through organic search and content marketing. By creating and sharing relevant, helpful content tailored to the early stages of the research process, marketers can build trust and become a go-to resource before transitioning to a sales-focused approach.

Marketing automation can help financial services marketers achieve meaningful results from their SEO efforts by creating pathways for customers to gradually move along the customer journey toward a purchase or account. For example, after a visitor clicks on a search result page to read a blog post about online investing, marketers can guide them to sign up for a newsletter, download a gated guide with more in-depth information, use an interactive calculator, or click through to another related blog post. The ultimate goal is to nurture these visitors along the journey to sign up for an account or reach out to the sales team. Automation can help collect the right data and send the right follow-up messages to make this journey seamless, and studies show that content marketing can be incredibly effective for financial services marketers, with organic search driving up to 64% of calls.

Driving Customer Lifetime Value with Advanced Targeting

It is often more expensive to attract and convert a new customer than to retain an existing one, and financial services are no exception. Marketing automation tools can help collect and use customer data to power targeted marketing campaigns that will drive engagement and improve lifetime value.

Collecting First-Party Data to Understand Customers

In recent years, new privacy-friendly policies have restricted how marketers can collect, purchase, and use data from third-party sources. As a result, marketers across sectors are focusing on first-party data, which is data that is collected directly from customers. Examples of first-party data include form submissions, website behavioral data, email click-throughs, SMS engagement, and phone call success rates. Marketing automation tools can collect data throughout the customer journey, providing valuable insights into customer preferences and behavior.

Building Better Segments with Data

Using the data collected by marketing automation software, financial services marketers can build more advanced segments of their customer list. This information can be used to create segments based on account types, age of accounts, past purchase history, life events, and other data points that capture the customer’s current stage in the lifecycle.

Targeting the Right Customers with the Right Offers at the Right Time

Marketing automation software enables financial services marketers to use data-driven segments to send laser-targeted messages to customers at the right moment. By using first-party data to tailor messages and offers, marketers can create a more personalized experience that leads to more engaged customers over time.

Ensuring Compliance Through Marketing Automation

Marketing automation has a particularly relevant benefit for financial services marketers: it can help save time while ensuring compliance with industry regulations. For example, when planning and executing repeatable, automated campaigns, marketers only need to go through the approval process with their legal team once to ensure their communications meet expectations around fair lending laws or include the proper disclosures and statements. Furthermore, if a marketing automation solution includes a BCC archiving solution, financial services marketers can achieve FINRA-compliant email marketing within their existing tool stack.

Case Studies in Financial Services Marketing Automation

Several financial services organizations have successfully implemented marketing automation to achieve exceptional results. Some examples include:

• Truity Credit Union: By using automation and segmentation to target customers with carefully timed messages around credit card offers, car loans, and other promotions, Truity Credit Union saw double-digit increases in email opens and skyrocketing numbers for credit card campaigns compared to previous years.
• Madrona Financial Services: This financial advisory firm adopted marketing automation software to drive growth across channels and experienced a staggering 1000% increase in sales over six years. The firm used on-page behavioral tracking to inform a website redesign, implemented automated lead scoring, and developed a segmentation and engagement strategy to nurture prospects with targeted content.
• TruStone Financial: This Midwest-based credit union implemented marketing automation to segment its audience, create custom landing pages, and send targeted campaigns to its members. As a result, the marketing team saw an 83% increase in open rates for highly segmented emails and an overall average open rate of nearly 35%.

Achieving Success with Marketing Automation in Financial Services

These success stories demonstrate that with the right strategy and tools, financial services organizations can use marketing automation to deliver highly personalized marketing at scale. By implementing a marketing automation platform tailored for financial services, businesses can improve the digital customer experience, generate leads, drive customer lifetime value, and ensure compliance.

 
[/et_pb_text][et_pb_image src=”https://engagepulse.io/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Need-Help-with-Your-CRM.jpg” _builder_version=”4.21.0″ _module_preset=”default” alt=”crm help, crm marketing, marketo, digital marketing, email marketing, marketing automation, google ads, conversion rates, conversion reporting,” title_text=”Need-Help-with-Your-CRM” url_new_window=”on” url=”https://engagepulse.io/services/” hover_enabled=”0″ sticky_enabled=”0″][/et_pb_image][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]