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How Financial Marketers Benefit from Better Personalization

Sep 28, 2021
Jeff Haws

For marketers at enterprise financial institutions, personalization beyond <first name> often hasn’t been a big priority when it comes to their messaging strategy. How are you putting all the information to use that you’ve collected? If your organization is like many, you may not be using it much for engagement at all. Besides there being legitimate concerns about PII, many of these organizations have been around for a very long time and may not have adjusted quickly to technological advances that could help.

So we wanted to look at some of the ways financial institutions could really use and benefit from a sophisticated approach to personalization using the customer data you most certainly already have available to you. These may spark some ideas for how you could better utilize your data to generate more relevant cross-channel campaigns that increase customer conversions and loyalty.

Show offers based upon location

This is a relatively simple one, but it can pay some serious dividends if you can make it work.

You have your customers’ Zip codes, and that should be all you need to be able to make your email campaigns location-specific. And there are all kinds of situations where this could make a big impact on your marketing success.

One would be state-specific tax tips. What if you wrote a blog post with tax tips regarding deductions and such with advice for families in each individual state? Then you could tease to those tips for each customer’s state to make the message more relevant to them, and build trust with them that you’re looking out for them as an individual, not just blasting out general emails to everyone.

Recommend content from website activity

If you have a blog discussing how to find the best home mortgage rate, what happens when a website visitor visits that page?

This could be a golden opportunity for your organization to put your best foot forward. If they’re reading about mortgage rates, there’s a solid chance they’re at least thinking about buying a new home. It’s at this stage you want them to see the latest rates your team can offer, and provide them with a call-to-action so they can get the ball rolling if they’re ready to.

You can also give them a quick form to fill out with their information, which is a terrific sign of interest. Then you should have a cadence already prepared to send them more content and information about getting started with a mortgage, buying a home, picking the right agent, etc., so you’re making your institution part of their decision-making process from the earliest point possible.

Base your offers on where they are in the customer cycle

You should have a lot more information on current customers than on those who aren’t, and that provides you with a good opportunity to get in front of them with targeted offers that other institutions aren’t in a position to give.

For example, if someone has a mortgage with your bank, you could email them with refinance and rate-decrease offers. Maybe rates have plunged recently, and you want to make sure they know. Or you wrote a blog post about the benefits of a refi, and you think they’d like to read it.

Maybe someone has a savings account but not a checking. Sending out a campaign just to non-checking account holders with a limited-time special deal to add one — $200 after three months with a direct-deposit paycheck added, perhaps — could be a great way to meet team KPIs on monthly checking account opens.

Or you could send a campaign out to customers who have an IRA with other types of investment tips, maybe with the benefits of a mutual fund or a money market account. Blog posts with investment tips or information about new federal programs to encourage IRA-type accounts could be great ideas for tailored content.

Takeaways

There are tons of possibilities for personalized messaging campaigns when you’re an ambitious enterprise marketer in the financial space and want to stand out in the inbox. To do this right, though, it’s important that you have a messaging platform that gives you direct access to your data and the ability to keep your PII safe with the industry’s highest standards for encryption.

We’d love to talk to you about how MessageGears can help you make this dream a reality. Let’s chat about what we’ve done for other security-conscious organizations, and what your marketing team can accomplish with the MessageGears customer engagement platform.

About the Author

Jeff Haws

As MessageGears’ Senior Marketing Manager, Jeff is focused on producing engaging and thoughtful content that resonates with enterprise marketers, helping them to better understand how MessageGears makes their jobs easier. He’s passionate about understanding the way data impacts messaging, and he’s also hopelessly obsessed with baseball.