As marketers, we constantly wear the hat of our customers to understand the motivation, buying behaviors, and rationale for making purchase decisions. Marketing decisions are often made with fractured customer data, which means expecting positive outcomes from marketing campaigns is like trying your hand at the slot machine. Financial marketers today are sitting on huge piles of customer data that is siloed in various martech databases and tools. They are unable to leverage this data for deploying targeted campaigns to customers.
How Financial Marketers Leverage Customer Data
Consider this scenario: Mark visits his bank’s website anonymously and visits the credit card section on the website. He views the Gold credit card and drops off the website. Three days later, Mark returns to login to his bank account and immediately sees a homepage personalized banner showing the benefits of getting a Gold credit card. Mark is a Senior Executive with a multinational firm and has his salary account here.
After logging into his account, he is given an offer to get a Gold credit card along with many more offers and benefits which he previously did not see. The bank sends Mark an email with a custom offer on a Gold credit card. Mark opens the email and signs up for a credit card. What began as a simple task of viewing a credit card anonymously, ended up being an upsell to a customer for the bank. The bank was able to bridge the gap between themselves and Mark by leveraging a Customer Data Platform (CDP).
Interest in Data-activated Marketing is driving the need for CDPs
Data-activated marketing based on a customer’s needs, intent, and behavior in real-time is becoming a vital part of digital growth for a financial organization. This can boost total sales easily by 15-20% and improve the ROI on the marketing spend across various marketing channels. A growing number of financial marketers are turning to CDPs to resolve their scattered and siloed customer data problems.
Here are 3 ways by which a customer data platform can bridge the gap between financial marketers and customers:
- Understand each customer intimately
A Customer data platform helps in un-wrangling customer data that is spread across various data sources. It aggregates and unifies this data for each individual customer. By getting a unified customer view, financial marketers can deeply understand customer preferences, their online behavior, transactional details, buying intent, etc. This ensures that financial marketers are in a much better position to market and engage with customers/prospects.
- Deliver personalized messages to millions of customers in real-time
Coupling a CDP with Artificial Intelligence can do wonders for a data-driven financial organization. Customer data platform enables marketers to understand each customer. However, a CDP paired with Artificial intelligence ensures that each customer is delivered a unique 1:1 personalized experience in real-time.
- Target customers with personalized offers through cross-device
Personalization is limited if it is restricted to a single device. Research has shown that almost 35% of customer conversions happen on a device other than the one where the first impression occurred. A CDP helps capture user details cross-device and unifies them to provide a single customer view. Financial marketers increase the marketing campaign effectiveness with personalized offers through cross-device.
Conclusion
In this digital age, Financial institutions are struggling to increase digital engagement and growth. The gap between them and the end customer is growing wide day after day. Financial marketers must, therefore, bridge the gap by exploring, identifying, and leveraging new technologies such as CDPs and AI. This will help them to stay in the game and attract new business growth and increase digital customer engagement.
By Rahul Mathew | Director – Marketing at Lemnisk
Great post I must say and thanks for the information. Education is definitely a sticky subject. However, it is still among the leading topics of our time. I appreciate your post and look forward to more.