The increased level of personalisation now available to financial services brands through the responsiveness and immediacy of digital media and marketing channels is a double-edged sword.
Better personalisation is not optional for big financial institutions as they look to shore up their customer base in the face of increased competition and innovation from more nimble competitors.
Customer expectations, particularly from fussy millennials, back this up: 40% of them complain that the offers they’re currently receiving from their bank aren’t personalised enough.
So it’s no surprise that a majority of financial services marketers (55%) are increasing their investment in personalisation.
What this means differs from institution to institution. It might mean showing a different version of the home page to different visitors, making customers tailored offers according to their lifecycle stage, using individual customer data to recommend new products and services, or using individual customer spending data to offer tailored financial advice on how customers can save or make money. It probably means all of the above, and more.
But, as anyone knows who has been down the personalisation road, all of this requires a big increase in content production, and that puts stress on structures and teams that were developed for a less personalised era.
There is no bigger buzzword in marketing at the moment than ‘customer experience’ (unless it’s ‘blockchain’ or ‘artificial intelligence’) and the pursuit of an exceptional customer experience means the content produced must be consistent across channels.
In fact, 70% of financial services marketers rate this as “very important” to their digital marketing in the next few years.
Complicating those efforts in financial services is the need for all that content, across every channel, to comply with every regulatory requirement.
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Regulation, old tech and rigid organisational structures are among the biggest hurdles financial services and insurance (FSI) marketers face today.
And the spotlight is on compliance in Australia, the US and Britain, among other markets.
All of this requires a parallel investment in the supporting technologies necessary to do personalisation well, to enable marketing teams to produce brand-consistent and brand-safe content that also contributes to an amazing customer experience.
In the future AI will most likely reach the point where these offers require less ongoing human oversight. But as recently as last year, just 4% of financial services and insurance marketers saw AI as the most exciting area of opportunity.
Until then, 89% of marketers are out there, competing primarily on the basis of the customer experience.
And one in five (21%) marketers nominate incompatible digital marketing point solutions as a major barrier to achieving great customer experience outcomes.
As your marketing team heads further down the personalisation path, making sure it has all the tools needed to orchestrate an exceptional customer experience across all channels in a brand-safe, brand compliant way is a minimum requirement.