As a financial institution marketer, you operate among a highly-competitive landscape with growing demands for digital, customer-centric experiences. So how can you effectively compete to retain and grow customers? Personalization is a growing trend among marketers that works to improve relationships and help you reach your loan and deposit growth goals.
Personalization should be a priority of your marketing strategy and here are some ways you can achieve personalization and give your customers or members the unique, personalized experience they desire.
Personas
You know by now that your relationships aren’t one-size fits all. So, how can you use personalization to build out unique experiences for different types of customers or members? One best practice for enhancing personalization in your marketing messages is to utilize audience personas. Creating multiple personas can help you represent each of the different types of relationships you serve.
Start by thinking demographically.
For example, what’s important to millenials when it comes to their financial goals may not be important to Gen-Xers. Your millennial audience is most likely more interested in debt management or mortgages and home buying whereas Gen-Xers are likely more interested in building retirement funds. Think about the different types of audiences you offer your products and services to when deciding who should receive a particular marketing message or persona.
You can segment your different personas by age, buying propensity, life stage, or financial goals. This will create a personalized buying experience for your relationships by allowing you to send relevant product offers to the right people. Your relationships will value you more if you are sending them product offers that they care about and are top-of-mind for their specific needs.
Behavior
You don’t want your relationships receiving marketing messages and product offers that seem generic or irrelevant.
For example, you wouldn’t want to send a message to all of your relationships saying:
“Did you know you could couple your Free Checking Account with a Premier Savings Account to receive additional rewards and benefits?”
…If that particular relationship doesn’t have a checking account with you.
Similarly, you wouldn’t want to send, “Apply for a HELOC” to an audience that doesn’t have a mortgage.
Be sure you are using your data and what you know about your relationships’ behavior to influence your marketing messaging. Then you can look for trends among your best relationships to deliver the best product offers to an audience that looks similar.
If you know a large portion of customers in the 50+ age range that have Senior Checking also have a credit card, find an audience fitting similar demographics that have Senior Checking but don’t have a credit card and send them an offer for one.
Communications
In addition to personalizing the type of messaging your relationships receive, another personalization must-have resides at the communication level. Using information within your individual communications that is specific to each relationship is a great strategy for enhancing personalization. Marketing communication platforms, like Core iQ, allow you to utilize merge fields.
Merge fields exist to save time. They work by pulling data from your core banking system and automatically populate personalized information for each relationship within a given communication template.
By creating one communication template using merge fields, you can send that communication to any number of relationships and each individual offer will be customized to its recipient – automatically. Merge fields can allow your communications to include specific information like,
- Customer contact information
- Account open or close dates
- Maturity dates of loans or timed deposits
- Available balances
- Remaining credit balances
- Upcoming payment dates, etc.
Using merge fields allows you to personalize all of your communications, in an automated way.
Merge fields not only personalize communications to the recipient, but can also consist of unique personalizations for the sender of the communication. You can use merge fields to send communications from a branch president, loan officer, or any responsible banker giving your messaging that extra personalized touch. You can also include a reply-to email address and phone number of the responsible banker/sender so the recipient can reach out with questions.
There are many ways financial marketers are equipped to deliver on the personalization promise. Core iQ is uniquely positioned to help marketers segment and define buyer personas, analyze and track relationship behavior, and personalize messaging at the communication level.
Request a quick demo to learn how Core iQ can help your marketing team achieve personalization.
Bonus
Take your marketing personalization skills to the next level by automating birthday messages and customer or member anniversarys with your financial institution. Learn more about how birthday communications can positively influence and strengthen relationships, here.
