Financial Services brands are continuously challenged by increasing, seemingly unfair, expectations that customers’ individual needs will be met in highly personalized ways. Compounding this problem is the fact that rates and regulations create a marketplace where products and pricing are largely the same.
Thus, it’s critical for financial services leaders to seek true differentiation and personalization through servicing, delivery, experiences, channel engagement, communication, and brand purpose.
Benefits of Personalization
- Enhanced Customer Experience: Personalized experiences make customers feel understood and valued. By tailoring product recommendations, content, and communications to individual preferences, financial services marketers can provide a superior customer experience that fosters trust and loyalty.
- Improved Customer Engagement: Personalization allows marketers to effectively engage with customers across various touchpoints. By delivering relevant and timely messages, financial services marketers can capture customers’ attention and drive higher engagement levels, leading to increased conversions, better customer satisfaction, and deeper brand connectivity.
- Meaningful Competitive Advantage: In a homogenous product market, personalization becomes a critical key differentiator. Finding a tailored approach where others don’t, financial services brands can stand out from competition, attract a larger customer base, and gain a competitive edge.
How to Enable Personalization
✓ Leverage Data, Analytics, and Insights
Consumer-focused insights are at the foundation of personalization. Specifically, create or refresh a robust market segmentation to organize customers into unique and distinct groups based on their characteristics, needs, and preferences. This will allow for personalized targeting and messaging.
✓ Develop Buyer Personas
Pair immersive, qualitative research with analytically focused segmentation to understand all customer archetypes more deeply. These personas should include demographics, preferences, goals, challenges, and pain points with existing solutions. In doing so, you can then tailor your marketing approaches to meet the specific needs and preferences of each unique group.
✓ Content Personalization
Delivering personalized content is crucial for optimizing customer engagement. Tailor your blogs, emails, and social media content to match the interests and needs of each consumer segment. Utilize both qualitative and quantitative messaging research to refine and optimize your approach to maximize reach.
✓ Optimize Product Offerings
While the core product or service may be standardized, financial services firms can still offer customization of features and engagement to meet individual customer preferences. Leverage product innovation research, including discrete choice modeling, to develop flexible payment structures or modular features that allow customers to personalize their experience within the broader product offering.
✓ Continuously Monitor and Optimize your Personalization Strategies and Tactics
Create a continuous feedback loop via brand and customer experience tracking research and assign a cross-functional team to act against results. Monitoring key performance indicators such as consideration, conversion, engagement, and product depth will allow you to determine the effectiveness of your personalization efforts. You may additionally incorporate A/B testing of messages, offers, and user experiences to understand what best resonates with your core target audience.
✓ Leverage Automation and AI Technology to Scale Efforts
Use marketing automation tools and database scoring to deliver personalized messages at scale. Additionally, AI-driven, predictive algorithms can be used to provide real-time customer engagement tactics. Chatbots and virtual assistants can also offer personalized support and guidance to customers, but you must measure all transactions with these tools to ensure they are aiding, and not detracting from, the feeling of personalization.
In a homogenous Financial Services product and pricing environment, personalization is the key to standing out, engaging customers, and driving business growth. By leveraging consumer-based insights marketers can uncover opportunities to develop and optimize a meaningful personalization framework.
