Automation-led omnichannel campaigns is a sure way to achieve higher ROAS and in this blog we will showcase how financial services organization can achieve it. Financial services marketing was a whole different ball game not too long ago. Depending on their affluence, every family had a wealth advisor or a close relative guiding its investments, loan accounts, banking relationships, and more. Much of this was simply word-of-mouth, and trust played a critical role.
Today, it’s all about omnichannel touchpoints. Sure, we still have wealth advisors and relentless and really annoying cold calls (which we all believe banks would do well by reducing!). But customer trust now incorporates digital channels. Email marketing for bank loans, clickable social ads for term insurance, websites comparing health insurance, SMS and WhatsApp alerts for newly launched services… You name it! Financial services marketing is as omnichannel as financial services and their customers. Before we look into how to double CTRs for financial services, let’s first understand the shifts in the industry and customer behavior.
Why omnichannel marketing is a must-have for financial services
Digitization is undeniable in any service industry, and financial services are no different. According to a Deloitte survey, younger generations are likely to switch from traditional to digital banking, 71% of millennials and 57% of Gen Z customers are willing to open deposits in digital-only banks. However, given the regulatory restrictions on financial services – specifically with elements like KYC and paper forms for high-value transactions – branch visits are also not going out of fashion soon.
With your customers’ transactions and touchpoints becoming omnichannel, your advertising and marketing efforts can’t possibly be restricted to traditional – or even just digital – channels alone.
Emerging fintech startups are also changing the game for financial services marketing. These startups often cater to the digital needs of the younger generation and leverage the shifting demographics of financial service customers. If traditional BFSI companies are to survive the fintech explosion, their services and advertising, marketing, acquisition, and retention touchpoints should be on par with their fintech counterparts.
The preference towards omnichannel touchpoints is not only because of new fintech solutions. Younger and older generations alike have seen a rise in the digitization of essential and trivial services, especially after the pandemic – and they expect the same awareness and services for their financial needs too. It was only a matter of time before a home loan journey started with search intent, and you began personalizing your Facebook ad creatives based on life events like college admission, marriage, and childbirth. That’s really the long and short of omnichannel campaigns strategy for financial services.
Your omnichannel marketing strategy is incomplete without automation
An omnichannel approach gives much better results compared to single-channel marketing. However, combining automation and omnichannel marketing allows you to truly harness its staggering potential. To simplify the reasons for automation investment, let’s see what a typical omnichannel approach looks like.
Your customer journey needs you to reinvent tech and data stack adoption and automation in omnichannel campaigns.
However, addressing these deliverables – from analysis to personalization – can’t be done manually. Well, you can still do it if that’s what you prefer. But it would mean significant financial investment in human resources. From data entry operators to data engineers, you will need varying skills, experience, and degrees of investment in each.
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With automation, you have the ability to take the guesswork and burden of tedious tasks off your marketing function’s shoulders. This simply means they have increased bandwidth for effective strategy and execution through close collaboration with AI tools.
Automation also allows your marketing team to hyper-target campaigns to specific personas and their needs and invest in the most hyper-targeted ad spaces. As a result, in-flight campaign optimization becomes simpler and always-on, and your overall campaign effectiveness increases. Collectively, these capabilities make your marketing function truly ROI-obsessed. It’s no longer just a pipedream. Statistics back this. Marketing automation leads to a 53% increase in conversions.
A relevant tech stack for the financial ecosystem can help them better understand customers with behavioral data, improve holistic experiences, prevent fraud and eventually drive higher ROI- while staying compliant in an evolving regulatory environment.
How to 2x financial services CTR with data and automation-led omnichannel campaigns
Typically, there are six areas where automation can assist with higher omnichannel campaign CTR.
Do more with customer data
Build a holistic customer understanding by integrating data from web, mobile web, app, email, support, CRM and offline transactions. Identify unique behavioral attributes of premium customers and discover key events along the customer journey to design ad interventions that impact growth, engagement and retention.
Clean and compliant data can also help you make informed decisions by centralizing and scaling access to high-quality and secure data to diverse connectors and internal teams. Use customer data to align your teams and tools towards common business goals. Automated data governance can also improve your compliance standards.
When you have data, how can insights and analytics be far behind? Achieve predictive analytics on key elements like drop offs, potential product purchases, propensity to convert or churn and growing affinity for competitors’ products.
Most importantly, a robust customer data usage model and relevant tech stack can assist with data enrichment at every interaction. With your customers using multiple devices to engage in their financial services needs with your institution, you no longer need to think of each such interaction as unique. Consolidate data across customer devices to send them relevant personal finance content and trustworthy insights and information.
Prevent financial frauds and earn customer trust
Users’ behavioral data is the best indicator of intent. Naturally, customer and user data can help you effectively combat different types of fraud.
Whether it’s a falsified loan application, an impersonation on your app or website, a remittance scam, or potential money laundering, users’ behavioral data is essential to detect and prevent fraudulent activity across all your channels.
Automate media buying to control spends and boost ROAS
Buying suitable ad spaces and digital time is crucial for a great marketing campaign. But even with a marketing budget, manual media buying may exceed the predetermined amount.
Many financial service companies fail to define their marketing goals before buying media. Unfortunately, the mistake negates the effect of good ad creatives and campaigns.
With automated programmatic media buying, you not only get the most suitable ad spaces at the best costs but also bid only on those spaces that serve your purpose. In addition, you can set up buying templates through automation tools and send personalized bids to media owners and publishers.
You can also set up automated payments and a budget such that only media spaces within your budget get approved. After the billing, you can automate creatives and intelligence to make manual interference negligible in your marketing campaign.
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Automate creative optimization for unique customer segments
Every financial services customer has a unique path to purchase. Converting them requires equally hyper-personalized creatives. For example, millennials and Gen Z may be more interested in wealth management, whereas boomers generations might look for safe investment options. Demographics mean little in our world. A 35-year-old yuppie could either be in the market for home loans, saving up for their children’s education fund, buying their parents’ health insurance, or saving up for the dream sabbatical travel around the world. Any or all of those!
Creative optimization and personalization must go beyond demographics. They also need to fit into the different format guidelines across various channels, including CTV and DOOH, social, and banners, among others. That being said, optimizing your team’s time in personalizing these touchpoints is also essential.
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As a financial service brand, manually creating ads that individually target every cohort in the audience is time- and cost-intensive. Instead, automating the creative process helps you connect instantly in the key moments that matter.
Financial service brands can achieve automation by creating basic ads and then generating personalized variations through automation tools. You can customize the ads to fit various ad spaces across all channels instead of running the same ads on different platforms.
For instance, you can repurpose ads for customers who have visited your business loan website but haven’t reached out through the contact page or call center. You can retarget ads that draw attention to their interests based on their clicks on your website. This will improve your ROAS, as retargeting promises a staggering 147% increase in conversion rates.
Automating the creative process also requires rigorous testing. Testing ensures that the creatives reach the desired audience and deliver the expected results. During the testing phase, you must monitor the performance through key metrics like clicks, views, and other actions in response to your ads.
Automate always-on creative and channel performance insights for higher ROAS
Once upon a time, campaign effectiveness was measured in a post-mortem. But that’s precisely what it was – a post-mortem. Unfortunately, that approach doesn’t work anymore. Neither marketers nor their budget sponsors have as much room for error and failure as they once did. Data and automation changes this equation.
Financial services have a lot of customer and ad performance data that they can use in a privacy-compliant manner. But the challenge lies in analyzing this massive amount of data and effectively utilizing it in ad campaigns. Automation can address this issue by automating data collection and analysis through artificial intelligence.
You first create personalized ads using AI tools with customer data as the foundation. Once an ad campaign is in-flight, automation tools can continuously analyze its performance and feed these insights into your dashboard for continuous campaign optimization. Typical social media performance analysis comes with a time lag. Automation reduces the delay in taking timely action on channel and creative optimization.
This analysis also helps you determine which areas of the conversion funnel require attention. For example, your ads might generate several clicks but fail to convert most of them. Automated campaign performance intelligence helps you determine the weak links in the conversion funnel so you can nurture and retain potential customers.
Automate campaign management and execution to focus on high-value tasks
Like Albert Einstein once said, it’s rather “insane” to keep doing the same thing and expecting different results. Though what’s marketing creativity without some insanity, there’s a time and place for everything. Just because your campaign isn’t working, it doesn’t mean you need to wait for it to end before you re-strategize your next steps. It is possible to alter campaign approaches on the go. But to do that, your marketing team needs time out from the repetitive tasks involved in campaign execution and reporting.
Ad campaigns require as much work in-flight and post-launch as they do pre-launch. Your marketing team must analyze, recreate, and relaunch during and after a campaign based on vital metrics. The process requires several hours of manual work, and it still can’t achieve the level of accuracy that it can with automation.
Moreover, manually refreshing ads or changing entire campaigns in flight has limitations. Even if marketers manage to stop and introduce new campaigns on one platform, doing the same for multiple platforms in a reasonable time frame is tedious and exhausting.
Instead, financial services can use tools designed to automate campaign management. From ad and reporting templates to analytics, these tools create everything. All you need to do is take action on what they tell you. Automation can convert several manual hours spent reading and understanding metrics into a few minutes, saving time, effort, and cost while helping build better campaigns with 2x CTR and 100x ROI.
Automation has many benefits in achieving the ambition of staggering ad and marketing ROI and boosting CTR. But to do all of this, you need to reinvent your adtech and martech stack with tools that make a difference.
2 tech stack priorities for 2x CTR
Adding the right tools to your omnichannel marketing strategy is crucial to improve your ROI. With financial services marketing requiring automation at multiple customer and campaign touchpoints, your data collection, activation, and campaign execution must get automated too.
The top 2 priorities in this tech stack include:
- Customer data platform (CDP) for financial services marketing:
Financial services brands are a storehouse of customer data. Using the data in a privacy-first manner can be a gold mine in creating and automating relevant marketing campaigns.
What services do millennials use the most? Is the trend changing among older customers using banking services? How’s the single mom down the street thinking about her finances? How about that 20-year-old who just launched their first freelance business? A robust CDP helps you analyze data across all customer touchpoints and make insight-led marketing decisions. Think ATM usage and digital banking, search intent, and app usage – all of these become critical data sources to personalize your customer’s path to purchase in meaningful and mutually beneficial ways.
But beyond these use cases, a CDP can assist you with behavioral data to prevent frauds. It’s a must-have for financial institutions looking to safeguard their reputation in a world of staggering cybercrime.
- Automated media buying platform for financial services marketing:
Media buying forms a considerable part of any marketing campaign and has immense automation potential, as proven by the staggering growth of programmatic spends over the years.
With financial service marketing, buying suitable ad space across vital customer touchpoints is essential, as different groups may use and relate to different services. It’s also crucial that this media buying platform gives you flexibility in ad formats, creative optimization, and other benefits across the marketing automation ecosystem.
With an automated media buying platform, you can set a budget, buy the most relevant ad spaces, and change these choices on the fly with real-time data and performance analysis.
Check out ReBid to kick start your marketing automation journey today
Don’t leave money on the table, financial services marketers
Gaining and retaining customers is going to get even more for financial service companies as the recession looms.
With lower transactions and a renewed focus on savings, financial service brands need to approach their campaigns with ROI and customer trust, automation and optimization in mind.
As more banking and financial service companies catch up to this open secret, now is the right time to invest in an automation-led omnichannel approach for your marketing campaign.
