Marketing automation can undoubtedly be a powerful tool for enhancing customer engagement and streamlining marketing efforts within various industries. Financial institutions have recognised the potential benefits of marketing automation. However, relying solely on marketing automation might not be sufficient to meet the unique challenges and demands of customers in the financial sector.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation tools are software platforms designed to automate and streamline marketing tasks, processes, and campaigns. These tools help businesses and marketers manage and nurture leads, engage with customers, and optimise their marketing efforts.
Marketing automation tools can streamline tasks like email marketing, CRM management, social media scheduling, workflow automation, and even limited personalisation. In many sectors, these tools efficiently handle various marketing interactions. However, the financial sector, especially retail & business banking and wealth management, requires supplementary tools to establish the impactful relationships essential for customer engagement.
Why do financial institutions require more than marketing automation?
Financial institutions demand a more data-driven and personalised approach for several reasons.
- Personalisation
Firstly, the nature of financial services is inherently personal; customers entrust their sensitive financial information and seek tailored advice. While marketing automation can segment audiences based on broad criteria, it often lacks the granularity needed to create highly tailored interactions that resonate with each customer in real-time. An industry-agnostic one-size-fits-all automated approach can’t meet the diverse needs of clients.
- Increased Competition
Secondly, the competitive landscape has intensified, with fintech disruptors entering the market, raising customer expectations for seamless, personalised experiences. To stand out, financial institutions must leverage advanced and real-time analytics to gain insights into customer behaviour, preferences, and life events, enabling them to offer timely, relevant solutions. Marketing automation tools typically rely on predefined rules and scheduled workflows, which may not respond to rapidly changing customer behaviours or market conditions in real-time. The static and simple nature of these systems limits their ability to adapt dynamically and deliver personalisation that matches the levels of competitors in the market.
- Access to Data
Lastly, unlike other industries, financial institutions have unparalleled access to a wealth of data. This data-rich environment stems from various sources such as transaction data, customer profiles and account information. Banks are in an ideal situation to have a deep understanding of customers’ financial behaviours, spending patterns, and saving habits. In order to deliver the experiences that customers expect, banks must harness the data available to deliver personalised recommendations, insights and nudges, and not only the generic digital activities which marketing automation tools are generally confined to.
Scalable real-time personalisation often demands quick decision-making and real-time analysis, which may exceed the capabilities of traditional marketing automation tools. Achieving this level of responsiveness requires in-depth knowledge of financial data points natively understood by agile systems that can process data rapidly and deliver instantaneous personalised financial & lifestyle experiences to customers.
How can financial institutions deliver the level of personalisation expected at scale?
Marketing automation tools can greatly enhance the experience that customers have with their banks. But to unlock true customer engagement, there is a level of personalisation required that most marketing automation tools cannot deliver.
Partnering with an industry-focused personalisation platform makes it simple and efficient to analyse, enrich and act upon core banking data to enable the delivery of actionable and contextually relevant recommendations, insights, and nudges across a variety of customer-facing channels, including in-app, push notifications, SMS, and email.
Financial institutions have the flexibility to engage with a personalisation engine provider exclusively or opt for a combination of both personalisation engine and marketing automation providers, depending on the specific requirements of the institution.
Marketing automation alone, while valuable across all industries, falls short when it comes to addressing the unique needs and challenges of financial institutions. The inherently personal nature of financial services, the intensifying competitive landscape, and the unmatched access to a wealth of data all underscore the necessity for a more data-driven and personalised approach.
To deliver the level of personalisation that customers expect at scale, financial institutions must look beyond traditional marketing automation tools. Partnering with specialised personalisation engine providers dedicated to digital banking use cases like Moneythor offers a way to bridge this gap efficiently.
The flexibility to choose between exclusive personalisation engine engagement or a combination with marketing automation providers ensures that each institution can tailor its approach to meet its unique requirements, ultimately enhancing customer engagement and delivering the personalised experiences that define the future of the financial industry.
