Financial Services Marketing Archives - Act-On

Marketing Automation for Financial Services

Act-On — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 14:57:00 +0000

The financial services industry poses unique challenges for marketers: Balancing creativity with strict regulatory requirements. Navigating digital transformation in a slow-moving industry. Generating growth even as the larger economy falters. With the Fed actively waging war against inflation, and the rate increases that come with it, it’s enough for any financial industry marketer to cry for “help!”

Fortunately, help is here, in the form of marketing automation for financial services. This technology allows finance marketers to personalize their communications while standardizing their operations at scale. A survey of marketing leaders found businesses use marketing automation to “streamline marketing and sales efforts” (38%), “improve customer experience” (34%), and “improve customer engagement” (28%).

Of course, technology alone is never the sole answer. However, financial services marketing automation is a powerful tool that marketers can use to get ahead despite difficult market conditions.

^{Marketing automation for financial services can help address the sector’s unique marketing challenges.}

Examples of Marketing Automation for Financial Services

Marketing automation tools can help you create unique, tailored brand experiences that nurture customer engagement, no matter the size of your team. Organizations may achieve different levels of financial services marketing automation maturity over time. But, the core goals remain the same: streamlining and personalizing customer experiences at scale.

With a solid automation strategy, you can set up technical integrations, customer segments, and personalized campaigns once. Then all you need to do is to deploy them repeatedly to drive results with minimal manual effort.

Here’s what this day-to-day reality looks like for financial services marketers. Whether in the context of a bank, credit union, insurance brokerage, or wealth management firm:

Email Marketing Automation

Automating your email marketing for financial services involves integrating your email service provider with your CRM, running A/B tests to improve open and click-through rates, personalizing content, and automating nurture campaigns throughout the customer life cycle. Use cases abound. You can use automation to enroll new leads in nurture campaigns that send educational content over time. You can send new client onboarding campaigns to drive engagement with their new accounts. And you can promote new offerings like credit cards or loan products through upselling and cross-selling campaigns.

With social media marketing automation, your team can save valuable hours when it comes to notoriously time-consuming activities. Automate repetitive tasks like scheduling and publishing content, and use advanced features like social media listening and employee advocacy to stay on top of conversations and comments while driving positive engagement.

^{Improve your multichannel coordination with marketing automation for financial services.}

SMS Marketing Automation

SMS marketing is a key component of marketing automation for financial services. With it, you can use automation to schedule text messages within your ongoing campaigns, track performance, and include engagement data in customer profiles. This could include standard alerts and notifications, promotional texts sent to a targeted segment of your audience, or even behaviorally triggered SMS messages that you send after a client or lead takes a specific action. (And even though it should go without saying, we’ll say it anyway: Make sure to stay on top of the SMS marketing regulations that protect consumer privacy.)

Landing Pages and Web Content Personalization

Financial services marketing automation tools help you personalize and optimize the content on your website and landing pages. This way, you can deliver a better experience to visitors while improving campaign results. For example, you can conduct A/B tests to increase conversions and build templates to help create variations of pages at scale to power your campaigns. Additionally, you can use dynamic web forms to improve lead capture and gather behavioral tracking data to personalize site content on future visits.

Segmentation

Building advanced customer segments is the foundation for providing personalized experiences down the road. Marketing automation for financial services helps you segment your prospect and customer lists. These can be based on “firmographics” like company size, demographics like location or gender, and behaviors like webpage visits or email click-throughs. You can use segments to send more targeted communications and drive results across the entire customer life cycle.

Financial services marketing teams can put these different automation use cases into practice to achieve bigger-picture goals like improving the customer experience, generating leads, driving customer lifetime value, and ensuring compliance.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Learn More

How to Improve the Digital Customer Experience

Marketing automation for financial services makes it easy (or at least easier) for teams to create a better digital customer experience. It also allows them to achieve the two key outcomes we mentioned earlier: personalizing and streamlining digital customer experiences at scale. Here’s how:

Create Consistency Across the Customer Journey

Today, most customers start their journey to choosing a financial services institution by doing online research. To communicate your organization’s story, value proposition, and services clearly while building trust, you need to deliver a consistent experience across every touchpoint.

One of the biggest reasons that financial institutions struggle to improve the digital experience is they haven’t mastered optimizing the complete buyer’s journey, cutting across multiple channels.

This is where marketing automation for financial services comes in. Marketers can first develop the strategy and messaging that should run throughout every campaign and touchpoint. Then, they can use financial services marketing automation tools to build templates and create assets at scale, develop repeatable communications, and integrate campaigns across the web, email, SMS, and other channels. With this kind of consistent execution, rather than one-off messages or uncoordinated activities, customers experience less friction and a more cohesive brand experience.

Deliver Personalized Messages at the Right Time

In addition to consistency, financial services clients expect personalized experiences relevant to their needs. One survey reported that 72% of banking customers rated personalization as “highly important.” Only 8% said it didn’t matter at all.

Personalization is about meaningful relevance: delivering the right message at the right time to meet a current need. This is where marketing automation for financial services can help. By mapping your marketing activities across the customer journey, segmenting your audience according to their current stage, and delivering communications and content tailored to those moments, you can achieve truly impactful personalization at scale.

Generate Leads With Automated Content Marketing Campaigns

Your prospects are doing a lot of research online before they ever reach out to a bank, credit union, or advisor. This presents a real opportunity to attract new leads through organic search and content marketing. Financial service marketers can connect with potential customers by creating and sharing relevant, helpful content tailored to the early stages of the research process. This allows you to build trust and become a go-to resource by focusing on education instead of selling (for now).

Marketing automation for financial services makes achieving meaningful results from your SEO efforts easier by creating pathways for customers to gradually move along the customer journey toward a purchase or account. For example, after a visitor clicks on a search result page to read your blog post about online investing, you can guide them to sign up for your newsletter. Another possibility is enticing them to download a gated guide with more in-depth information or, at the very least, click through to another related blog post. Ultimately, the goal is to nurture these visitors to sign up for an account or contact your sales team.

With marketing automation for financial services, you can collect the right data and send the right follow-up messages to make that journey a seamless one. And research shows content marketing can be incredibly effective for financial services marketers, with organic search driving up to 64% of calls.

^{Improve your relationships with clients new and existing, with financial services marketing automation.}

Drive Customer Lifetime Value With Advanced Targeting

Across industries, it’s usually much more expensive to attract and convert a new customer than to keep an existing one. Financial services are no exception. Marketing automation for financial services can help you collect and use customer data to power targeted marketing campaigns. This will drive engagement and improve lifetime value.

Collect First-Party Data to Understand Your Customers

Over the past few years, government agencies and tech giants have introduced new privacy-friendly policies. They restrict how marketers can collect, purchase, and use data from third-party sources like programmatic advertisers or aggregators. In response, marketers across sectors are adapting by focusing on first-party data.

First-party data is data that you own because you collect it directly from your customers. Examples of first-party data include form submissions, website behavioral data, email click-throughs, SMS engagement, and phone call success rates. These data points can be used to better understand what your customers care about. They can also be used to see what questions they have, and how they prefer to be contacted.

Financial service marketing automation collects data for you throughout the customer journey. From tracking beacons installed on your website to assigning unique phone numbers for paid campaigns to recording email engagement metrics across recipients.

Use Data to Build Better Segments

Your financial services marketing automation software collects data. With it, you can build out more advanced segments of your customer list. You’ll know which customers clicked on an article about car loans in your recent email newsletter, who checked out the business lending page on your website, and who downloaded your new guide to online investing.

You can also create segments based on your customers’ account types, age of accounts, past purchase history, life events, and other data points that capture their current stage in the customer life cycle.

Target the Right Customers With the Right Offers at the Right Time

Financial service marketing automation helps you put your data-driven segments to use by laser-targeting your customers with the messages they’re most likely to be interested in at the right moment. Are they checking out new credit card options on your website? Send them a limited-time bonus offer when they click to sign up. Did they just leave you a perfect score on a customer satisfaction survey? Ask them to refer a friend, and offer an incentive to do so.

Bottom line: By using first-party data to tailor your messages and offers, you’ll create a more personalized experience that will lead to more engaged customers over time.

Marketing Automation and Compliance

Financial marketers know that securing legal approval for marketing content is time consuming, and let’s be honest here, sometimes it’s downright frustrating. Here’s the good news: When you’re executing repeatable, automated campaigns, you only need to go through the approval process with your legal team once. Doesn’t that sound like a dream? Just think about how much time you’ll save.

Does your marketing automation solution include a BCC archiving solution? If yes, you can achieve FINRA-compliant email marketing within your existing tool stack.

Case Studies in Financial Services Marketing Automation

Of course, you don’t have to take our word for it. Commercial banks, credit unions, insurance agencies, and wealth managers are putting marketing automation to use with outstanding results. Here are just a few examples:

Georgia United Credit Union: 96% Increase in Application Volumes

Georgia United Credit Union implemented marketing automation to improve the member journey and create segmented marketing programs. They offer personalized content to attract and retain new members. Using marketing automation for financial services, they achieved a 77% open rate on their welcome email, cross-sold thousands of new products via the marketing automation platform, and experienced a 96% spike in application volume.

“Having our member data file integrated into Act-On gives marketing the ease and independence we didn’t have in our old system, allowing us to send more frequent, more segmented and personalized communications.”
-Amanda Hullinger, Marketing Supervisor, Georgia United Credit Union

Tower Federal Credit Union: Increases Open Rates by 300%

Tower Federal Credit Union uses marketing automation to automate email campaigns and improve segmentation efforts. They also use data and analytics tools to more effectively understand member behavior and run reports. The credit union is experiencing a 300% increase in open rates and follow-up emails.

“We’ve seen a two to three times increase in our open rates, especially to the follow-up emails, and we’ve seen a lot more customers starting loan applications.”
-Marc Wilensky, Vice President of Communications and Brand Marketing, Tower Federal Credit Union`

RATESDOTCA: Increases Total Annual Email Revenue Target by 15%

Canada’s largest and most trusted digital financial acquisition platform uses Act-On to achieve more dynamic segmentation and personalization. Using marketing automation for financial services, they support the entire customer life cycle. They also moved beyond a traditional website shopping experience and delivering more personalized communication to customers’ inboxes. The company has achieved a 20% average click-through rate for marketing campaigns and increased the total annual email revenue target by 15%.

“Act-On allows us to build automated programs that power our entire outbound efforts. The Automated Journey Builder, in particular, helps us map our content and then visualize and facilitate our customer journeys from start to finish. It’s actually the main selling point of our new product — totally automated renewals.”
–Lydia Ku, Senior Marketing Manager, RATESDOTCA

It’s Possible for You Too!

These stories show that with the right strategy and tools, financial services organizations can use automation to accomplish exceptionally personalized marketing at scale.

Want to read a few more stories or to share the potential results of marketing automation for financial services with stakeholders? We’ve compiled an entire collection into a single, easy-to-read document.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Learn More

Automation Makes Wealth Management Marketing Simpler

Act-On — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 23:46:37 +0000

As a wealth manager, you want to focus on what’s most important: helping your clients plan their financial future. Marketing can feel like a distraction from that core function.

It’s made all the more difficult by manual approaches to data collection, follow up, and nurturing leads into clients. If you’re not automating your marketing operations, you’re essentially leaving money on the table. And as a wealth management firm, that’s the last thing you want to do.

Fortunately, there’s a solution. Marketing automation can help you track user behavior and get the data you need for segmentation and personalization. It can also help you develop and launch upsell and cross-sell programs for your current clients. Let’s explore, shall we?

^{This is the good stuff: working closely with your clients. Leave the marketing to your automation platform.}

Use Marketing Automation to Track Wealth Management Client Behavior

One of the best benefits of using marketing automation as a wealth manager or financial advisor is the data. When you’re tracking your efforts correctly, you’ll have data on how people use your website, landing pages, emails, video content, SMS blasts, and social media posts. This added visibility will help you build more knowledge about your clients and what makes them happy.

These insights can help you improve your customer journey and deliver a better client experience. Then, take things a step further by implementing lead scoring based on these behaviors. This process will help you “nurture” the lead as they move through the sales funnel. The best part? This process is fairly easy once you’ve implemented your marketing automation solution.

https://act-on.com/learn/e-books-guides/financial-industry-use-cases-collection/

Use Marketing Automation to Retain Wealth Management Clients and Grow Your Assets Under Management

Marketing automation provides the foundation for personalized marketing campaigns that drive growth for your wealth management practice. Your marketing automation platform can help you segment your audiences and make specific offers at just the right time. You can educate and engage new clients with automated nurture sequences. Or win over on-the-fence prospects with client case studies and infographics showing their wealth’s growth potential if they sign up.

That means you don’t have to spend precious hours sending emails to your prospects manually (or spend money hiring someone else to do it). You don’t have that kind of time! With marketing automation, you can group all of your contacts into specific segments based on their demographics, behaviors, financial goals, and interests. Once everyone is segmented, you can deliver more targeted messaging uniquely suited to them. This way, you can get super specific about different investment opportunities or services depending on who you’re speaking to.

^{Add new clients and retain existing ones with automated nurture campaigns that prove the value of your services.}

Wealth Management Marketing Automation Helps Reach the Next Generation of Investors

According to Forbes, roughly $30 trillion in assets are about to be passed from the Baby Boomers to younger generations in “the great wealth transfer.” Appealing to millennials and Gen Z means speaking to them in their language: digital communications.

According to the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center (GFLEC), “Approximately 80 percent of millennials use their smartphone for transactional purposes like paying bills and depositing checks, and 90 percent use their phones for informational activities like tracking their spending.” However, the GFLEC report also says that smartphone usage for financial services management doesn’t correlate with individuals improving their financial practices. Therefore, it’s up to wealth management firms and financial advisors to help younger investors better understand their opportunities.

Building a Digital First Customer Journey in Wealth Management

Here’s an example of what a digital-first customer journey might look like.

A young professional receives a promotion at work and begins exploring more advanced financial investment options.
After searching “financial literacy for Gen Z,” she clicks on your website.
She does some light research but doesn’t request any further information or content.
Over the next 30 days, she receives your advertisements as she browses online.
She clicks on an ad. She’s redirected to a landing page with a gated asset titled, “Improve Your Financial Literacy in 5 Easy Steps.”
She submits her details, reads the content, and begins to sharpen her financial knowledge and skills.
Meanwhile, now that you have her contact information, you can place her in a custom segment and begin sending automated email campaigns.
Tracking her behaviors and interactions, you’re alerted when she hits a certain lead score, indicating she’s moved on in the buyer’s process.
At this point, you begin more direct and personal sales outreach with the hopes of securing her as a client early in her career.
Once your new client has begun her investment journey, you continue to provide relevant and regular content and messaging for potential cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

Once you turn on all of the switches, you simply wait for the data to roll in and A/B test and optimize as necessary. Everything is simple, streamlined, and efficient.

^{Appeal to younger investors with digital deliverables like sample charts showing portfolio growth.}

Marketing Automation Helps Wealth Managers Cut to the Chase

By streamlining your processes using marketing automation, you and your team will have the time and resources you need to develop and distribute more personalized content. The efficiency you gain helps you get time to refine your brand messaging and external communications, and provide the tailored support your prospective customers and current investors so desperately want and need. Don’t fumble around with a bare-bones email service providers (or worse, sheets in Excel). The sooner you start combining great strategies with great technologies, the sooner you’ll be able to beat out rival firms.

https://act-on.com/learn/e-books-guides/financial-industry-use-cases-collection/

Use Marketing Automation Tools to Become a Supermarketer

Act-On — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 22:52:01 +0000

What would make you a hero in your marketing role? Figuring out how to generate more revenue with fewer resources—less time, less headcount, and less budget—might seem like a feat of superheroics. But the truth is, with the right marketing automation tools, you can be a superhero in the eyes of leadership.

Not sure how to do that? Never fear! Act-On teamed up with MarketingProfs, and we’re here to save the day! Read on for a step-by-step guide with everything you need to know to use marketing automation tools to unlock your superpowers.

The Marketing Superhero’s Guide to Marketing Automation Tools

A superhero’s only as good as the tools in their arsenal. Maybe you weren’t born with a genetic mutation that gives you superhuman abilities, but hey, that’s why we have superheroes like Batman, right? With training, dedication, and the latest and most advanced tech, you can be the savior of your own Gotham City.

Chapter 1: Suit Up! Consolidate the Marketing Automation Tools in Your Tech Stack

“I love deploying new software!”
-No one, ever

First things first: consolidate your tech stack! What do you really need in your utility belt and what’s just weighing you down?

In an informal poll, we learned that fellow marketers consider their marketing automation platform as having the biggest impact on their marketing efforts, followed by their CRM and then their sales enablement tool. And this is just a sliver of categories that make up the current MarTech landscape, where there are a whopping 10,000+ vendors! Just like the Marvel Universe, it keeps on growing.

As new vendors keep entering the market, you really have to pay attention to what’s in your tech stack. Figure out which ones are serving you versus which are just collecting subscription fees. It’s not enough to stick with the status quo—learn what marketing tools are out there that can help you amplify and grow your business.

So ask yourself: What’s in your tech stack? And how do you “stack up” next to your peers?

^{The Marketing Technology Landscape can be daunting: there are 10,383 vendors providing everything from marketing automation tools to advertising and content tools.}

Now that you’ve done a roll call of your vendors, time to put them to the test. Assess your tools based on team usage, connectivity, and cost by asking yourself the following questions:

· Is anyone using this tool? If not, should we be?

· Do we have duplicate tools?

· Are there other teams in our company that could share this cost?

· Is there an integration that could make it more sticky?

· Is there something else in the market that’s a better value?

And finally, the most important question to ask: what’s the ROI on this tool? With budgets being scrutinized and contracts being challenged these days, you really need to justify the time/cost savings and the amount of business influenced by the products you have in your tech stack. What impact would it have on your business if you gave it the classic Batman ka-pow? If you need to part ways with a marketing tool, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered: here are tips on how to break up with your marketing automation platform.

Hot tip: Ask your vendor to resell you their product, as if you’re unfamiliar with it. Any tech company worth its salt would have had several product rollouts since you first purchased it, and you may not be aware of all its current capabilities.

Chapter 2: Find Your Sidekick – Do More with Marketing Automation Tools at Your Side

Every Batman needs a Robin. We don’t know what audition process Robin went through to land the coveted gig of sidekick, but when choosing your automation partner, it’s important to discern what’s most important to you. Most marketers want their marketing automation platform to be easier to understand and navigate. How do you find the right match?

^{Consider these automation activities when using marketing automation tools to kick your marketing efforts into super speed.}

One thing we can all agree on: anything that can be automated should be automated. This is true for every stage of the buyer journey and the customer lifecycle. What are some of these key automation activities that will make you look like a superhero for getting so much done?

Notifications
A great marketing automation platform helps with your communications externally, and internally as well. Notifications to the sales team alert them when a prospect reaches a certain lead score or engagement. You can learn more about how to get the most out of your internal marketing team here.
Nurtures
Nurtures are great for your customers, too. It’s not just about that top-of-funnel – it’s about engaging customers, encouraging up-sell and cross-sell, and making sure they’re getting the most out of your product.
Transactional Communications
We’re all used to communications that remind us to fill out a form, confirm an event, or post-event follow-ups. We’re trained to expect a sequence of steps that a good marketing automation platform should definitely be doing without any heavy lifting on your part ( save that super strength for more strategic projects and places where you can really add value).
Onboarding sequences
Closing a customer only puts you at the starting gate—you then have to think about how to onboard your customer so that they have a really great experience. This encompasses everything from beta programs to end-of-life notifications. There’s a lot of opportunity here to think of each stage of the customer lifecycle and how you’re automating those communications. “Speed to lead” is particularly important—what is your company’s response time to leads? Leverage automation to engage your super speed and make sure you’re not leaving valuable opportunities to be snatched up by the competition.
Product comms
Some of the most important communications to customers are about specific dates and deadlines about the product. No doubt these should be automated.

One of the best ways you can rely on marketing automation tools as your sidekick is building automated nurture streams. Here are few tips:

Build out your ideal customer profiles, so you know how to approach different customers’ different needs.
Know and understand where your buyer is in the sales process—you don’t want to duplicate communications with the sales team, which creates a confusing experience for the potential buyer.
Don’t stop with a sale! Think about how you’re nurturing the customer throughout.

Remember: automation works best when it’s personalized as much as possible. Personalization is so important in building trust, loyalty and respect. Base your communications on conversations with customers, the actions they’re most likely to take, and their place in the product lifecycle. For example, three months out from contract renewal, send an automated email to remind them.

Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead.
–Harvard Business Review

Maybe you can’t use echolocation like a bat does, but listen to the information and data you have on a prospect to know when to remove someone from a nurture stream and customize your messaging to them. Timing and segmentation are key. What you don’t want to do is treat all customers or prospects the same.

Learn how Act-On can help you create compelling, personalized messages that engage.

Chapter 3: Engage Laser Focus! (Use a Targeted Approach with Marketing Automation Tools)

Ever wondered what would happen if Batman didn’t just focus on crime? What if he also wanted to take care of Gotham City’s pothole problem and use the Batmobile for garbage collection? Even the best of us need a focus. Imagine how confusing the bat signal would be, if it wasn’t clear why the hero was being called.

It’s vital to understand your dataset and focus on metrics so you can identify trends that tie back to your marketing efforts. What channel did prospects come in from? Attribution is key. After all, it’s possible to go way down the funnel with a chunk of leads from a marketing campaign, but with none of them converting. It’s important to assess the data and focus on what you can improve to get better results. It can be as simple as quarterly reviews on all your programs and channels to understand what content is working, and what’s not. What’s your top-performing initiative that’s getting the most clicks and conversions? Hone in with laser focus—don’t just churn out more of the same.

Act-On’s marketing automation tools helped Georgia United Credit Union leverage high customer engagement to segment their customers according to the products, services and accounts they had. By bucketing customers into smaller groups, Georgia Union was able to send more laser-focused communication using marketing automation for personalized and focused cross-selling. The result? 800 upsells in 11 months! This was a new tool in their toolbelt that really created a great customer experience and made Georgia United’s marketing team the superheroes their organization needed.

Want to Tap into Your Superpowers?

Watch the full webinar and learn more tips from experts about how to get the most out of your marketing automation tools.

Act-On provides solutions that empower marketers to target every step of the customer lifecycle, allowing customers to build smart and effective programs to grow their business and generate high customer lifetime value.

Financial Services Marketing Automation in the UK

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 20:00:00 +0000

Finance is a big deal in the United Kingdom. In fact, the financial services sector contributes more than £164.8 billion to the UK economy, accounting for 8.6% of the total economic output. Marketing automation plays an integral role in this impact, aiding the growth of financial services companies, banks and other institutions in the wake of a global pandemic that changed everyday business for us all. Financial services marketing automation has become an embedded fixture of marketing departments in financial services worldwide, including and especially in the UK.

However, many financial services marketers have a misaligned impression of automation and waste time setting up technical systems instead of finding creative new ways to integrate marketing automation into everyday business. Done well, marketing automation provides financial professionals with the tools to streamline and measure workflows and marketing tasks. This allows you to increase your ROI and operational efficiency while improving the customer journey.

Embracing financial services marketing automation in the UK requires an understanding of key regulations and how to apply the right tools.

Key Regulations for the UK Financial Services Industry

The financial services sector is one of the most heavily regulated industries in the world. This is because financial services businesses deal with people’s money, which means a higher risk of fraud and abuse. As a result, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) imposes strict rules and regulations on financial services businesses to protect consumers in the UK.

Some of the key regulations financial services businesses in the UK need to be aware of include the Financial Services and Markets Act of 2000, the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, and the Financial Promotions Order.

Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)

The FCA is the independent regulator of financial services in the United Kingdom. It regulates financial firms providing services to consumers and maintains the integrity of the UK’s financial markets.

The FCA is responsible for protecting consumers by ensuring that financial firms provide them with products and services that are fair, transparent, and offer value for money. The FCA also promotes competition in consumers’ interests by ensuring a level playing field between financial firms.

The FCA regulates financial services firms providing consumer services, including banks, building societies, mortgage lenders and brokers, investment firms, stockbrokers, insurance companies and intermediaries, consumer credit firms, and claims management companies. The FCA also regulates the conduct of firms operating in the UK’s financial markets, including investment banks, asset managers, and securities and derivatives traders.

It’s an independent body, accountable to Parliament and funded by fees charged to firms.

The FCA has wide-ranging powers to enforce its rules and regulations, including the power to impose financial penalties on firms and individuals that breach its rules and to ban individuals from working in the financial services industry.

Financial Services and Markets Act 2000

The Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (FSMA) is the primary piece of legislation that gives the FCA its powers and functions. It outlines the general principles the FCA must have when carrying out its functions.

The act was created in the wake of the collapse of Barings Bank, which highlights the importance of effective regulation in the financial sector. The FSMA is designed to be flexible in order to adapt to changing circumstances and new risks, ensuring that the financial sector remains stable and consumers are protected.

The key principles of the FCA are:

Protecting consumers
Promoting competition
Maintaining market integrity
Reducing financial crime

The FCA has a wide range of powers to carry out its functions, including the power to impose financial penalties, cancel authorizations, and ban individuals from working in the financial sector.

The FSMA is an important piece of legislation that provides the FCA with the necessary tools to regulate the financial sector effectively. It is designed to protect consumers and promote competition while ensuring that the financial sector remains stable.

Financial Services Compensation Scheme

The FSMA also created the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), which protects consumers if authorized financial services firms fail.

The FSCS can pay consumers compensation if a firm cannot meet its financial obligations. The scheme covers deposits, insurance contracts, and investment business and can pay out up to £85,000 per person per firm.

Financial Promotions Order

The Financial Promotions Order (FPO) is a statutory instrument that sets out the rules governing financial promotions. Financial promotions are defined as any form of communication that could be used to induce someone to engage in financial activity. The FPO is enforced by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

The FPO is especially important for marketers, because it prohibits false, misleading, or deceptive financial promotions. It also requires firms to include certain information in their financial promotions, such as the firm’s name and contact details, a description of the service offered, and any associated risks.

Office for National Statistics (ONS) Classifications

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the UK’s executive office for national statistics and economic classifications. The ONS is responsible for producing statistics on the UK economy, population, and society.

The ONS publishes a range of statistical classifications, including the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC), the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC), and the National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS-SEC). These classifications are used to provide a consistent framework for the collection and analysis of data.

The SIC is a classification of economic activity. It is used to identify the main activity of businesses in the UK. The SOC is a classification of occupations. It is used to identify the skills and training requirements of jobs in the UK. The NS-SEC is a socio-economic classification. It is used to identify people’s social position in relation to their occupations.

Businesses, governments, and academia use the ONS classifications for various purposes, such as market research, economic analysis, and social research.

It is a legal requirement for the UK to compile the national accounts statistics in accordance with the European System of Accounts 2010: ESA 2010, which the ONS does. The two main areas of classification that we engage in are classifying institutional units and classifying transactions.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulation of the European Union (EU). It came into force on 25 May 2018, and is extremely important for financial services marketing automation in the UK. The GDPR replaces the 1995 Data Protection Directive.

The GDPR sets out the rules for how personal data must be collected, processed, and stored by organisations operating in the EU. It also establishes new rights for individuals concerning their personal data.

Organisations that process the personal data of EU citizens must comply with the GDPR. Non-compliance can result in fines of up to 4% of annual global turnover or €20 million (whichever is greater). The GDPR applies to any organisation that processes the personal data of EU citizens, regardless of whether the organisation is based inside or outside the EU.

Types of Financial Institutions in the UK

There are a number of different types of financial institutions in the UK. These include banks, building societies, credit unions, and insurance companies.

Public Corporations (PCs)

In the UK, a public corporation is a limited company that the government owns. There are two types of public corporations: nationalised industries and trading funds. Nationalised industries are companies that have been nationalised or taken over by the government. Trading funds are companies owned by the government but operating as commercial businesses.

Private Non-Financial Corporations (PNFCs)

A private non-financial corporation (PNFC) is a limited company that the government does not own. PNFCs are typically large businesses that operate in the private sector.

This sector is diverse, and examples of units within the sector include retailers, manufacturers, accountancy, and law firms, amongst many others.

Monetary Financial Institutions (MFIs)

A monetary financial institution (MFI) is an organization that provides financial services to its customers. Financial institutions can be either public or private corporations. In the UK, the majority of financial institutions are private corporations.

There are three subsectors within the monetary financial institutions’ sector in the UK:

Central Bank
Deposit-taking corporations
Money market funds

Other Financial Institutions (OFIs)

Other financial institutions (OFIs) are organizations that provide financial services that are not classed as monetary financial institutions.

The sub sectors within the OFIs sector include:

Investment funds: Funds that invest in a variety of assets such as stocks, bonds, and real estate; they can be either open-ended or closed-ended
Specialized lenders: Organizations that provide loans to specific sectors such as the construction industry or small businesses
Financial leasing companies: companies that lease equipment to other businesses
Hedge funds: private investment funds that use a variety of strategies to generate returns; they are typically only available to wealthy investors

Technical Landscape of the UK Financial Sector

A recent report on the United Kingdom Core Banking Solutions Markets (CBSM) highlights the acceleration in the adoption of digital platform technologies in the financial sector. For example, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority has been working on a project to use blockchain technology to record and track data from financial transactions.

Digital technologies are also being used to create new financial products and services. For example, mobile apps allow users to make peer-to-peer payments or digital currencies like Bitcoin.

There has also been an increase in the trend of Buy-Now-Pay-Later services in the UK, which has given a new opportunity to the financial sector.

The big bang migration of the Bank of England’s aging computer systems to a privately hosted service is a recent example of technological advancement in the sector. The Bank of England plans to complete the replacement of the core system it uses to settle payments between banks before 2025.

In the race to go digital, the Bank of England is also preparing to launch a new real-time gross settlement (RTGS) service. The RTGS will enable banks to make faster payments and will be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Among these evolutions of technology, there is also an incredible push toward automation and data-driven approaches in marketing and sales. That’s because as the entire world goes digital, people expect their experience with any financial services company or bank to be personalised and delivered at exactly the right moment.

How UK Financial Companies and Banks Use Marketing Automation

If you’ve been reading this far, you know there are several business classifications as well as several regulations that typically apply to financial services marketers in the UK. One of the most important – and commonly encountered by marketers – is GDPR.

Having the right tool to help meet GDPR principles like purpose limitation, and data minimisation brings peace to regulatory compliance. And, with that peace of mind comes the opportunity to be creative and reach your customers in meaningful ways. To to this well – and to scale – you need marketing automation.

Regulatory Compliance

Integrating marketing automation into everyday business means being aware of the organisation type you’re working in, and what regulations apply, and then setting up the right systems to effectively meet those standards. At the same time, it means connecting with your customers and clients in a way that makes sense and leads to growth for your bank or financial firm. At the center of it all is data.

Compliance with GDPR and other regulations like the Financial Promotions Order (FPO) relies on the proper collection and use of data. But so do your segmented, personalised marketing programs and communications. The good thing about marketing automation is that once you set up your system in the right way, and stay aware of best practices, you are freed up to build the type of customer experience that leads to more accounts opened, higher amounts invested, or additional contracts signed.

Marketing Maturity

Marketing automation for financial services companies helps with lead generation, nurturing and the sales process. With tools like landing pages, forms, automated email, and a journey builder the possibilities open up for marketing way beyond batch and blast. If you’ve got the right system, you are also collecting data every step of the way, which allows you to see what’s working, and share a rich level of data with your sales team as well.

While organisations may achieve different levels of financial services marketing automation maturity over time, the core goals remain the same: streamlining and personalising customer experiences at scale.

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Timely Messaging

Another benefit of marketing automation is that it can help financial service providers and banks send timely and relevant messages to their target audiences. Many banks use marketing automation to time messages around the opening of a new account (as in a welcome sequence), or nearing completion of an auto loan. There are so many uses for marketing automation when it comes to the timing and relevance of messages.

For example, if a client’s investment portfolio is underperforming, a financial advisor can use marketing automation to send them an email with information about how to rebalance their portfolio, and include an offer for a free call to get started on a plan.

Building Trust

One of the main benefits of marketing automation is that it can help financial services marketing build trust with clients. This is because marketing automation allows financial services providers to send timely and relevant messages to their target audiences with the right amount of personalisation. In practice, that means having a system that can trigger transactional messages, as well as marketing messaging that makes sense based on the products and services the customer or prospect is likely to be interested in. Making sure to align the emails, SMS messages, or social posts you’re sharing to the data you have on individuals and groups in your funnel is essential for building trust.

Driving Loyalty and Retention

Another benefit of marketing automation for the financial industry in the UK is that it can help drive loyalty and retention among your existing clients or customers. When implemented correctly, marketing automation can help with upselling, cross-selling and encouraging existing customers to refer others, or offer reviews that can help attract even more great prospects. Even outside of the direct selling opportunities, marketing automation helps you serve educational information and announcements to keep them engaged, which is an important step toward building loyalty.

Facilitating Multi-Channel Marketing

Automation is key to trying out more of a multi-channel approach. Incorporating channels such as email, social media, SMS, webinars, PPC, content syndication and more can help you expand your customer base and reach them across channels where they are ready to receive your message.

Gaining Customer Insights

Marketing automation can help financial service providers and banks gain insights into their target audiences to better tailor their marketing efforts, rooted in data.

By tracking the interactions of leads and customers, financial service providers can learn more about their buying habits, interests, and needs. This information can then be used to create the type of segmented campaigns that have been proven to improve marketing results.

Marketing Automation is Crucial for Compliance and Success in the Financial Industry

The benefits of implementing marketing automation for financial services marketing in the UK are plentiful. From regulatory compliance to improved personalisation, it’s a great tool for banks, financial advisors and all types of financial services organisations. Act-On marketing automation software supports banks, credit unions, insurance organizations, and wealth managers at every customer journey stage.

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How 3 Insurance Companies are Leveraging Marketing Automation

Act-On — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 14:00:00 +0000

There are people out there on a quest to find your insurance products and services, and once you capture their attention, you don’t want to lose it. So how can you win attention and trust, then turn that into revenue? That’s a great question and one that many insurance companies are asking.

One of the most important ways to grab attention and keep it is to personalize your messaging and your offers. Seventy-seven percent of insurance customers report they were influenced to purchase insurance based on personalized promotions. That’s more than 3 out of 4 people.

So, how, exactly do you go about personalizing marketing on a mass scale? That’s an easy one to answer – it’s marketing automation. This article gives you three real-life examples of how insurance companies leverage marketing automation to capture more interest, convert leads and grow business longterm.

Benefits of Marketing Automation for Insurance Firms

As an insurance marketer, you likely segment customers into groups. And this is a good strategy, it helps you to deliver more relevant content to people. But your customers don’t want to feel like they’re one of many, they want to feel like an individual. Talking to a customer in a way that makes her feel known is a matter of segmentation and personalization. Doing so at scale is a matter of having the right data, strategy and tools.

Using a marketing automation tool makes it much easier to talk to people about what they want in a way that feels more personal. A few benefits include:

Delivering the Right Content at the Right Time

Marketing automation allows you to segment your audiences by creating content triggers, and personalized nurturing campaigns. Connect with your audience at the right time with the right offer, and sometimes before they even realize they have a new need.

Boost Cross-Sell Business and Retain Customers

You already know that retaining existing customers is far cheaper than acquiring new ones. But here’s something else to consider: current customers spend on average 67% more than those new to your business. Automation helps you to cross-sell existing customers based on the products and services they most likely need because you can access the right insights at the right moment.

Let Your Prospects Convert Themselves

Research from PricewaterhouseCoopers found that 71% of people surveyed report they do some kind of digital research before buying insurance. Insurance industry marketing automation helps you to view prospect behavior in real-time, allowing you to provide relevant content and build trust.

Help Your Insurance Marketing Team Do More With Less

There’s one more important benefit to consider – marketing efficiency. If you have a large department and many resources, you still need ways to create more efficiency in processes. If you have a smaller marketing department, your team might be downright overloaded. Marketing automation helps to get rid of time-consuming manual tasks so that your team can make a bigger impact.

Ready for your examples? Let’s take a look at how 3 insurance companies are using marketing automation and experiencing these benefits.

5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokerages

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How RSA Insurance Pumped Up Email Deliverability

RSA Insurance is one of the oldest and most well-known insurance providers in the world, serving individuals, small businesses, and larger companies. Even though the company was well known, it struggled to get the attention of its audience. The company targets brokers and risk managers, and these people get a lot of emails. As a result, standing out in the inbox is hard.

Before implementing marketing automation, understanding marketing results was also difficult. RSA couldn’t see who opened their emails and who did not. Without this data, the company didn’t really know if its audience was engaged. It also made measuring ROI more challenging.

RSA leveraged Act-On’s marketing automation solution to get visibility into open rates, engagement, automated campaigns, and A/B tests to understand and improve results. RSA Insurance has had some exciting results:

Increases open rates to 18-20 percent above the industry average.
Designed emails faster and more easily connected with their target audiences.
Improved ROI since they could measure how well marketing efforts worked.
Facilitated easier compliance with GDPR.

How Physicians Insurance Implemented Automated Segmentation

Driven by a trend of doctors leaving private practices to work for larger clinics and hospitals, Physicians Insurance was navigating a decrease in demand. Many larger medical organizations have self-insurance plans, which eliminates the need to buy individual policies. Physicians Insurance wanted to expand its business model to reach different types of buyers, like hospital administrators and executives, but was stuck in figuring out how to do so.

They used an email service provider (ESP) to stay in touch with prospects and customers, but the system was rife with problems. For starters, the ESP solution didn’t integrate well with internal systems and lacked advanced segmentation abilities. Without the ability to deeply segment audiences, Physicians Insurance couldn’t provide the level of personalization that today’s buyers expect.

In addition to attracting a new clientele, Physicians Insurance needed to continue improving cross-selling activities to maintain its most important source of revenue.Email marketing was still important, but Physicians Insurance wanted to take nurturing a step further to improve customer retention and growth. Marketing automation allowed the firm to create more personalized interactions that were more meaningful and relevant to each customer.

Using Act-On’s marketing automation, Physicians Insurance could segment based on job title, specialty, geographic region, and more, helping the company to get more personal with communications.

Creating campaigns was also much easier, with a drag and drop editor that made it faster to create existing and future messages. Reporting helped the company to better understand and assess how buyers interacted with messages. Were prospects and customers responding positively? And if not, what changes could they make to do better? Greater visibility gave them the data to make changes.

For example, the company learned that doctors read their emails very early in the morning and on holidays and their days off. This information allowed them to strategize how and when to best engage.

Using automation provided several positive results, including:

Email open rates as high as 30% for existing clients.
Customer retention rate above 95%.
Connected MarTech stack to create programs that do a better job at reaching customers.
Access to the right insights, at the right time to make better decisions about who to reach, and when.

How IAMS Increased Conversion Rates

A customer with an inbox full of unread emails is looking for ways to clear it out fast. Hitting the select button and moving an email to the trash happens in seconds, and if you want to save your marketing from the trash, you need people to see value in what you deliver.

Insurance Agency Marketing Services (IAMS) is a company that helps thousands of agents across the United States with developing leads. The agency struggled to help clients stand out in a competitive market and needed to improve marketing intelligence and lead tracking.

Without personalized interactions, emails from IAMS clients were constantly overlooked by prospects and customers. Webinar registration was low, and according to the metrics, people were disinterested in receiving and opening marketing messages. The agency needed to transform a disengaged audience into one that was excited to receive emails, and willing to register for events, like webinars. Using marketing automation, the company:

Delivered personalized content that increased webinar registrations by 470% opening the floodgates to new, fresh leads.
Grew website traffic by 300% with click-through rates that tripled to 6% far exceeding industry email marketing campaign benchmarks.
Improved email reputation and deliverability rates, so that more customers and prospects received emails.

List segmentation allowed IAMS to talk to the right people at the right time, and better insights helped to understand what types of content customers liked the most. With a better marketing automation tool, the organization can now view campaign performance, and make quick decisions about how to improve results.

Marketing Automation Provides the Structure for Your Best Insurance Marketing Results

You’re trying to reach customers at a time when the digital noise has never been louder. If you hope to capture their attention, you need them to feel excited every time they see your emails and open your content. And this can only happen when every experience feels personal.

Of course, you can’t personally understand every customer at every moment, which is why you need insurance marketing automation to help you use data, implement segmented programs, and scale. Marketing automation delivers the right content to people along their buyer journey and gives you the insights required to continue to improve. Do this well, and you can retain more customers, cross-sell more products and improve prospect conversion rates.
Ready to find out how marketing automation can help your insurance business take on the largest industry challenges? If so, check out the 5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokers.

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3 of the Best Financial Services Marketing Campaigns

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 13:16:00 +0000

Marketing financial products and services can be a challenging task. You need to find the right approach to reach your target audience, and you also need to make sure that your campaigns are compliant with regulations like FINRA.

That’s why we’ve created a list of three of the best financial marketing campaigns that you can implement into your strategy right now. Read on for tips on creating successful campaigns using different marketing channels, such as email and social media, all with the efficiency of automation.

What to Know About Financial Marketing Campaigns

Financial services marketing campaigns come in all shapes and sizes. But before you launch your next big campaign, you should keep a few things in mind.

Your campaigns must be compliant with financial marketing and advertising regulations. This includes adhering to rules set by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), as well as any other state or local laws that may apply to your business.
Your campaigns should be focused on a specific goal, such as acquiring new customers, increasing product adoption, or reactivating inactive customers.
You’ll need to use data from your marketing campaigns to inform your strategy. This includes tracking metrics such as leads generated, conversion rates, and ROI.

Let’s get into the 3 best financial services marketing campaigns to run now.

Financial Services Onboarding Campaign

An effective onboarding campaign is designed to welcome new customers and help them get started with your product or service. It’s important because it helps define the path for a new customer, encouraging them to interact with and get the most out of the product or service they signed up for — empowering them to eventually become invested in future offerings as well.

Onboarding campaigns can be automated using email marketing for a more personalized approach. This allows you to reach a large number of people directly without having to manually send each message yourself.

For example, you can create an email campaign that automatically sends new bank customers a series of welcome messages once they have signed up for a checking account. These emails can include information on what they can expect, important contact information, how to use features like direct deposit and auto-pay, and links to resources they may find helpful. These emails help to form a relationship between your financial institution and the customer, and build brand trust and loyalty.

Upselling and Cross-Selling Campaigns for Financial Services

If you’re looking to increase product sales, an upselling or cross-selling campaign can be a great way to achieve your goals.

Upselling campaigns focus on convincing existing customers to upgrade to a more expensive product or service. On the other hand, cross-selling campaigns focus on selling complementary products to your existing customer base.

Both types of campaigns can be highly effective in increasing product sales. Before you launch either type of campaign, there are some things to be aware of.

You’ll need to create targeted content that speaks to the needs of your audience. This content should be designed to convince your customers that they need to upgrade or add to your product or service.
You’ll also want to consider which marketing channels will be most effective for reaching your target customers. Email, social media, and paid ads are a few ways to reach your customers who want to upgrade and/or engage with additional products.

For example, you can create an automated email campaign that talks specifically to a segment of checking customers about a high-yield savings account. Or, upgrade your investment client to a more hands-on, individual coaching package.

Social media automation is a great way to reach your audience with upsells and cross-sells as well. Create an ad campaign that targets customers who have expressed interest in similar products or services. Let’s say you’ve got a mortgage customer who may be interested in an auto-loan, according to behavioral data. Start serving up some targeted ads about your great auto-loan rates.

Another effective way to easily reach customers who have opted in to be contacted is through SMS marketing. You can easily offer promo codes or limited offers to customers through their mobile devices.

Inactive Member Engagement Campaigns

Engagement campaigns are designed to re-engage inactive members and get them interested in your products or services again. They typically involve sending targeted content to your inactive customers like a survey about their experience, a ‘were sorry to see you go’ type of email, or even a special offer to entice re-engagement. Best of all, such messages can easily be automated for a more efficient and effective approach.

For example, if an investor hasn’t signed on to his online account for 6 months, you may want to send an encouraging message with an offer of a free consult call to find out where that investor might be stuck and offer advice that energizes him about his investments again. But what makes a customer inactive? Typically if there’s been no transactions for 12 months, a customer is considered inactive. It’s important to be aware of this disengagement before the 12-month mark. Using a CRM can help create reports showing customer activity, highlighting those that are on their way to becoming inactive. From there, you can determine triggers for sending automated emails to entice them to use their accounts or services. This is when you can decide whether to offer a special rate, promotion, or simply reach out and see why they haven’t been using their account.

Reengagement campaigns can also be used for non-customers, like those who initially signed up showing interest, but never committed to any services. For example, if someone signed up for marketing emails but hasn’t opened one in six month, you can create an email campaign o entice them. Create a catchy and clickable subject line with a special deal for a first-time sign up or offer a bundle of products or services created especially for their segment. If you know someone is reaching retirement age, offering them account services to handle their retirement funds and make the most of their savings can be a great way to pique their interest.

Make Your Financial Marketing More Effective With Automation

Implementing your best financial services marketing campaigns relies on using an effective marketing automation tool. The data you get from marketing automation allows you to gain insight into what is working for your customers and potential customers, and get more effective with your campaigns in the future. So, if you are not currently running an onboarding campaign, upsells and cross-sells, as well as an engagement campaign for both customer and leads who have slowed down on their opens or visits, this is your sign to go and build them today.

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4 Massively Important Financial Services Marketing Statistics

Tue, 07 Jun 2022 13:55:00 +0000

Are you wondering if you’re on the right track with your approach to financial services marketing? Maybe you’re curious what other people in the industry are focusing on, or want to make sure you’re aligning with current trends like marketing automation.

We’ve gathered sources on 4 financial services marketing statistics to watch, with examples of how institutions like banks and wealth management firms are addressing the issues they represent.

4 Statistics on Financial Marketing and What They Mean for Your Business

1. 72% of Customers Say Personalization is “Highly Important”

Your financial services customers receive far more personalized interactions than ever before. They can jump on their phones, receive personalized shopping recommendations, and have those items delivered to their doorstep within a couple of days or sometimes a couple of hours. Curated clothing recommendations? No problem. Suggestions for that special holiday dinner with a pre-populated grocery list? Done. But these expectations don’t stop at shopping experiences, as they flow into all business interactions, including those with financial institutions.

A recent McKinsey report found “[t]he biggest reason companies fail to capture the full benefits of their digital improvement efforts is that they concentrate on optimizing individual touch points rather than first tackling the customer experience as customers actually experience it – the complete journey that cuts across multiple functions and channels.”

A banking customer survey found that 72% of respondents said personalization was “highly important” and only 8% reported that it’s not important at all. This sentiment holds true across all demographics, including Millennials (79%), Gen Z (75%), and Gen X (74%), with a slight decrease for baby boomers (58%).

The solution is to create a customer journey-driven strategy to meet rising demands around personalization. A strong plan for customer segmentation that leverages automation helps you tailor specific messages to specific audiences based on behaviors and interests.

For example, Centra Credit Union leveraged segmentation and automation to get super focused on members with an educational campaign targeted at the benefits of opening a new certificate of deposit. The campaign led to 35% email open rates, 470 new certifications, and over $10 million in new deposits over several short weeks.

2. Customer Experience is the “Top Priority” for 73% of Financial Services Marketers

Financial services marketers are responding to meet the demand for better customer experiences. In fact, three out of four financial services marketers say that improving the customer experience is a top priority. And most customers don’t just want a better experience – they demand it.

The majority of U.S. banking customers under the age of 55 say they have no problem switching banks, and seven out of 10 say they would change banks to improve their experience.

Financial services marketers can no longer deliver weakly–personalized content, because people expect much more. Every time a prospect or customer receives an email, product recommendation, or phone call, they want to feel truly known and understood. Marketing automation helps you achieve this level of personalization.

3. Organic Search Drives 64% of Calls to Financial Services Providers

Creating high-quality and specifically-researched content is essential, since organic search drives 64% of calls to financial services providers. If you want to stand out against the competition, you need to publish SEO-optimized content that draws in that high-intent organic traffic, then convert and nurture that traffic with marketing automation.

Research shows that less than one-fifth of companies say their content marketing is “very successful.” If you want to get more traction from your content, you need to get more personal. Create high-quality content that ranks well with search engines, but then capitalize on the power of data to capture leads with the right offer.

Tools such as lead scoring allow you to further understand what prospects are most likely to buy and help you get salespeople involved with the right prospect at the right moment.

4. Less Than One-Fourth of Marketers Say They’re Using Marketing Automation to its Ultimate Potential

Do you use automation? And if so, could that automation perform better? Act-On recently teamed up with Ascend2 and published a survey of 162 marketers. We wanted to learn more about how marketers use automation since it’s such a critical tool to provide the personalization and the customer experience that customers demand.

The survey revealed that only 22% of respondents said they are “successful” at using marketing automation to achieve their most important priorities. 62% of marketers said they are only “somewhat successful,” and surprisingly, 16% say they “aren’t successful at all.”

So, even if you’re using marketing automation, there may be room for improvement. When used well, it can help increase efficiency, align sales and marketing, increase conversion rates, and create more personalized marketing experiences for your customers.. And whatever is working well, you can identify and then scale. Without comprehensive marketing data, you can’t really do that.

With the right solution, you can easily set up and expand marketing automation and reach more prospects and customers through personalization.

The Statistics Are Clear – Use Them to Inspire Your Next Move

Financial services marketing must focus first on the customer. And, if you didn’t believe that when you opened this article, you should now. The statistics are clear that personalization and segmentation are 100% expected by your best customers, and that organizations just like yours are placing a huge focus on customer service because of that expectation. You’ve got to provide the information and support your customers need and answer the questions they are searching. When you do, you’ll have a much better chance of capturing some of that sweet, sweet organic traffic. According to the stats, there is so much more potential for all of these efforts with better use of financial services marketing automation.

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Marketing Automation Maturity for Financial Services Companies

Act-On — Tue, 10 May 2022 07:00:00 +0000

We get it. You’ve been through a lot lately working in the financial services industry. Fast-changing customer demands and quickly commoditizing all your services as the entire world went virtual haven’t made things easy. But your number one priority among all of this is the customer, right? In fact, 73% of financial services marketers recently reported that improving the customer experience is a top priority. One way to make sure you continue to meet customer experience demands is to evaluate your own marketing automation maturity.

Marketing Automation Maturity Means You’re Connecting with the Modern Customer

You wanna know about the modern customer? Sixty-four percent of Millennials report that they are willing to try financial services from a brand they already know, such as Google or Nike, even if that company isn’t currently in the financial market. That must be a scary thought. As someone working in the highly-nuanced world of banking, wealth management and insurance, that statistic might make you a little sick to your stomach. But if you think about it, what that shows you is that brand and marketing are supremely important.

The worst thing to do in this context is to commit “random acts of marketing.” Not only do misaligned campaigns create a disconnect between marketing and sales, they also nearly always miss the mark in connecting with your ideal customer.

To connect authentically, you really need a marketing automation tool that can gather the right data and serve the right personalized messages at the right time. This makes your customer feel seen, and that’s what they really want.

Only 22% of Marketers Say They Are Using Marketing Automation Successfully

Act-On recently partnered with Ascend2 to conduct a survey of 162 marketers from companies of all sizes, industries and locations. We wanted to learn more about how marketers are using automation, details about their path to marketing automation maturity, and the greatest challenges around using tools like ours.

We learned that while many marketers are doing well with automation, there is still room for improvement. Only 22% of those surveyed say they are successfully using marketing automation to achieve top priorities. Even more striking, 62% say they are only “somewhat successful” and 16% say their efforts are unsuccessful.

It was shocking to us that 59% of marketers surveyed said that they are not using their marketing automation tools to their fullest potential! This survey showed us that even if you’re using marketing automation in the financial services industry, you could be getting even greater results with some changes. Those changes can take the form of trying to improve your marketing automation maturity.

Why Financial Services Firms Need Marketing Automation Software to Improve Marketing Maturity

As you know, many financial services firms have smaller marketing teams, so adopting or updating marketing automation software is one way to be more agile. You can achieve more, launch improved, data-backed campaigns, and generate more revenue.

Features such as audience segmentation will empower you to deliver more targeted and personalized messaging along any stage of the customer journey. Let’s look at a few examples:

300% Increase in Marketing Email Open Rate

Tower Federal Credit Union, Maryland’s largest credit union, used Act-On’s marketing automation platform to increase engagement and conversion rates, and scale marketing efforts. The credit union experienced a 300% increase in open rates on follow-up emails. It achieved improved conversion rates using segmented lead nurturing campaigns and gained full visibility into the lifecycle of members. According to Marc Wilensky, Vice President of Communications and Brand Marketing, “We’ve seen a two to three times increase in our open rates, especially to the follow-up emails, and we’ve seen a lot more customers starting loan applications.”

$10 Million Bump in Deposits in Less Than 2 Months

Centra Credit Union used market automation to increase open rates to 35% and capture over $10 million in new deposits within seven short weeks. The credit union improved data hygiene practices to increase understanding of personas, allowing for more effective segmentation. Chad Kiser, Digital Marketing Manager, says: “By collecting and analyzing demographic and behavioral data, we better understand our members and what might help them reach financial success and meet their financial needs. This allows us to segment accordingly and deliver targeted automated programs that are highly effective.”

The First Step: Chart Your Progress

Marketing automation is a powerful tool for capturing more leads and creating the meaningful experiences that customers demand. But, in order to make the most of investing in marketing automation, your programs have to keep getting more sophisticated. Growing from one-message blasts to your entire database into personalization, then fully automated upselling and retention is a process. The first step to really scaling is figuring out where you are now.

When you pinpoint your current location on the path to marketing automation maturity, you’ll be able to more clearly see what to do next with your financial services marketing.

The Four Stages of Marketing Automation Maturity: Where Are You Now?

Level 1: Just Getting Started

At the first level, you’re investing heavily in a single marketing channel and still have many manual processes. Uploading lists into your CRM or wading through duplicate data records, for example, are still common tasks. Reporting might be ad hoc, and honestly, you might not feel 100% confident in your data. You aren’t segmenting customers, and personalization is confined to inserting the prospect’s first name into an email greeting, but you’re also considering how to get started with marketing automation.

Level 2: Email Automation, Mostly

On the second level, you’re venturing into personalization and automation. Usually, this is still on one channel, and most financial services business start with email. You’ve got at least a basic integration between your CRM and marketing automation tool, and might even be expanding into additional channels, like social media. Your email, through, is getting more sophisticated as you run A/B tests, personalize a few things, and see what’s resonating. At this second stage of automation maturity, you are dabbling with segmentation and leveraging behavioral data.

Level 3: Adding Channels, Getting Deeper

At this point, marketing automation is providing consistent results and you have many different marketing channels in play. Data is flowing easily from a variety of sources, and you’re capturing insights to truly understand customers in context. You deliver more personalized experiences. You’re using advanced segmentation across all channels, and you can even personalize landing pages, and other parts of your website. Automation is allowing your campaigns to get super targeted, and you’re using automated lead scoring to map content that appears at the right point in the customer journey.

Level 4: Your Finance Marketing Machine

When you’ve put some energy into building marketing automation maturity, it will show. You’ll be delivering data-driven, segmented and augmented campaigns across multiple channels. You’ll see revenue gains from automated campaigns, and watch your onboarding and retention numbers continue to grow. The personalized, perfectly-timed experiences you deliver are helping you surpass your competitors. That’s level 4.

Marketing Automation Maturity Means Scaling Your Results

Meeting the demand for meaningful interactions at scale is a matter of reaching automation maturity. With the right marketing automation program in place, you can do it, and guess what? You can do more with fewer internal marketing resources. Because when you start with the intention to provide value, you’ll have a true north. All the strategies, resources, tools and energy you pour into building automation maturity should add up to the best possible customer experience. That’s the key to attracting new business, growing with the customers you already have, and helping happy customers share their great experiences.

Ready to Reach for Marketing Automation Maturity?

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Financial Services Marketing Archives - Act-On

Marketing Automation for Financial Services

Examples of Marketing Automation for Financial Services

Email Marketing Automation

Social Media Automation

SMS Marketing Automation

Landing Pages and Web Content Personalization

Segmentation

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

How to Improve the Digital Customer Experience

Create Consistency Across the Customer Journey

Deliver Personalized Messages at the Right Time

Generate Leads With Automated Content Marketing Campaigns

Drive Customer Lifetime Value With Advanced Targeting

Collect First-Party Data to Understand Your Customers

Use Data to Build Better Segments

Target the Right Customers With the Right Offers at the Right Time

Marketing Automation and Compliance

Case Studies in Financial Services Marketing Automation

Georgia United Credit Union: 96% Increase in Application Volumes

Tower Federal Credit Union: Increases Open Rates by 300%

RATESDOTCA: Increases Total Annual Email Revenue Target by 15%

It’s Possible for You Too!

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Automation Makes Wealth Management Marketing Simpler

Use Marketing Automation to Track Wealth Management Client Behavior

Use Marketing Automation to Retain Wealth Management Clients and Grow Your Assets Under Management

Wealth Management Marketing Automation Helps Reach the Next Generation of Investors

Building a Digital First Customer Journey in Wealth Management

Marketing Automation Helps Wealth Managers Cut to the Chase

Use Marketing Automation Tools to Become a Supermarketer

The Marketing Superhero’s Guide to Marketing Automation Tools

Chapter 1: Suit Up! Consolidate the Marketing Automation Tools in Your Tech Stack

Chapter 2: Find Your Sidekick – Do More with Marketing Automation Tools at Your Side

Chapter 3: Engage Laser Focus! (Use a Targeted Approach with Marketing Automation Tools)

Want to Tap into Your Superpowers?

Financial Services Marketing Automation in the UK

Key Regulations for the UK Financial Services Industry

Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)

Financial Services and Markets Act 2000

Financial Services Compensation Scheme

Financial Promotions Order

Office for National Statistics (ONS) Classifications

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

Types of Financial Institutions in the UK

Public Corporations (PCs)

Private Non-Financial Corporations (PNFCs)

Monetary Financial Institutions (MFIs)

Other Financial Institutions (OFIs)

Technical Landscape of the UK Financial Sector

How UK Financial Companies and Banks Use Marketing Automation

Regulatory Compliance

Marketing Maturity

Are you working in financial or bank marketing in the UK? Get our guide to marketing automation strategy.

Timely Messaging

Building Trust

Driving Loyalty and Retention

Facilitating Multi-Channel Marketing

Gaining Customer Insights

Marketing Automation is Crucial for Compliance and Success in the Financial Industry

Advanced Marketing Automation Strategy. You Need It.

How 3 Insurance Companies are Leveraging Marketing Automation

Benefits of Marketing Automation for Insurance Firms

Delivering the Right Content at the Right Time

Boost Cross-Sell Business and Retain Customers

Let Your Prospects Convert Themselves

Help Your Insurance Marketing Team Do More With Less

5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokerages

How RSA Insurance Pumped Up Email Deliverability

How Physicians Insurance Implemented Automated Segmentation

How IAMS Increased Conversion Rates

Marketing Automation Provides the Structure for Your Best Insurance Marketing Results

Insurance Marketing Automation Guide – Get Yours Now

3 of the Best Financial Services Marketing Campaigns

What to Know About Financial Marketing Campaigns

Financial Services Onboarding Campaign

Upselling and Cross-Selling Campaigns for Financial Services

Inactive Member Engagement Campaigns