Marketing for financial services: Automating and integrating your marketing software

This blog is part 4 of a 4-part series marketing for financial services

• • Part 1: Improving customer insights using marketing data
  • Part 2: Use of marketing data to send the right message at the right time
  • Part 3: Gaining online trust
  • Part 4: Automating and integrating your marketing software

The customer journey is becoming increasingly complex. Specifically in the financial services sector; after all, these are products that are more complex than average that also demand a great level of trust from the customer. To illustrate this, here is an example of a customer journey for loans (Source: SmartInsights/McKinsey), which shows the complexity of a customer journey. Keep in mind that this concerns a single product:

Marketing automation to support and automate the complex customer journey

The complex customer journey must be automated to be able to support it. Marketing automation software gives you the opportunity to send the right message to the right (potential) customer.

You can carry out the following tasks using automation, for example:

• Personalized content in emails and online: you can ensure that the customer receives the right content based on profile and behavioral data. This also allows you to avoid the presentation of incorrect content. This is essential in finance because it engenders trust in the customer and trust is of paramount importance!
• Lead scoring and nurturing: you can give a (potential) customer a score based on intention. You can then continue to inform the customer and prepare him for the next step in the buying cycle by automated means.
• Automated upselling and cross-selling: people often forget that marketing automation is also very effective for maintaining and developing an existing customer relationship. You can expand the share or wallet of a customer using a targeted personalized approach.
• Reports: marketing automation offers you real-time insight into the results of your activities and thus the effectiveness and ROI of marketing.
• Automating transactional emails and text messages: many financial service providers have a large customer portfolio that regularly accesses a dedicated environment. This environment leads to a lot of follow-up by email. Marketing automation enables you to automate and follow up on these emails and even text messages. Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of functionality as there are many more options.

The importance of integrating your marketing software

The average marketeer uses no fewer than 30 different tools. Sometimes these are new tools, and sometimes they replace existing tools. Did you know that CMOs spent 26.6% of the marketing budget on marketing technology (source: Gartner)?

It is important to keep the integration of the tools in mind, especially in the finance sector. This is also one of the most important trends of 2022.

Because marketing automation is often at the centre of the digital marketing infrastructure, it is important to properly identify which integrations you need and which ones the supplier can offer when selecting or replacing a marketing automation platform. This is often referred to as an eco-system. You can find it at the supplier. An example of the HubSpot eco-system can be found here:

Do you want to learn more about the use of marketing automation in the financial services sector?

We have helped numerous financial service providers select and implement the right marketing automation platform, and – the most important thing – achieve the right results by making smart use of data in campaigns and communication. We do this around the globe. Do you want to learn more about this? Schedule an appointment below: