How to use marketing automation in the financial services industry

The financial services industry plays a crucial role in the world economy. With a wide range of activities, finance companies cater to a diverse audience. Whether it’s commercial banking, insurance, or asset management, targeted and relevant marketing is essential for financial firms to succeed. However, keeping up with the rapidly changing needs and expectations of customers in the digital age can be difficult. This is where marketing automation can help.

The advantages of marketing automation in the financial services industry

Marketing automation is not just a strategy, but an important tool for financial services marketers of all scales. With marketing automation platforms, you can enhance your marketing campaigns to attract new clients, retain the existing ones, and grow your business. 

Here’s how marketing automation helps the financial services industry:

1. Deliver timely messages

The right message at the right time is crucial. With marketing automation, you can create workflows that ensure emails reach your subscribers at the most receptive times. You can even set reminders for important events, such as loan payments or insurance policy renewals. Triggered messaging can also be used when prospects fill in forms or make inquiries. This saves your team time while keeping clients and prospects engaged.

2. Build trust and credibility

Being transparent and reliable is essential in the financial services industry. Consistent and coherent communication across all channels can help establish trust in your brand. Landing pages, forms, retargeting ads, emails, and other elements are all part of a single customer journey. Delivering consistent experiences across all channels can boost customer engagement.

3. Drive loyalty and retention

Whether converting prospects or turning investors into brand advocates, loyalty and retention are key to sustainable growth. Marketing automation empowers you to target high-value prospects and long-term clients. Leverage lead scoring and social sharing buttons to encourage them to share your content with their network. Additionally, build personalized loyalty programs that incentivize every interaction and keep customers engaged.

4. Engage and educate audiences

By leveraging preference centers, web insights, and lead scoring, you can gain valuable insights into your customer base. This information can help you identify important topics and trends within your audience. You can then use this data to develop educational content that resonates with your subscribers and keeps them engaged with your brand. 

Additionally, you can use chat widgets to answer any questions your customers may have, which helps build trust and establish your brand as a reliable source of information. By taking these steps, you can create a more meaningful connection with your audience and drive long-term loyalty.

5. Understand customer needs

By having a comprehensive understanding of your customer’s preferences and needs, you can guarantee that you only send appropriate messages to the correct customers. Segmentation allows you to send personalized offers to customers at the ideal moment to convert them. By monitoring your target audience, you can gain a better understanding of your customers and meet their needs before they consider turning to a different firm.

6. Reach clients and prospects anywhere

Cross-channel marketing is crucial in today’s marketing landscape. Marketing automation platforms allow you to reach customers on their preferred channels. Deliver seamless experiences, whether retargeting prospects on social media or answering queries via live chat.  With adaptive design, all your marketing channels are mobile-ready, and AI-powered tools ensure emails land in inboxes, not spam folders.

7. Send with confidence

To safeguard your brand reputation, it’s important to use branded templates that include all necessary information for the recipients. These templates can be customized to add legal disclaimers, privacy policies, terms and conditions, and unsubscribe buttons that help you comply with national and international laws and regulations. Moreover, our dedicated deliverability team makes sure that your emails are delivered directly to the recipient’s inboxes.

How the financial services industry can put marketing automation into action

Marketing automation is a constantly evolving field, and platforms are becoming increasingly sophisticated. This means that when it’s time to scale up your marketing efforts, you’ll be equipped with the tools you need to succeed.  

Here are specific examples of how the financial services industry can leverage marketing automation.

Asset management

Asset management involves communicating with a large number of people in a highly personalized way. Asset managers need to strike a balance between personal and promotional communications to gain customer trust. Marketing automation can help build this trust.

• Segmentation: Segmentation is great for targeting specific groups of people. Using a lead scoring or RFM model, you can create highly specific audience segments to guarantee you’re delivering the right content to the correct audience.
• Personalization: Using dynamic personalization blocks you can create multiple variations of a single email. This will allow you to deliver one-to-one communications that will delight your customers as you demonstrate just how well you know them.
• API: Whether it’s plug-and-play or a custom-built solution, you can pull in content such as stock exchange rates or specific contact details to create a hyper-personalized experience for your subscribers.
• Nurture campaigns: When a prospect registers interest in your offerings, you can auto-enroll them in nurture automation campaigns. This will help you discover what specific services they’re interested in and, depending on how in-depth your information gathering goes, you’ll be able to discover how much they’re likely to invest with you.

Commercial banking

Commercial banks serve a wide and diverse customer base with a range of services. Each customer has a unique relationship with the bank, requiring multiple parallel campaigns. Marketing automation makes this possible.

• Triggered automation campaigns: If you offer multiple services you should run multiple nurture campaigns. By creating multiple forms across your website, you can target prospects with specific nurture campaigns designed to highlight the USPs for each of your services.
• Newsletters: A mortgage customer will have very different interests compared to a customer with a student account. But, by creating engaging and educational newsletters for key segments, you’re going to create the kind of relationship that puts you at the top of their list when it comes to opening new accounts or taking out new loans.
• Cross-selling and upselling campaigns: Again, you can use audience segmentation to target customers. Using your segments, you can deliver campaigns about account upgrades or additional services, based on their current relationship with your brand.
• Loyalty reward schemes: Customers are more likely to turn to a brand they already know if their experience with them is a positive one. By rewarding customers based on their account activity or the number of services they use, customers will naturally choose your firm when they need to set up a new account or take out a loan.

Insurance

Insurance clients can include individuals, firms, and organizations who want to protect themselves from specific risks. As an insurance provider, you need to cater to a diverse audience, each with its own unique needs depending on the services you offer. Fortunately, marketing automation can help you easily engage with this diverse audience and provide them with the services they require.

• Live chat: Live chat is a great tool to provide real-time support to your clients. By having a live chat widget on your website, your agents and brokers can quickly and efficiently address queries as they arise. This significantly improves the customer experience, and if they’re a potential customer, it can help to convert them. For existing clients, it demonstrates your firm’s commitment to creating a positive experience.
• Rewards programs: We’ve already mentioned the importance of loyalty programs – they’re a powerful tool for customer retention. Rewarding loyalty to retain customers is a foolproof tactic. When customers have more policies, they receive greater rewards, once again putting you at the top of the list.
• Auto-responders: Set up auto-response campaigns when customers and prospects submit queries or pricing requests. This will help manage expectations and support your teams’ workloads.

Wealth management

Wealth management, like asset management, is all about trust. You need to build trust while delivering one-to-one conversations to create the interactions that convert and drive growth.

• Lead scoring: Lead scoring empowers you to rank prospects and customers based on their suitability and levels of engagement. This makes it easier to target hot prospects and nurture leads through the funnel.
• Segmentation and personalization: Use customer insights to ensure everyone on your marketing list feels valued. The more you demonstrate how well you know your audience, the better their overall experience will be. Whether they’re a VIP client or a brand-new prospect, you can deliver one-to-one marketing that builds trust and drives retention.

The future of financial services marketing is automated

In today’s dynamic digital landscape, financial services must build trust and cultivate long-lasting client relationships. Marketing automation emerges as a powerful tool, empowering financial services companies to achieve sustainable growth. By enabling targeted communication, personalized experiences, and efficient outreach, automation unlocks the potential to acquire new clients, retain existing ones, and foster deeper connections.

However, the future of financial services marketing isn’t solely about automation. It’s about leveraging technology to create a personalized human touch. By strategically integrating automation with the irreplaceable value of human interaction, financial institutions can deliver an exceptional customer experience across all touchpoints. This winning combination will not only solidify brand loyalty but also position them as frontrunners in a competitive marketplace.