Understanding the potential of digital engagement and personalizing user experience is an essential aspect for banks and financial institutions to survive today. These challenges could potentially affect the revenue generation and lead to attrition of brand reputation. Perhaps, not every financial organization is ready to make changes to satisfy a progressing consumer group.

For this reason, financial marketers are working towards providing a rich user experience across all digital channels. They are figuring out various methods to implement new technologies and tools to their business models that help them engage users on a deeper level. The better the digital experience, the better the user engagement and, subsequently, greater leads. Digital transformation and engagement build brand loyalty and offers higher value to customers.

Digital Marketing Readiness through digital engagement

Digital marketing campaigns are evolving faster. Latest technologies, apps, search engine updates, and social media platforms impact capturing a huge portion of the target market.  While financial marketers are trying to incorporate innovative technologies a major part of the companies reported low in implementing the tools.  This scenario exists despite having ambitions to develop the ability to reach more digital customers.

Most of the digital marketing transformation challenges are happening around the financial institutions and banking sectors. While some of the organizations had been traveling successfully in the digital world, others face challenges with several components of this transformation.

For instance, a survey conducted by the Digital Banking Report stated that over 56% of the companies fulfill basic marketing needs. Only 40% stated that they had implemented tools to offer personalized, compelling, and real-time experience.

1.     Data Management 

The effective and optimized management of the user information is defining the organization’s success. Efficient management of data is vital for digital marketing transformation. Some of the factors include assimilating, collecting, and analyzing, along with a deployment solution for each targeted customer. This data management issue is magnified when the financial institutions and banks handle many siloed systems.  These contain minimal or partial perspectives of consumer behavior, interaction, and relationships.

Data collection and analysis have always been at the forefront of the digital marketing process, so banks should now absorb more data faster and accurately than before. Customers are now aware of the level of information shared with the bank and other financial sectors and the degree to which these data can be utilized for their benefit.

Banking sectors are working towards collecting and centralizing user data into one platform. The advantage of the strategy is that everyone who is authorized can have a single user view whenever they need it for better data management and processing.

Other businesses are leveraging the potential of the data management tools to pull from data sources to enhance the accessibility and quality of the data to support digital marketing and other operational activities. This operational solution bypasses the requirement to instantly replace the legacy tools and systems while leveraging the platform’s scalability, security, reliability, and flexibility.

2. Understanding digital engagement and Customer Journey    

Understanding the user journey is vital in digital transformation as it is the center of any successful digital marketing campaign. Enhancing the user experience has always been the top priority of the banks for over a decade. They have the potential to personalize user engagement and communication for their success. However, the challenge here is to understand the digital consumer’s personalized requirements while understanding their journey.

Certainly, the latest tools and technologies play an important role in the successful digital transformation. Still, the key role relies on the ability to understand user behavior and respond to their needs. This requires customer journey mapping, which requires data flow, evaluation, and communication.

Optimizing the user journey requires good communication and cooperation between the various departments of the organization. The correlation between the departments like sales, product management, finance, and customer support for the marketers to determine the path to success.  This coordination supports the objective of marketers to map user journeys across the organization.

3. Using Advanced Technology

The most important challenge faced by digital marketing is the time and effort involved to achieve the required detail level. Whether your organization is one of the top five banks or financial institutions, marketing automation can enhance both the efforts’ effectiveness and efficiency. As per the statistics, marketing automation had contributed to a 14.5% boost to sales productivity and 12.2% declines in marketing overhead.

In the same way, CRM lets the organization maintain track of where consumers are in the sales funnel and what context triggers their interest level, and other marketing insights that can back your marketing decision in the future.

If you want to experience success in marketing automation, your organization should have a complete understanding of user behavior and expectation. This requires mapping a clear path that can take every user from their sales funnel.

Though there are various automation tools available in the market, the organization decides to opt for one, which makes their organization succeed in digital marketing.

–       The automation tool lets you engage with more customers

–       Let’s you approach your customers in a more personal way

–       Provide the necessary content for the user to meet their expectation.

4. Consistent User Experience    

Customers these days expect a valuable digital engagement and consistent experience on all digital channels. If they get a certain experience from a brand on a channel such as a desktop web browser, they expect a similar experience in other channels such as mobile, social, email, and so on. This is where the importance of an “Omnichannel” user experience comes in.

In the current Financial Marketing era, most marketers spend their time and resources in getting their messages on every digital channel available. The issue here is that the messaging isn’t consistent on these channels. If the customer gets a credit card offer on social, he might get a different offer such as a car loan on email. This inconsistent static messaging confuses the customer and she gets an impression that the company doesn’t care much about her and is bothered about getting her to buy some product or service. She might thus end up ignoring the brand completely.

The aim for every marketer in the industry should be to treat the engagement and relationship with customers in a consistent way on every channel.

5. Digital Channel Orchestration 

To establish an efficient customer association, marketers should focus on engaging the users on their preferred channel. Rather than focusing on over-marketing their products or services on all the channels, they should determine the customer’s preferred channel response and send across tailored responses to those specific channels only. If you wonder how to achieve this progress to cater to millions of customers’ needs, then AI could be your savior.

Latest technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning are already used by several banking and financial institutions to drive customer experience enhancement and product innovation. Here are some of the use of these technologies by various financial sectors:

AI and ML are utilized to identify any sort of anomalies in money transactions or other fraudulent practices.

Several securities ventures have implemented AI to make less riskier selling or buying stocks decisions.

Insurance industries have been utilizing AI and Big Data to enhance their operational efficiency.

Digital Tools Such as CDP is already used to analyze user data and behaviors by blending Artificial intelligence to CDP. This will help the financial marketer to orchestrate the right context on the right channel at the right time, thus helping to drive digital channel orchestration.