What the Financial & Insurance Industries Can Learn from Retailers

Transcription

1 What the Financial & Insurance Industries Can Learn from Retailers 1

2 Retailers have long understood that personalization is a strong business driver that helps them market to their customers with more accuracy and relevance. They have also embraced the movement from batch-and-blast to managing interactions on a 1:1 level and now, their customers have come to expect it. Recently, smart marketers from organizations such as banks, financial institutions, and insurance agencies have started embracing the idea of personalizing every interaction point for their customers. Marketers in these industries are taking some of the fundamentals from the retailer s personalization playbook and have started to weave them into their business strategies. In this guide, we will explore some of these strategies that marketers in other industries are beginning to incorporate into their own playbooks, as retail has long used personalization and capitalized on its results and now marketers in banking, financial, and insurance industries are beginning to do the same. 2 What the Financial & Insurance Industries Can Learn from Retailers

3 Key Play #1: Collect Data About Your Customers Then Make it Actionable It might not come as a surprise, but in marketing (or business in general), data is king. What retailers have figured out is that it s not only about how to collect immense amounts of data, but how to make it actionable and leverage it to make key marketing decisions. Retailers try to collect every click, customer interaction, and purchase, regardless of channel. The idea of personalization or interaction management is a relatively new concept in the financial services and insurance industries, so try to start simple. Find a way to automatically collect all of your customer interactions and behavioral information into one single database. If you choose a partner like the Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, then you can utilize their personalization engine, igodigital, to collect and synthesize all of these data points from these interactions and store them inside that individual customer s profile. Personalization engines collect two different types of data. Implicit data is collected by observing a customer s behavior, and explicit data is collected by asking the customer questions. By collecting real-time data from every interaction with your company, you can learn more about a customer s wants, needs, and preferences. 3

4 Browsing & Click Behavior Purchase History Implicit/Explicit Feedback Social Profile Wisdom of the Crowds Customer Intelligence Engine Mobile Social Web In-Store Call Center Once you ve begun to collect all of these different types of data points, it s time to make the data actionable. By leveraging the data you collect about your customer, you can begin to speak to him or her as an individual, helping drive relevant interactions like targeted and relevant offers, location-based mobile SMS messages, and personalized onsite content all based on the customer s profile. 4 What the Financial & Insurance Industries Can Learn from Retailers

5 Key Play #2: Create a Re-engagement Strategy by Taking Action on Interesting Moments Added item to cart Abandoned Cart After you ve started building the profile through events that capture explicit and implicit data points, it s time to define interesting moments in the sales cycle and encourage customers to take a specific action. In its most basic form, this plays out in the retail world as an abandoned shopping cart. The idea of creating a remarketing message to encourage a customer to come back and purchase the items they left in their cart is a very easy way to recapture revenue. Financial institutions and insurance companies can also adopt this core competency in their business as well. First, the company needs to define the interesting moment a pivotal moment in the customer lifecycle. In the retail world, this is most often the time when a shopping cart is abandoned and the action (or lack thereof) is recorded in the customer s profile. A reengagement is then triggered within 24 hours of the cart abandonment. With this type of strategy, the retailer can recapture anywhere from 10%-30% of the revenue left in the cart. Re-engagement trigger Purchase In the banking world, this might consist of a customer logging into their account online and begins an application for a new credit card, but does not complete it. The bank would record that this interaction occurred in the customer s profile and trigger an to the customer, encouraging them to complete the application. Once your organization has mapped out the interesting moments within the sales cycle, they can then begin to assign reengagement strategies to each. These types of reengagement strategies can produce real ROI for your organization. 5

6 Key Play #3: Help Customers Find What They re Looking for Online and Offline Just like an experienced sales person in a retail store may ask a customer a series of lifestyle or usage-based questions in order to help them find the best product to fit their needs, retailers have figured out how to create this experience online while arming salespeople with additional information to make the sale in-store. In recent years, as the concept of the experienced salesperson has diminished, retailers have supplemented this knowledge gap by arming in-store sales people with online or tablet tools that include real-time inventory, lifestyle or usage-based questions, and product specs to help the salesperson guide the customer to the right product. Retailers often leverage a concept called guided selling, which walks customers through a series of lifestyle or usage-based questions to receive personalized product or content recommendations. These types of tools not only gather explicit data points, but also allow marketers to gain access to these customer responses and real-time customer trends, preferences, and insights, allowing the marketer to take action on the data being collected. Throughout these interactions, whether online or in-store, data is being gathered and stored about each customer for the marketer to use for future outreach opportunities. 6 What the Financial & Insurance Industries Can Learn from Retailers

7 Step 2 Step 1 Agents in the financial services and insurance industries can utilize this same concept of guided selling for their online and offline locations. Guided selling helps financial and insurance companies achieve the following types of business goals: Ask smart questions about customer s needs, wants, and preferences to provide a more relevant and helpful experience with your brand. Enable advisors to cross-sell and up-sell other vehicles from your brand. Helps your advisors or agents to ask the right questions to the customer. Use guided selling to educate your advisors or agents to teach them how to ask the right questions to potential customers while gathering valuable customer data that can quick start a customer s profile. Step 3 If just used as an end consumer web-based tool, an average completion rate for Guided Selling tools in the insurance or financial services industries is around 35%. The average conversation rate of these tools is around 29%. 7

8 These goals could play out in a few different ways: guided selling can be positioned as a supplemental tool to use in the physical/offline location or as a self-service model online or on a mobile device. Whether being used as an educational tool for the company s agents on what questions to ask potential customers or for tips to guide customers to new vehicles (investment plans, insurance plans, etc.), specifically in the insurance industry, these tools can be used for captive agents to increase lead management efficiencies and drive more policies or sales. Guided selling can also be used to differentiate your agency for independent agents and encourage them to sell more of your policies by leveraging these types of tools. In a self-service model, guided selling can be used online or on a mobile device to help educate the end-customer to best select a new plan, new credit card, or revised investment strategy. In the financial services and banking industries, the online version can be used by the end-customer to help comprehend and narrow down all the choices they might have for credit cards. By asking questions about financial stability and spending habits in the privacy of their own homes, a customer might be more honest and truly find the best solution to fit their needs. Guided selling can also be used to encourage cross-selling and up-selling of items and is extremely important to customer retention. In the insurance industry, it s all about renewals. Recent studies suggest that if an insurance company can cross-sell or up-sell just one additional policy within a 12-month period, there is a much higher chance the customer will renew. This metric shows that the more policies a customer engages with, there is less of a chance they will leave for a competitor. Guided selling can help ask these questions about needs and wants and guide customers to other vehicles of interest. 8 What the Financial & Insurance Industries Can Learn from Retailers

9 Key Play #4: Personalize the Experience of Every Customer on a 1:1 Level at Each Interaction Point Imagine a world where every advertisement displayed, sent, store walked in, mobile offer viewed, and website visited was personalized just for you. Believe it or not, this theme is alive and well in the retail world today. This might seem like an unreachable goal, but this is the way businesses are moving. In the financial and insurance industries, this could be as simple as understanding that a customer interacts with a particular part of their account on a calculated basis with a specific intention and then help them accomplish that more efficiency. Day 15 For example, if you see that a customer habitually logs into their account on the 10th of the month to pay their credit card bill, you should recognize this behavior and then drive a relevant result like creating a personalized banner ad to help get your customer to the bill pay page faster. If the customer feels as though you re listening to them based on what they re telling you through their behavior, there is a better chance that interaction will result in a positive ROI impact. Day 10 9

10 If you want to take this theme a step further, use data points such as credit score, income, and products of interest to create a targeted campaign or onsite offer that corresponds directly to an individual s information stored in the customer profile to create a 1:1 message just for them. Harvard Business Review commented, There is an opportunity to deliver services and marketing with unprecedented precision and accuracy, meeting and exceeding customer expectations in extraordinary ways at every turn. This is an extraordinary opportunity for marketers in the financial services and insurance verticals to embrace and capitalize on this shift from batch and blast tactics to 1:1 messaging, just like marketers from retail companies have done previously. 10 What the Financial & Insurance Industries Can Learn from Retailers

11 Key Play #5: Create a Singular View of the Customer Across Your Business Retailers have begun to leverage data they ve gathered about each and every customer in order to arm the entire organization with insights on what their customers are wanting and needing as they interact with different parts of the company. Here is an example of how the singular view of a customer can be used across a financial institution or insurance agency s organization: 1 1. Robert wants to open a new checking account so he heads into his local bank branch Upon signing up for his new checking account he receives a triggered with a link to download the bank s mobile app When Robert logs into his account online, he notices his bank is offering him additional content, offers, and up-sells on his account home page. 2 1 First Bank Open a new airline credit card for 0% for 6 months Recommendations 3 11

12 4 4. Robert receives a triggered message with content based on the Advice Center products and services he interacted with on the web. Apply Now Robert receives a mobile notification based on his current location about offers with his debit card Robert calls into customer service to inquire about his account. His profile is easily accessed by the representative and she is able to offer him optimized cross-sell and up-sell opportunities based on his profile Robert enters a contest on Facebook and opts into promotional messages from his bank. He is sent tailored content based on the information he shared on Facebook. Address: 8 8. Robert receives information via a push notification from the app about an upcoming local event in his area. robert@indiana.edu 7 8 March Newsletter Introduction to Investing All of these interactions touch different parts of the bank s business. By collecting information about Robert in one place and dispersing it across the organization, each department can use Robert s profile to successfully interact with him across all channels. 12 What the Financial & Insurance Industries Can Learn from Retailers

13 Conclusion All of these five plays are pieces of the puzzle and untimely help an organization capture customer data, build the customer s profile, and enable the marketer to use the customer data collected to impact and personalize future interactions just like retailers have done for decades. If you would like to learn how to incorporate these key plays into your organization s strategy please visit. Overview Key Play #1: Collect Data About Your Customers Then Make it Actionable Key Play #2: Create a Re-engagement Strategy by Taking Action on Interesting Moments Key Play #3: Help Customers Find What They re Looking for Online and Offline Key Play #4: Personalize the Experience of Every Customer on a 1:1 Level at Each Interaction Point Key Play #5: Create a Singular View of the Customer Across Your Business 13

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