With the proliferation of banking institutions and progressing digitalization of the world, banks are becoming more and more customer-centric. Technology has changed customers’ expectations for good and banks, just like telcos and retailers, need to follow suit and adapt to the busy day-to-day lives of their customers. Hardly anyone steps inside a bank these days – mainly because we are getting more and more impatient while placing greater trust in technology. Hence, banks need to adjust their offer to fit into the mobile, omnichannel world of customers expecting a personalized experience, and who take for granted the ease with which transactions happen. In addition, banks also need to cut through the noise of information overload and proactively anticipate customers’ expectations in order to present them with the right messages in the right context. Luckily, awareness of the necessity of fully understanding customers’ needs and leveraging that knowledge to provide a more personalized experience is growing. Hardly anyone doubts it. The pace of life is increasing and customers long ago began expecting their needs to be met. The universal customization of services inevitably affects communication. Customers expect quick wins, easy findings, and instant answers to their questions as well. If you are in any doubt, just look at the numbers – what is the average time per visit on your website or application? How does your conversion rate compare to the targets you’ve set?
Hear what customers are saying
Think of content personalization as a conversation you’re having with your customer. It sounds a bit vague, but in fact it’s not. Just think of the people you like talking to. What makes you enjoy engaging in discussions with them? They most likely have something interesting to say, but what’s equally important is they listen to you as well. In fact, a conversation with even the most knowledgeable person would be extremely annoying if your interlocutor failed to listen to you. That’s why, before you get down to personalizing your messages, you must listen and learn your customers and their context. The more accurate information on user behavior you have, the more effective you will be.
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Start with why
To quote Simon Sinek: Start with why. Firstly, why does your website or app exist? Then, why do people visit it? Why don’t you think of them as landing pages. The role of your landing page is to convert visitors into leads. Isn’t conversion exactly what you hope for when people visit your website? When creating the content for your landing pages, you take into account the context (referrals) in which your users visit the page, and then, with their needs in mind, you clean up the page and get rid of any needless junk. Keep information to a bare minimum to respond to visitors’ needs, and maybe show them benefits they were unaware of before clicking on the advertising link. Adopt the same approach when personalizing your bank messages. By personalizing your on-site, in-app, or mobile web content you are much better positioned as in most cases the users you target are your clients, about whom you possess vast knowledge. This means your choices are going to be so much more informed!Get your priorities straight
Did you know that the majority of customers who decide to switch banks do so based on their mobile banking experience? Banks tend to undervalue the importance of their mobile banking services and waste the money they’ve invested in mobile apps. Offering great, personalized mobile web and app content is your chance to make your bank stand out.
Stay coherent across channels
Focusing on the mobile experience is a necessity, but it’s not the end of the story. As we all know, making financial decisions is a process, which means it can take more than a little time. This is exactly why you should try to orchestrate your personalization efforts and reach your customers across multiple channels:- On-site personalization. Personalize the details of your loan and mortgage offers based on user browsing history and user data gathered in web analytics or CRM.
- Lead capture forms and pop-up personalization. Tap into the DMP audiences and web analytics segments which users have been assigned to. Not having to fill in their personal details over and over again is definitely helpful. However, you should remember to give your users the possibility to override your suggestions – you want to help rather than frustrate.
- In-app personalization. This fundamentally does not differ from on-site personalization. Employing geolocation may come in particularly handy here, though. Let’s assume that your goal is to increase turnover on mortgages. What you can do as a bank is ask a DMP for the audience interested in buying a house, and collate members of this audience with given locations where, according to your data, they have been considering purchasing a house. Use the geolocation function in their phones and display pop-ups advertising mortgage products when they are in a given area. Knowing the device type and the locations your customers often visit, you can understand a lot about their spending habits and what financial services might help them fulfil their needs.
- Personalized messaging. On top of newsletters personalized using segments, banks can learn from e-commerce systems which email reminders to customers about abandoned carts, or offer discounts depending on their viewing history. As a bank, you may do the same when customers decide to abandon the conversion funnel (as we’ve said, financial decisions take some time). Banks can send personalized emails with information captured by forms before the user dropped off, incentivizing customers to get back on their conversion path. By providing content tailored to answer users’ needs, you grab their interest. However, in parallel to delivering customized messages, you shouldn’t forget to personalize the website or app user experience. By personalizing functionality, you shorten the path to conversion.
Personalize User Experience
Last but not least, personalizing your content should go hand in hand with personalizing functionality. The decisions you make when choosing the right messages will necessarily affect the look of your app. Here again, you want to empower your app users by giving them the freedom to override your choices – let them prioritize the various pieces of content, or hide some of them if possible. Learn from the best: you, as a bank, probably wouldn’t associate yourself with Facebook. But in fact there is a huge common denominator you can leverage – both banks and Facebook alike possess a huge quantity of first-party data on their users and clients. Make use of this commonality and model the way you engage your customers on the way the world’s leading social network platform does it.In conclusion…
The impact of personalizing content cannot be overestimated – it not only drives conversions, but also presents financial institutions with opportunities to engage in a conversation with their users, and hence build more advisory relationships with their clients. It motivates institutions to get to know their clients better and then open a conversation leading to further understanding, which is necessary to continue developing services and position the organization as a consultancy with a human face. We hope we’ve responded to some of your needs with this article. If you would like to engage in conversation with us, we invite you to subscribe to our newsletter or get in touch!Free Ebook: 6 Steps to Start Capturing Customer Journey in e-Banking and m-Banking
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