“Welcome to Hyderabad – Enjoy a coffee and a snack at ‘Coffee House’ in Terminal 1. Get 15% off when you use your debit card for the purchase” – This was the first message I received as soon as I landed at Hyderabad airport and this was not from the Merchant but from my Bank!!! I was amused and am sure many customers who are seeing these new trends in Banking will be, too.

Thanks to “big data”, gone are the days when we used to receive irrelevant marketing messages. The banking sector has come of age and has set off an era of meaningful marketing. Most industries are far ahead of financial services with insight-driven marketing. This is surprising as banks and credit unions have access to more transactional, behavioural and demographic data on consumers than any other industry.

Marketing Analytics is the solution that helps sift through the clutter and take decisions with confidence. With banking now possessing a footprint across multiple channels, analytics helps the marketer in the bank identify how, why and when a customer interaction took place on a particular channel. The information available at their fingertips, coupled with the trust and loyalty of their customers, gives banks the opportunity to revolutionize their customer marketing efforts. Rather than simply measuring activity on a bank’s website, marketing departments can now look to find a holistic view of customer acquisition, engagement and retention across all digital channels to provide invaluable insight into campaign planning.

An offshoot of being able to predict customer behaviour is the ability to personalize communication, timing and delivery of products and offers based on customer preferences. Big data can identify trends to form campaigns, for example, professionals aged between 25 and 35 are often in the market for a first-time buyer mortgage. By drilling down into an individual’s habits, it’s now also possible to tailor effective marketing to customers on a personal level.

Banks can utilize the insight into what customers are doing at the exact moment of engagement – such as which offer or link they just clicked on, along with knowledge of what they’ve done in the past – such as their historical usage data and/or offline actions stored on a CRM solution, to deliver tailored cross-sell or up-sell offers while the customer is still on the site. As stated by CMO Council, customer data integration is the new marketing mantra as marketers strive to:

  • Own the customer experience
  • Improve listening and feedback
  • Retain and grow relationships
  • Deliver more market ready products and services

Solutions should combine technology and expertise to reveal what customers want, and deliver personally valuable content across any digital channel, at any point in their journey. Fortunately, these tools now exist and are becoming more robust.

It’s time financial institutions followed the famous quote – “Dream Big (Data). Start Small. But most of all, START” With more challenges than ever in banking, analytics is at the center of it all.

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