Marketing automation platforms have picked up in popularity in various industries, including finance. Finance professionals who are puzzled by this trend or are yet to discover the benefits of investing in marketing automation may be wondering, “Why is marketing automation important for my industry?”.
While finance and accounting software are widely used across the finance industry, the financial sector can benefit extensively from incorporating a supplementary platform to build greater rapport and relationships with their clients and customers. This is especially relevant among marketers working in financial institutions such as banks and credit unions.
The finance sector faces many challenges, especially when it comes to marketing services and products, so like other industries, marketers in finance rely on customer data to execute more personalised and impactful marketing strategies.
Therefore, to answer the important question of “Why is marketing automation important?”, let’s explore the benefits that this platform can offer finance professionals and institutions.
1. Personalising and targeting
Using marketing automation features, marketers in the finance sector can gain valuable customer data which gives them insights into the financial challenges customers face, their credit health, and other important information.
This helps marketers to tailor unique marketing campaigns which include offers, discounts, promotions, educational content, SMS campaigns, and email campaigns that resonate with their personal struggles or interests.
Offering solutions such as loans with lower interest rates, credit score improvement methods, and credit card offers and promotions through cross-selling or upselling campaigns that resonate with the target audience can add that personal touch customers look for.
Customers want to feel appreciated and sending out personalised content can increase the likelihood of financial institutions generating more leads and increasing their overall campaign revenue.
2. Nurturing leads and engaging customers
When marketers in the financial sector take a more customer-centric approach to carve out captivating content that’s eye-catching for target audiences, they are more likely to generate high-quality leads. Such leads are typically accumulated from email drip or SMS marketing approaches which are personalised and segmented.
Marketing automation can also help marketers in the financial sector accumulate high-quality leads through predictive lead scoring, where each marketing team will generate scores stemming from particular actions. For instance, when a lead downloads a free online financial guide 20 points can be assigned. If the lead books a paid one-to-one consultation, 50 points can be assigned.
By adding the total scores from a marketing campaign, marketers can find leads who score the highest, whom marketers can potentially convert into a sales purchase by curating personalised content that appeals to them. This process is known as lead nurturing.
In the finance industry, crafting compelling content that addresses specific financial needs or concerns can help generate high-quality leads.
3. Complying with and managing regulations
It is no surprise that the finance industry is highly regulated, so compliance with these strict financial regulations is important to avoid heavy penalties or fines. When questioning “Why is marketing automation important in the finance sector?”, it is mandatory to discuss the implementation of mandatory compliance checks.
Features such as consent management tools ensure that marketers in the financial sector only send marketing communications to users who have provided explicit consent. This reduces the risk of non-compliance.
Automated compliance checks as found in marketing automation platforms also flag potential compliance issues before marketing material is sent out, reducing the likelihood of unintentional violations.
Marketing automation also maintains detailed audit trails of all marketing campaigns and efforts, providing documentation for compliance purposes. This platform showcases campaign performance based on its comprehensive and robust reporting features, ensuring transparency and accountability in line with financial guidelines.
4. Retaining customers
Gaining new customers can cost more than retaining existing clients. In the finance sector, marketing automation helps marketers potentially double their retention efforts in several ways.
With marketing automation features, marketers can still reach out to customers to ask about their experience, through automated post-sales messaging. Marketing automation can be utilised to enhance the effectiveness of the customer support provided by financial institutions, which includes live chats and automated responses to generic questions.
This ensures that marketers in the finance sector do not have to be on standby or work overtime to attend to customer queries. Should a customer wish to speak to a real-life customer agent, their request can be escalated to a customer representative.
Marketing automation also makes it easier to promote a financial institution’s upselling and cross-selling opportunities across multiple channels. This is known as omnichannel marketing. Through active engagement with customers, marketers in the financial sector stand the chance to retain more customers than if they were to rely on traditional marketing methods.
Get in touch with an automation specialist to improve marketing strategies in the finance industry
All things considered, marketing in the financial sector can be challenging, as banks and financial institutions need to comply with stricter compliance checks, rely on captivating marketing strategies, and schedule frequent catch-ups with customers to effectively market their products and services and retain a loyal customer base.
Fortunately, with marketing automation, many workflows and marketing campaigns in the financial sector can be leveraged to optimise a business’s campaign revenue and overall ROI. So if you’re a marketing professional in the finance industry who wants to learn more about “Why is marketing automation important in the finance industry?”, schedule a consultation with an automation expert.