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Financial agents and advisors aspire to develop strong relationships with their book of business-requiring the ability to effectively engage with the right customer, through the right channel, at the right time, with the right content. To accomplish these goals, financial organizations need a single comprehensive platform that empowers advisors with tools and data.
Financial organizations have to account for some key technical aspects while developing a distributed marketing strategy. Let's take a closer look.
Advisors and agents need to focus their time providing customers with the best experience rather than trying to use complex, disjointed technologies. They must be equipped with a simple UI to perform segmentation, create and leverage existing content, and deliver personalized messages. A user interface that is not designed with an advisor in mind will lead to lower adoption and may drive advisors to revert back to the manual methods to which they are accustomed.
Advisors often engage with their customers through a single channel such as email or direct mail, etc. Most often, this is based on technology limitations-not customer preferences or needs. Advisors need to be aware of their customers' messaging preferences, and the platform must provide the ability to engage based on them. This will significantly enhance engagement and in-turn drive more business.
In a highly regulated industry such as the Financial services, the content of messages, the channel of communication, and the time and frequency of communications are all factors that organizations need to be cautious about. Another important factor is whether advisors can create their own content, and if so, what approval processes are required. It is a delicate balance that needs to be struck-while regulating content is crucial, it is also critical not be create bottlenecks that would prevent advisors from communicating with their customers effectively.
Without analytics there is no sound way to establish the success of your communications. Success metrics can include:
This is not meant to be a comprehensive list, but provides an idea on the types of analytics that empower financial advisors with the insights needed to adjust their communication strategy as necessary.
It goes without saying that understanding your customers is critical to delivering targeted and personalized experiences for customers. Systems such as CRM, POS, ERP, MDM, Web Analytics, Social channels etc., may all be systems that provide valuable information about your customer. A platform that can integrate with these systems in real time to construct a 360-degree view of customers will allow you to establish the best distributing marketing strategy.
Customers do not care if they are engaging with sales, service or marketing. They expect a seamless experience. Many organizations have employed some level of distributed marketing but in most cases it is a very manual and disjointed process where the communication established by the agents is not in sync with the communications sent by Marketing. Advisors need to be aware of the communications from marketing and service. For example, if a customer has an open case the last thing the advisors would want to do is to engage with the customer about a new product or service. Another factor as to why an integrated system is extremely important is to ensure that customers are not bombarded with redundant messages from the advisor soon after receiving messages from marketing or service. The system can act as a traffic cop. It is important to realize that while employing distributed marketing can be an asset, it can also result in an unpleasant experience for customers if they are bombarded with redundant and uncoordinated messages.
Interested in learning more? See how digital marketing can provide 1-to-1 experiences throughout the financial services customer lifecycle. Sign up for Any Journey is Possible, and you'll receive a series of cross-channel communications powered by Marketing Cloud. Experience the possibilities first hand! You'll see emails, ads, mobile messages, recommendations, and more that a customer would see.
About the Author: Vikram Chellappa is a Senior Sales Engineer with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Vikram focusses in the financial services sector and has worked with many large Financial Services institutions to help define their digital strategies.
