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Marketing automation is essential for successful inbound marketing campaigns. But what does it mean? Marketing automation is using software to automate marketing activities. Automating activities doesn’t just make your job more efficient, it also means you are able to create more personalised experiences. Although financial services companies use marketing automation, there are very few that have a full-scale program.
Many companies collect data about a prospect before they become a client, however, they are not using this to communicate with them. In order to be successful, companies need to continually grow their current client base as well as retain their current clients. Marketing automation can support both. Customer relationship management systems (CRMs) like HubSpot allow you to easily automate your marketing activities and create personalised experiences. Here are 5 marketing automation tips for financial services companies.
Contextual content, also known as smart content, is a great way to personalise your content for your audience. Users visit your website from a number of sources including SEO, email, paid ads, social media and referring websites. Because of this, they are going to be at different stages of the customer journey. Even though their needs are different, it’s likely your website content will be the same for all. However, with contextual content, you are able to personalise the content on your website to the user depending on a number of factors. This means the content the user sees will be different as they move through the customer journey.
When most people think of marketing automation, they think of email workflows. Simply put, email workflows are automated emails that are sent to your customers and prospects. Once they have been set up, you can then set them to trigger on certain actions. One of these actions could be downloading an ebook or webinar. The user might not be a client, however, they’ve shown that they are interested and want to find out more. A workflow can be set up for emails to be sent providing more information around the topic they were interested in to help move them through the customer journey. Once they are then interested in your company and services, you can then create another workflow that they can move into which will help them become a client.
Email workflows are not only great for nurturing leads. You can also use them to re-engage current clients. Are you currently sending emails out to clients who are not opening or clicking through? There are a number of reasons why this could be happening. You could be in their SPAM folders or the content you’re sending isn’t of any value to them. It’s important that your inactive clients are segmented into lists. This way, you can create a re-engagement workflow which will provide value to them. For example, if the last action they took on your website was to download an ebook, you can send them an email with a new, relevant ebook which they are yet to download.
Whether you are on LinkedIn or searching on Google, you will see an ad. There are currently more than 3.8 billion active social media users and over 3.5 billion searches on Google every day. In the financial services industry, most of your target audience will be looking for your services on LinkedIn. LinkedIn ads can be a great way to target the key decision makers that you want to reach. You are able to create ads to target based on location, job titles, level of experience, industry sector and many more. You can even use your own data to create retargeting ads.
You can also create retargeting ads on Google ads but using your own data and retarget users they have visited your website and not taken any actions. Google Ads also has two automated options - Smart Bidding and Smart Creative - which shows the right ad to the right audience at the right time. Smart Bidding optimises bids to help get you the best results whilst Smart Creative generates the best combinations of creatives that you have uploaded to create the most attractive ads of each user.
Gone are the days that chatbots are annoying popups which offer the same predefined answers without helping the user. The advancements of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has meant chatbots now act as smart digital assistants and are able to assist users with a human-like interaction. For financial services companies, chatbots can really help boost user experience on your website. They can make users feel like they have a personal banker by being able to check their account, track expenses and offer investment advice. They can also provide customer assistance, answering queries and complaints. You could even have chatbots on your site to support with lead generation. It was found that 82% of website visitors are more likely to convert to customers if they have chatted to you first and 63% of consumers who have used a chatbot are likely to return to the site. By integrating them with your CRM systems, you can then feed the leads straight into your contacts to nurture into clients.
It can take up a lot of valuable time for you to send out customer feedback surveys. Automating this task can free up time that can be used to nurture leads and engage with your current customers. Customer feedback surveys can be set to be sent out on a monthly or quarterly basis. If integrated with your CRM system, the results can then be added to your contacts and you can then create lists around the results so you are able to engage more effectively with them.
As we’ve seen, marketing automation can support financial services companies massively. Not only will it save you time but also provide great insights into your clients. You are able to find out if people are not interacting with your emails due to the number of emails you are sending or if they don’t find value in them. You can then use this information to tailor your email workflows. Customer feedback can also provide you with valuable insights into your services. Do they live up to your customers’ expectations? Are there any improvements you can make? It also allows you to engage with your clients a lot more effectively, being able to offer them a much more personalised experience which makes it easier for them to find the information they are looking for and converting.
