Marketing automation is a new trend for many financial firms that they are implementing to create a complete program to make their services better and faster for an amazing customer journey. Huge operational and marketing analytics data is gathered by firms much before a prospect turns into a client.
- Currently, 75% of marketers use at least one type of marketing automation tools. Making automation tools accepted by most marketers. – Social Media Today “State of Marketing Automation Survey Report” (2019)
- Marketing automation is one of the 4 most popular methods to form personalized customer experiences with 48% of Marketers using it now. – House of Marketing “Yearly Marketing Survey 2019” (2019)
- Email marketing automation is used by 55% of the e-commercemarketers. In the coming year, another 25% is planning to start. – Thuiswinkel.org and Spotler “e-commerce marketing Trendrapport” (2019)
If news customers are growing and the existing customers are staying then only a service organization can be successful. Growth cannot be maintained if the focus remains on one aspect and the other one is ignored. Both sides of this equation require marketing automation.
Shooting emails to every lead is not what marketing automation is all about. There is much more to it. Below are three areas where your financial organization can use marketing automation:
Lead Generation:
You have to get people in at the top of the funnel because that is how growth starts. When they’re on your website, you have to convert them. How do you do that?
1. Chatbots:
Prospects visit your website to fulfill a particular need or get clarity on a query. Refrain from using the same general chat message on every page of your website. For instance, if your prospect has a question regarding trading commodities, your chat message should be personalized and specific to this product. Your chatbot messages should be automated depending upon the URL.
Source: fingent.com
2. Contextual Content:
There are numerous channels, including SEO, paid media, referring websites, social media, etc., from which your prospects can come in. Don’t address all prospects in the same way. When a prospect comes from a paid search campaign aligned with a particular persona then you need to customize your copy, imagery, and CTA buttons to this contact. Depending upon on the rules you set, this personalization can happen automatically. Configure these rules around device type, referring source, preferred language, or country.
Lead Nurturing:
Once you have a steady amount of fresh leads in your database, you have to get them to open an account. How do you do that?
3. Email Workflows:
Email Workflows comes up when marketing automation is discussed. The following tips will help in nurturing your financial clients:
A. Don’t over-email your prospects: Don’t shoot emails to your prospects over and over again. Limit the number of workflows they can be in and the number of emails a prospect can receive. You should create a suppression list that will remove leads from a workflow if they haven’t even opened your last 10 emails. Stop sending emails to prospects who don’t want or need them.
B. Maintain an inventory of your workflows: Do keep a 5,000-foot view of all of your workflows. If you don’t do it, there is a possibility that people get conflicting messaging or receive information that they don’t want. There can be some clients having numerous workflows and they are unable to understand the way certain workflows overlap with others. It can create an issue because then you may be sending your contacts conflicting or confusing information.
C. Test your workflow delays: Some sales cycles take longer than others, which is why you must avoid shooting five emails within the first week to a prospect who may require many months to move forward. Make it a habit to test frequently to ensure that unsubscribes or spam complaints are not increasing. The opposite of it also needs attention. When a lead is hot, use a combination of emails and phone calls from sales to get them to the next stage.
4. Lead Scoring:
Every lead that comes in your database will have a different level of buyer readiness. You need to build your lead scoring criteria. Make sure your email workflows are personalized toward your buyers’ traits such as company size, role, lifecycle stage, etc and behavior such as how many pages are viewed on site, how many emails are clicked, how many webinars are attended, etc.
Customer Success And Retention:
Once your customers begin to trade or invest in particular assets, keep them around.
5. Customer Feedback:
A crucial part of reducing churn is to measure client happiness or NPS (net promoter score) over time. NPS automation can be used to send out surveys on a quarterly basis. Don’t continue to handle these feedback surveys. All of this can be done automatically.
6. Upsells:
Communication to your customers is not the only thing that is involved in automation. As soon as you sense that a customer is a perfect fit for additional products or services, notify your account managers/executives internally. This can produce various opportunities for increasing revenue and offsetting churn provided your lead scoring is configured properly and that you have notifications set up when engaged customers revisit the website to check your other products/services pages.
7. Client Education:
Figure out a way to stay in touch with your customers and not only to sell them your next product. Your customers might seek financial advice and guidance from you. You are empowering them to be more confident in their investments and trades when you educate them regarding markets. Try contextual banner ads featuring webinars, e-books, blogs, or training on their areas of interest.
Conclusion
Marketing automation is more than shooting your emails to your prospects. If you adopt an intelligent approach, your whole organization will benefit from increased productivity, client happiness, as well as revenue.