Unlock the Power of Personalization in Financial Services

In financial services marketing, every interaction isn’t just about engagement - it’s about trust. Yes, today’s customers expect brands to know them and anticipate their needs, but that expectation is intertwined with demands for privacy and security, creating a delicate balance. After all, financial institutions are stewards of people’s personal and financial security, meaning a single misstep can damage the customer relationship and brand reputation for a long time.

Let’s first take a look at a few specific challenges financial services marketers are up against:

• Strict data, privacy, and product regulatory environments
• Legacy systems that aren’t designed to support omni-channel experience patterns
• Data disparity and silos that have scattered useful implicit and explicit customer information across various departments and systems
• Balancing the expectations of customer trust, use of customer data with ethics and integrity, expectations of hyperpersonalization, and the high risk of getting personalization wrong on a financial product or vehicle

Plus, a few market trends have emerged that require all financial institutions to react:

• More competition from fintech and nontraditional players, who present a more agile and customer-centric experience
• Growing backlash on the use of third-party data that has put first-party data at the forefront of “getting personalization right”
• Advances in AI, both generative and machine learning, allowing institutions to analyze large datasets to uncover insights with relative ease
• Growing customer expectations that financial institutions should be able to support their holistic financial wellbeing, especially with a focus on financial literacy and education
• The rise of mobile-first design, with customers wanting experiences they can access on the go

This leaves a lot for digital experience marketers to sort out. And trying to move the needle becomes a mammoth challenge if you try to solve everything at once.

So let’s break our solutions into three buckets: Listen, decide and activate, and analyze.

Marketers responsible for a single customer experience channel have grown increasingly isolated from their counterparts on other channels. There used to be very little incentive to work together and connect channel performance. Digital experience technology has completely changed the game on the effort-to-reward ratio of bringing channel owners, and most importantly, channel data into a single view of the customer.

Customer engagement on email can now change the content for a home hero or a product recommendation on the website. Website browsing behavior can determine the right email content for the customer intent. The content of an ad a customer interacts with can determine what products should be highlighted on your website. These patterns, when deployed in a scalable fashion, allow us to listen and respond to customers’ wants and needs, down to the individual.

It all sounds great, but operational silos make it hard to realize the scaled outcomes of listening to customer touchpoints across channels. We must create alignment around a singular strategy for personalization across channels to ensure operational silos don’t interfere with creating the right customer experience at the right time.

As you break operational silos and lay down data piping, it’s critical to include the feedback loop necessary to ensure you’re not just creating experiences but also continually refining them. This means building a robust analytics framework that gives you clear, up-to-the-minute insights into customer engagement, conversion rates, and any other key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most to your team.

Experimentation is in our DNA as digital experience marketers, yet true end-to-end testing is only possible with full visibility into performance. By incorporating regular checkpoints to review these insights, you can make data-driven decisions that inform future campaigns, ensuring each effort moves you closer to your strategic goals.

Put simply, it’s not enough to curate experiences at scale; you need to also measure the efficacy of those experiences against your focused KPIs, make improvements, and iterate.

As a starting point, answer the following:

• If a customer answers the three questions from the previous section, what conversation flow path would I take them through?
• If they interject key pieces of information, how would I react?
• Are there any pieces of information that are worth putting in front of them throughout the conversation?

As you break operational silos and lay down data piping, it’s critical to include the feedback loop necessary to ensure you’re not just creating experiences but also continually refining them. This means building a robust analytics framework that gives you clear, up-to-the-minute insights into customer engagement, conversion rates, and any other key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most to your team.

Experimentation is in our DNA as digital experience marketers, yet true end-to-end testing is only possible with full visibility into performance. By incorporating regular checkpoints to review these insights, you can make data-driven decisions that inform future campaigns, ensuring each effort moves you closer to your strategic goals.

Put simply, it’s not enough to curate experiences at scale; you need to also measure the efficacy of those experiences against your focused KPIs, make improvements, and iterate.

As a starting point, answer the following:

• With every campaign I deploy, how will I monitor success?
• What specific KPIs will tell me if I’m hitting the mark?
• And how will I adjust my strategy to make each iteration better than the last?

We are using Salesforce’s personalization technology as our digital experience technology of choice to bring these concepts to life. We developed a personalization strategy for one of the largest financial institutions in the world that integrated our three key principles: Listen to customer data, make informed decisions, and continually analyze outcomes. This approach ensured that every interaction was relevant and aligned with the institution’s strategic goals, thereby creating a seamless journey from data collection to personalized customer engagement.

We created our experience, based on the following criteria and plan:

Where are we targeting?

• Website Homepage Hero Banner
• Email Hero Banner

Who are we targeting?

• All prospective and returning customers

What are we targeting them with:
Regulatory messaging

What we needed: Content served at least three times across email or website
Outcome we were driving: People clicking through to our financial educational and awareness materials

Strategic messaging:
What we needed: Content served at least two times across email or website
Outcome we were driving: People clicking through to the financial educational and awareness materials

Abandon form messaging:
What we needed: Content served if the customer has started a financial vehicle application
Outcome we were driving: People clicking through to the related financial vehicle application

AI-driven content:
What we needed: Personalized content based on browsing behavior, user attributes, and segment membership
Outcome we were driving: People clicking through to the relevant product or vehicle Additional parameters: Exclusion of certain content if the user already has a product or vehicle related to the content

This criteria allowed us to workshop and develop the Financial Services Personalization Funnel.

We moved one step at a time and created something that scales with the organization bolstered by the three pillars (listen, decide and activate, and analyze) for financial service marketing problem-solving.

Our financial services customer’s website was static — it didn’t have any digital experience technology. As a result, they were missing out on the opportunity to listen to their new and existing customers and decide what signals to activate on.

The first step we took was to use Marketing Cloud Personalization decisioning engine logic and business rules to decide and activate the correct content for each customer, based on individual journey paths, and adhere to regulatory requirements.

Once regulatory requirements are met, we established additional rule sets and logic that would allow us to continue the “conversation” for the customers with the appropriate next step, across email and website channels. In order to do this successfully we used additional browse behavior and customer data to enrich an individual’s experience with messages, and content tailored to their current state in the journey.

If an individual customer took an explicit action for us to react to, we listened and decided on the appropriate content to show them and “activated” accordingly. This was done while continuing to meet regulatory and strategic requirements, ensuring adherence to unique financial services communication flows.

Finally, when all requirements were met and explicit actions were reacted to, the AI progressed the customer down a desired path across channels. The AI was fully guardrailed with parameters defining what it was and was not allowed to do.

Tracking analytics — impressions, click-throughs, and form submissions — across the entire funnel was key to ensuring both our content selections and targeting logic were as effective as possible.

Personalization at scale is within reach. You likely already have many of the tools necessary to get started. Instead of trying to solve everything at once, establish a strategic roadmap that lets you take steps to execute your fintech marketing vision.

Your strategic roadmap should have clear milestones to assess progress and should be flexible enough so you can adapt your approach as you go.

I’ll leave you with the best learnings I’ve taken away from my thousands of martech implementations: Focus on quick wins that demonstrate immediate value. This will help you build momentum and support for ongoing investment. The possibilities are endless, but take it one step at a time to build the best member and customer experiences.