For consumers, retail banking is a buyer’s market. Offers arrive in the mail almost daily. Rewards and money-saving deals are peppered throughout websites. Banks are now competing for consumers in more ways than ever before—mobile, real-time recommendations, email, and so on.  With so many options, and such little product differentiation, there's really very little incentive for consumer loyalty.

The fact remains that people simply don’t spend much time reading web pages—often ignoring parts of the page that are attempting to grab our attention. Instead, they are linking around the Internet from site to site and going to the most enticing pages, or to get answers to their questions. The opportunity to capture a visitor is often just a few seconds, yet the methods to present a compelling offer are often ineffective—targeting on a “one size fits all approach”, while limiting the promotions to only a few products.

But with this fickleness comes opportunity…for both banks and consumers alike.

Many customer-loyalty issues in banking and finance companies can be traced to poor marketing and customer service—which means that those that know how to effectively entice, capture, and maintain deal-hungry customers are looking at a blue ocean of opportunity. Meanwhile, customers can just keep playing hard to get to make banks work harder to meet their needs.

Today, online banking is transforming that way consumers’ research and interact with financial institutions. But, most financial services marketing teams are held back from effective targeting practices by their IT resources—as well as data security requirements—and are simply doing the best they can within the constraints of their existing web infrastructure. Cross-sell and up-sell offers tend to be served on a random or rotating basis, or with a tab-based approach within the main banners on the home page only. It’s simply one big guessing game.

Further, since this approach is presenting the same offers to each visitor, the number of offers is limited—usually to the top five or so. With these offers presented on an automated rotation or in a tab format left for the visitor to select, the chances of presenting the most compelling offer to an individual visitor is, well, very low. Visitors will not stay on the page simply to wait for the right offer to appear, nor do they page through the offers to see if something is right for them.

When it comes to banking and finance, customers simply aren’t that loyal if there’s a good deal to be found elsewhere. But, personalizing offers will give marketers the upper hand on competitors by making your customers feel more catered to and more secure—a crucial element in the ever-sensitive area of personal finance—despite marketplace pricing wars. Personalizing offers means that the most relevant offer is presented to each visitor based upon what you know about the visitor. In doing so, you will increase the range of offers that you can select from and show to each visitor, since all visitors will not see the same offer.

This is the issue addressed in new white paper, “Taming the Fickle Financial Services Customer,” just released by Maxymiser. Find out more on how to fix this fickleness.

Here's the basic tenet of feng shui: With the mindful arrangement of objects in relation to one another and in the context of their environment, one can attract positive energy and good fortune, and generally usher in the good. That sounds manageable, right?

In theory, yes, but when you start bringing outside forces to bear—a sense of where things are supposed to go, an irrational desire to bring in the new while holding on to the old, the notion that more really is more—things gets a lot more complicated.

Nowhere is that more evident than in the mobile commerce space. For years, marketers have been working to perfect their e-commerce sites, figuring out what clicks and doesn't click with consumers, and creating just the right energy for happy shopping—and buying. Now, they're tackling the new mobile revolution head on—with the exact same strategies and the exact same websites!

Mobile sites are not the same as websites. Full stop.

The screens are smaller, the keyboards are smaller, and the experience people have browsing your site on a smartphone is completely different from how they view it on a computer screen.

Marketers need to take a step back and realize that mobile is a new environment, one that demands a new design and a new approach to keep their customers and win new ones.

Only by prioritizing your mobile strategy and making it a key element of your overall e-commerce planning will you be able to prove its worth—via customer retention, measurable revenue, and a stellar return on investment.

So what does it take to create a harmonious, customer-friendly mobile site?

1. Learn to let go

It's easy to get carried away with offers, content, and information on your website; after all, you have plenty of real estate to work with. But simply replicating that scope in mobile form is like trying to fit your Barcalounger in the breakfast nook: there just isn't space.

As you begin building your mobile marketing strategy, start by removing items from your website that are superfluous.

How do you decide what's essential and what's gratuitous? You're likely already storing a lot of analytics data about how your consumers interact on your site. Use that information to determine what your customers need from you, what can (and should) be translated to your mobile environment—and what you can dispose of. 

But space is not the only factor to consider: load times and screen rendering are just as important. Get out that smartphone of yours, type in your brand's URL, and take note of the load times and overall layout. Are any large graphics or Flash pieces killing the mobile experience? What is hard or easy to find?

Hold on to what works, get rid of what seems clunky or cumbersome in a mobile browser, and if there's must-keep content that will need new presentation, make note of that, too.

When designing your mobile site, less is definitely more.

2. Create a harmonious space

Once you've cleared out the clutter, it's time to focus on making the best of the remaining content.

The first step is to get your hands on the Big 3 mobile devices—iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry—and view your site on each. Next, spend some time visiting mobile sites within your industry or of competitors, and download various types of apps on each device to understand what works—and what doesn't. Do you notice any patterns? What items do you like and dislike? What features and design components seem to be the most user-friendly... or unnecessary?

Though some of your impressions will be subjective, you'll gain a sense of whether your mobile site is set up to perform properly on a small screen. Within that context, you'll be able to focus on improving and optimizing successful elements, rather than wasting time on the irrelevant or unnecessary.

Whether you're simply looking for general inspiration or cross-industry best-practices, look to the successful mobile sites, such as those of Google, Amazon, or eBay.

3. Get a second, third, and fourth opinion

You've renovated and redecorated, but you'll know if you got it right only by testing your new look. A must for e-commerce sites, multivariate and A/B testing are just as important for mobile commerce sites.

With few tried-and-true best-practices for mobile conversion, even the most experienced marketers can't predict what elements of a mobile site will drive desired consumer behaviors. Small elements, such as headline placement, button color, or tone/copy tweaks can have a significant impact on sales—but you won't get it just right until you test.

But don't rest on your laurels: Mobile sites, like their online counterparts, are at the mercy of the ever-shifting demands of consumers and the marketplace. Developing your mobile site isn't a once-and-you're-done project. Mobile requires the same continual care and feeding that traditional websites do.

4. Make your mobile site comfortable (and personal) for everyone

No matter how the small the space, with the right personal touches it can feel like home. Your apartment might be the size of a shoe box, but when it's your shoe box, everything just feels better.

The same can be said for the mobile environment. Yes, there's a lack of real estate to play with, but you can make the mobile experience just as custom and personal as you can on a standard website—and, along the way, draw in and win over your customers. It's up to you to make every visitor feel comfortable and wanted—and eager to visit again and again.

Segmented personalization will allow you to capture behaviors and attributes about your mobile visitors to create content tailored to their location, their time of day, or even their brand of mobile device. Personalization can also be specific to each visitor: Users can be targeted by previous searches, past purchases, the time of their last visits, and even their activities in your physical store, call center, or website.

Personalizing the mobile shopping experience is an essential practice if you want to be on top of the mobile commerce game.

* * *

It's a lot to take in, but before you walk away thinking these best-practices seem too daunting to achieve, rest assured that technology resources can help you automate these processes. Just as feng shui experts and interior designers exist, so, too, do personalization experts who can save you time, budget, and internal resources as you achieve your mobile commerce goals.

Whatever path you choose, know that every successful mobile site specifically addresses both the demands of the medium and the needs of customers.

This article first appeared on Travel Mole on July 29, 2011.

When it comes to targeting consumers, the travel industry’s got it made. Think about it: to secure any type of travel—hotel, car, flight, tour, etc—customers have to release individual preferences and other information about themselves, which can later be used to personalize marketing efforts, and tailor the travel experience. Now, with the online world playing a major (and often, the only) role in the booking and research phases of trip planning, the opportunity to capture even more data about users and make their brand experience personalized across all channels is greater than ever.

Each visitor that comes to your website is equipped with a wealth of data that comprises their unique traveler “profiles”—powerful information such as previous trips booked, travel –related items they’ve researched, frequency and recency of travel, and ads or offers they’ve responded to (with a click or purchase). Needless to say, this information can help you better target content and offers for each individual, making their visit much more relevant, while helping you increase engagement, bookings and repeat customers. But how?'

One method is to define “rules” (or a set of conditions that must be met) that will dictate which visitor segments will get which experiences.  When defining rules, it’s important that you take into account the various stages travelers go through when planning for their trips; they may visit a site several times before actually booking a reservation. Use this to your advantage. This type of personalization technique allows you to adapt and match each forthcoming experience to the data collected during their previous visits. An example of how a rule can be used to define the experience for a repeat visitor is to re-target them based upon the last destination they searched. This may result in an offer for a vacation package that includes tickets to a local attraction, which could result in enticing them to book, or even extend their trip.

While targeting with rules can be effective, it can be nearly impossible to manually define rules for monstrous websites with copious amounts of daily traffic. So for increased sophistication, another method of behavioral targeting uses mathematical models to predict the most compelling content and offers based upon all that is known about a visitor. This type of model learns and adjusts over time to dynamically optimize visitor experiences with content that yields the highest conversion rate. This approach also enables a broader range of content—such as destinations or travel packages—to be presented to the right person based on their unique predictive attributes.

Examples of predictive attributes used to personalize the online experience:
• Planning days in advance of the trip
• Length of stay
• Number of people (adults and children)
• Last departure point (searched or booked)
• Last destination (searched or booked)

European airline carrier bmibaby, for example, uses real-time personalization to target visitors with different “Featured Destinations” on their home page. The destination each visitor sees is based on the visitor’s geographical region, past trips and searches. By personalizing in this way, bmibaby has seen a 34% increase in clicks on the Featured Destination features, and a 4% uplift in bookings.

Independent of which of these methods you choose, digital personalization will empower you to start targeting visitors at the right time, with the right content and offers based on their individual needs, wants and behaviors. Since visitor behavior can change with each visit to your website, targeting rules alone can grow to unmanageable numbers. When this happens, consider moving to automated behavioral targeting, which will help you properly personalize the real-time experience for each traveler, without the nightmare of creating and maintaining complex rules.