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.
