We’re seeing more companies making reference to being customer-obsessed, and in the offer management arena, this definitely makes sense. Adopting a customer-led approach is a must for martech leaders seeking to secure long-term relationships with their customers in a way that generates both greater personalization and profitability.
Recently, I had the privilege to host a discussion with two highly-respected industry leaders.
The goal: share the latest research and innovations on personalization with fintech marketers.
These partners in personalization work with my teams and me to support the professionals tasked with achieving top results in top financial institutions. Keeping up with innovations in marketing automation and marketing technology in today’s financial services offer management climate is a critical component for those charged with achieving consistent, sustainable results.
The titles our clients hold represent the dynamic nature of their work in a highly-regulated and complex industry: Marketing execution, Marketing strategy, Product manager, Segment manager, Martech data lead, or Martech platform manager. If you’re wearing one or more of these hats, this one’s for you.
This blog series is focused on those roles and the ways in which each can successfully navigate the customer journey to achieve remarkable results. The proven solutions included here are a collaborative representation of the two interview guests, whose work has helped countless martech leaders deliver impressive enterprise business value (EBV). Now more than ever, personalized offers in the financial services industry require a laser focus on EBV, which is realized in five important and impactful ways:
- Sustained ROI
- Enhanced sales and marketing
- Cost savings
- Efficiency gains
- Strategic initiatives
Following the leaders: CX, DX Experts Weigh In
With the fast-changing industry, steeped in rules and regulations and getting only more complex, the challenges that financial services marketing professionals face are formidable. Seeing those struggles is what drives me to seek and find resourceful experts to provide valued perspective. We all enjoy sharing knowledge. Such is the case with customer experience and digital transformation leaders who joined me in the high-level personalization discussion I’m referencing. They deserve credit for how they generously and genuinely offer actionable insights and strategic solutions to help martech leaders do their jobs better. As is the case with all of the resources my team and I share with martech teams, collaborating to raise awareness and understanding of industry innovations is an integral part of these consultants’ work, and the core of the Naehas mission, as well.
Capgemini’s Chandramouli Venkatesan, Vice President of Market Development, leads the go-to-market for Digital Marketing services in the Banking & Capital Markets practice. He works with organizations to understand their marketing needs and help them realize their ambitions, through the interplay of martech and data. His work on martech is focused on delivering outcomes through simplification and integration of real-time experience. Chandra has over 20 years of rich experience working with clients across Banking, Payments, Wealth Management and Capital Markets domains.
Forrester’s Rusty Warner, Vice President, Principal Analyst, also contributed his expertise to this timely discussion. He is widely-recognized as a leading analyst whose research focuses on enterprise marketing technologies, including cross-channel campaign management, marketing resource management, and real-time interaction management. Through his work, he helps organizations ensure that their marketing technology investments underpin strategies to meet evolving customer expectations and align with overall business technology investments to win, serve, and retain customers. He joined Chandra and I in a webinar on this topic, and I am pleased to consider these two experts collaborative colleagues.
These are trying times for martech teams, facing increased demand to increase the amount of offers while expediting time-to-market. To these ends, there are four “marketing fundamentals” necessary to drive successful personalization.
- Redefine the customer
- Rethink targeting and multi-channel campaign strategies
- Know when to personalize and when not to
- Measure success on customer value and satisfaction
The demands of a digitized world
Product and segment managers placing are not the only ones placing demands on marketing teams. Customers are more digitally savvy and, as such, have elevated expectations. Brands must adapt and answer to these demands. Adopting platform technology toward greater personalization delivers strong returns by creating greater efficiencies to manage offers, and a better customer experience. Those who pivot are well-positioned to profit.
Advisors continually consult with top-level martech leaders on customer-led personalization.
Top-tier martech leaders are learning that drawing a distinction between personalization and experiences advances the goals of the enterprise, while enhancing the customer experience. Key learnings CX and DX experts regularly share include:
- Delivering on customer obsession begins with an enterprise customer data and content strategy to transcend disparate data stores.
- Collaborating with IT professionals can help marketers align data ingestion, customer profiles, and offer management with enterprise strategies for governance, privacy, and security.
- Investing in a more holistic personalization strategy can ensure that marketers deliver experiences aligned with individual customer expectations.
- Getting it right is important: Personalization geared to product sales misses the mark in situations like the COVID-19 crisis, when customers expect more empathy and focus on their financial well-being.
Let’s be honest. Marketing cannot accomplish this on its own. If an organization’s brand team wants to be moments-based, as one key consultant emphasizes, marketing needs to work with the rest of the organization to make it happen. The recommendation toward ROI is clear: rely on enterprise-wide capabilities for data and content to make sure you are addressing the customer in a consistent way across all touchpoints. Then, with essential IT support, assemble a tech ecosystem to make this all possible.
Truly engaging with customers across their lifecycle can bring sustainable business results. To get and stay ahead of the fierce competition, as my expert guests have proven, leading brands must leverage their investments for strategic business enhancements, such as digital transformation, empowering marketing, and establishing lofty but impactful CX goals.
Naheas has a great deal of experience working with financial organizations to help them address and attack the complexities inherent in personalized offer management amidst a fast-paced, competitive, highly-regulated, complex industry. The learnings we share reflect case studies in the success we’ve helped clients realize with trusted, proven partnerships.
In the second article on driving greater personalization, I’ll address key components in the offer lifecycle, and how martech leaders can apply best practices to leverage purposely-built platform technology to achieve better customer experiences and profits.
