With more choices now than ever before, financial services customers expect an ever-increasing level of personalization from the companies they choose to spend and save their hard-earned cash with. Get it wrong, and the competition is but a click away. Get it right, however, and the rewards speak for themselves:
- Personalization can generate between 5 and 15% more revenue - and increase marketing spend by 10 to 30% (McKinsey)
- 66% of customers want their bank to understand their personal needs and expectations (Salesforce)
- 52% expect all offers to be personalized (Salesforce)
- And over 70% of consumers across all age demographics say personalization is highly important to their banking experience (Capco)
Reader, the days of one-size-fits-all marketing emails are dead. But as FS brands deal with ever-increasing amounts of data and juggle constantly evolving consumer needs, focusing resources and efforts on email personalization at scale is more challenging than ever before, particularly when talking QA …
Why QA is essential in personalized email campaigns
Personalized email campaigns are built on the foundation of data - however, we’re all very aware that data is vulnerable to errors and inconsistencies, especially when collected from multiple sources.
This means that a rigorous QA process is crucial; without one, FS brands risk sending irrelevant email campaigns to customers, damaging their reputation and hurting the bottom line. Yet some still struggle with email personalization at scale when verifying data and attributes for templates - and a fast, accurate process. That’s why when one Optimove client asked us to step in and help, we listened and created Smart Previews.
OptiMail’s Smart Previews feature enables marketing teams to sample customers from a target group, view the data behind the personalization tags, and quickly verify the data and design of every template for specific customers without switching screens, saving them time.
To make the process even faster, it’s a good idea to establish which data points power the different areas of personalization so it’s easy to troubleshoot for errors and make edits. So, for example, you might include the customer’s account number, first name, company name, or products and/or services used, along with any variables that will determine if a field changes for an individual. Before you know it, you’ll be shipping personalized campaigns at scale that you’re confident contain the most relevant, valuable content for each recipient.
Here are a few more tips to help nail your email personalization efforts:
- Get your data in shape: Many FS brands are still working with siloed data spread across disparate systems, and without a single customer view, it’s impossible to get the deep insights needed for true personalization at scale. A robust CDP will help, providing that crucial single customer view, enabling smart segmentation, and streamlining campaign orchestration and performance.
- Combine demographic and transactional data from different sources into your single customer view. This powerful data combination will allow you to quickly create and explore micro-segments to provide rich customer insights that will skyrocket your personalization efforts. If your customer database has a large number of records and customer attributes - highly likely in financial services - then an AI-powered CDP will proactively surface customer insights and segments for you.
- Use dynamic content: Leverage dynamic content to deliver personalized email messaging. Customize email elements such as greetings, subject lines, and body content based on the insights you - or your CDP! - uncover. For example, customers who have visited your website and explored specific finance products could receive an email that references these products, an invite to chat with a customer rep for more information, and a time-sensitive offer … you get the idea.
- And test, test, test!! As you build out your email campaigns, being able to test and automate continuously becomes critical for hyper-personalization. Performing comprehensive multivariate testing to ascertain the optimal treatment is a great start, but if your goal is to personalize comms for each and every customer (and let’s face it, that’s what we’re all trying to do), then at some point, you’ll want to look at that AI-powered CDP so that you can continuously optimize the best treatment for each one. That way, every customer will receive the optimal treatment - every time.
To find out more about how Optimove can help with email personalization at scale, let’s get the conversation started.
