Personal finance
Increased competition in financial services and the desire among customers for a more tailored experience has meant personalised digital experience is a critical goal for many of that industry’s marketers today.
When Chris Maccan joined the Australian financial services firm NOW Finance five years ago the company’s direct-to-consumer channels were still developing, with minimal brand strategy and structure and limited development of its customer value proposition.
But given the company’s goal of being the most liked lending brand, that has meant ensuring that the way it engages with new and existing customers meets that aspiration. And that has meant investing in marketing automation and campaign capabilities that are up to the task.
“Our martech stack was very fragmented, which meant we couldn’t stitch together a coherent customer journey,” Maccan said.
“We had no customer-centric architecture, our digital experience was clunky, we didn’t have attribution through our different channels and touchpoints.”
The company’s initial choice for a marketing automation platform was Braze, with HubSpot acting as the sales and service hub. Maccan soon found it made more sense to consolidate to a single platform, with HubSpot chosen to provide the full end-to-end customer journey.
“It’s also enabled a transformation away from us using backend systems for front-end tasks, to really having a front-end system that enables us to coordinate our processes and track everything from a marketing and acquisition perspective all the way through the funnel,” Maccan said.
NOW Finance’s model sees it operating multiple distribution channels working through intermediaries, with a direct-to-consumer channel for personal finance. The company’s plan to expand its consumer business has dictated the need for an efficient sales pipeline.
“We’ve got more opportunity in terms of how we tailor the content that we provide based on the customer needs, to really deepen that customer engagement,” Maccan said.
A lifelong engagement
At Brighter Super, which was born from the merger of two industry superannuation funds with a retail superannuation fund, head of customer experience Brad Hancock said the goal was to take all of the warmth that could be delivered through an offline experience into online channels, to create digital experiences that were comforting and empathetic.
“I classify personalisation as individualisation, because every member for us is an individual,” Hancock said.
“Personalisation is all too often just used as a catchphrase for segmentation. People preach personalisation, but still just distribute generic offers.”
Hancock said his goal was for members to be able to engage with Brighter Super through whichever channel they felt most comfortable with, which meant numerous capabilities needed to be brought to its digital experience.
“What we’re doing is building out specific use cases, but not losing sight of our ultimate goal to build an end-to-end seamless experience that a member actually is in the driving seat,” he said.
This thinking also extended to how Brighter Super conducted marketing campaigns, with a great emphasis on value-led metrics.
“For us, it’s about sentiment perception,” Hancock said.
“We’re storytellers, and we forget that sometimes as brands. The people that we serve in Queensland have worked a long time and we’re custodians of that. We need to ensure they are getting advice at the right times and are maximizing their opportunities.
“For me, as the custodian of the omnichannel experience, the challenge is to capture intelligence and infer what those recommendations are. That’s the criticality of omnichannel experience and individualisation.”
Source link
