The right message at the right time is critical for customer engagement. And in a complex retirement landscape, it’s vital to ROI. Operating in a heavily regulated sector like financial services leads companies like Vanguard Institutional to take caution with how and where they engage with customers.
Vanguard is one of the world’s largest investment companies, and its institutional division, Vanguard Institutional, primarily serves retirement plan sponsors. Clients are Vanguard Institutional’s top priority, and as such, the company wants to ensure its customers get the content they want and need.
LinkedIn is a safe social media platform that Vanguard Institutional uses to connect with customers. But in a competitive landscape like LinkedIn, Vanguard Institutional needed a way to stand out; a way to speak to its audience in a more engaging and authentic way that would motivate customers to take action.
A new era of customer engagement
Just like Vanguard Institutional, many financial institutions are seeking out ways to differentiate themselves and their services in a compliant, but authentic way that speaks to the customer in a way that resonates with them. After all, personalization is at the core of strategy these days.
With all of this in mind, Vanguard Institutional sought out a way to scale and meet its customer needs with personalized language. The company needed a way to speak to customers that felt like 1-to-1, personalizing messages with authentic, relatable content. Vanguard Institutional wanted to help its customers solve the challenges of saving for retirement and help them meet their goals. To do this, the company needed to maximize the use of its customer data, and figure out how to elevate insights into the customer to inform a robust personalization strategy.
Vanguard Institutional turned to Persado for help in maximizing its data and elevating its personalization strategy. The company provided control content to kick off the LinkedIn messaging experimentation, and the Persado AI and machine learning engine revved up.
By identifying message components and analyzing specific words, phrases, and emotions to determine the intent of the content, Persado then used eight AI-generated variants, which represented 64 permutations on the message, to test against the control on LinkedIn and surface data.
Vanguard Institutional was able to review the key messages and decide which ones resonated or connected most with clients and prospects. The result? A 15.76% increase in conversion rates vs. the control content for this campaign.
Key takeaways for personalization and increased ROI
In the short-term, Persado experimentation helped Vanguard Institutional uncover the exact phrases that resonated with customers in its LinkedIn marketing campaigns. And the long-term effects are still providing incredible, growing insights into why customers engage.
Vanguard Institutional can now deliver relevant, meaningful content to clients and prospects as well as surface insights and opportunities to inform its strategic marketing plans. Using Persado’s AI platform, Vanguard Institutional is seeing a 16% increase in conversions and creating meaningful brand connections with the market at a scale that humans alone could never replicate.
Vanguard Institutional’s success is not restricted to financial services. Any company that has customer data to leverage, or regularly tests messages in the marketplace, can use an AI platform to transform their language in ways that truly resonate with the customers. AI language generation is here to stay, and it’s reinventing the way marketers work.
Vanguard Institutional is only one of several success stories about companies that are using AI to achieve incredible results. The time for innovation is now. What will you achieve with AI by your side?
