Emotion Sells FinServ Products, Too

Marketers in every vertical know emotions sell products. Financial service marketers are no different, so here’s a guide to four ways to employ emotion in FinServ marketing. Trust is essential when consumers are parting with their money, says Maria Vardy on June 9 in her article in Marketing Week. Build Trust Through Retention, Loyalty Although it’s been almost a decade since the Great Recession, spurred by a banking crisis, many consumers still view banks as only necessary evils — not institutions they trust, Vardy says. And yet, many financial services marketers are still pursuing acquisition as a growth strategy, rather than instilling trust in existing customers in order to get them to invest more. (Or, at the very least, keep their money where it is.) Marketers may not realize even new customers don’t trust them. “Marketing efforts for these customers are almost always offer-led, attracting the deal-chasers,” Vardy writes. “It’s rarely emotive or focused on the longer-term or wider brand benefits, such as service quality, ease of use and reputation for the loyal majority.” So start there, she suggests. Enhance the Customer Experience to Make Them Happy Use data to personalize customer experiences, Vardy says. “Price may be the obvious choice for some products like insurance and in attracting the rate-chasers,” she says, “but when it comes to more complex products, such as mortgages, customer experience has an even bigger part to play.” Happy Customer Experiences Involve Testing Adding emotion to the customer experience is about more than mass marketing messages, Vardy writes. It’s finding out what the customer wants and then providing that experience. For instance, bankers at First Direct found that what many marketers would consider “mundane,” small offerings really mattered to customers. Only having to ask one real person, no matter the seniority level or silo, to get a task finished — 24/7, 365 — resulted in “92 percent of our customers saying they would recommend us to someone else,” Zoe Burns-Shore, head of brand marketing at First Direct, tells Vardy. “I think it’s commitment that pays off.” Be Customer-Centric Despite the common wisdom in marketing circles — that’s been in practice for at least a decade at many organizations in other verticals — many financial services marketers may not yet have customer-centric approaches. Vardy writes that FinServ marketers will benefit greatly from this change. “What should not be underestimated is the importance of delivering a brand via [optimized] CRM, in real-time, empowering the customer and supporting them by understanding their world and what makes them tick,” she writes, then citing her company’s research. “A recent study by Jaywing shows that financial service marketers are starting to follow the growing trend of becoming customer-obsessed. They rank ‘improving the customer contact strategy’ (64 percent) and ‘improving customer retention strategies’ (55 percent) as top priorities in 2017.” What do you think, financial services marketers? Please respond in the comments section below.

FinTech

Emotion Sells FinServ Products, Too

Build Trust Through Retention, Loyalty

Heather Fletcher

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

Build Trust Through Retention, Loyalty

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Heather Fletcher