Prioritizing Personalization
Progressive banks have come to realize that their customer base is anything but homogeneous, and a variety of voices is required in order to be heard. These entities listen to each of their customer types on a regular basis and retune their expressions accordingly, writes Michael McCaw
The age-old belief that once a customer has bought into a brand they’ll stick to it and trust its language and tone is long gone. Constant exposure to a growing list of providers and the increasing entrenchment of personalization mean that banks must be willing to test different tones on different user groups.
Banking has become significantly more competitive in recent years. The average US consumer owns 5.3 accounts across all types of financial institutions, and they are engaged – with 43% of the population reading an email when it arrives or checking their inbox several times throughout the day. This is a discerning bunch, and they expect personalized relationships: 62% of consumers say a brand will lose their loyalty if they deliver an un-personalized experience, up nearly 20% from 2021. Exploratory journeys are required and testing is necessary: 86% of high performing marketers say their organization adapts their marketing strategy and tactics based on testing and refining customer interactions. Marketers are getting results by targeting groups with different tones over set periods, delivering better results through a scientific approach to testing and engagement.
Sequential messaging and storytelling is a fragile process, so testing mood and tonal variations on specific customer types and at different stages of the journey is paramount. Story arcs should begin with a head-turning trigger that resonates with the user’s mood and preferences, and subsequent messages should be built in such a tone that will nudge and nurture the customer, who should feel that value is being exchanged exclusively between them and their bank. Different styles of message have different shelf lives, and the delicate balance of repurposing content with a robust key word strategy can help the investigation of tones across environment and customer group.
Amplero’s ability to gauge the success rate of each piece of communication and restrategize appropriately informs and directs the story arc by reacting to different preferences, creating an optimal experience for each refined group of customers. It uses the marketing team’s creative library to automatically generate dynamic journeys for individuals – watching downstream behavior and adapting its decisions based on which elements are working and which aren’t.
For the creative team a new challenge is set: suddenly one large client base becomes multiple groups of customers with different needs, attitudes, levels of involvement, exposure to different types of information and whose memory retentions are all unique. By driving creatives to deliver tones of voice and test them on customers grouped by different attributes (from savings and retention profiles to average balance durations and incentive elasticities), marketing teams can deepen the sense of attachment to a brand, product or service.
