As the financial industry continues to change, customers are demanding a better, more customized banking experience. They want to be treated as individuals (right now, less than 30 percent of consumers believe that offers from their banks are customized for their specific needs). For this reason, financial institutions have begun to develop strategies for identifying and meeting unique customer needs while optimizing their market share, value and profits.
This challenge requires financial institutions to leverage data to better serve customers. Luckily, banks and credit unions have a wealth of customer information at their fingertips to help them understand current and prospective customers’ needs — and you can use this data to improve customer experience and boost sales performance by implementing data-driven sales and service initiatives. In this post, we’ll lay out some proven strategies that will help you turn your customer data into actionable analytics.
1. Use data to learn your customer’s behavior and preferences
Driven by their consumer experience, customers now expect more sophisticated and responsive interactions with their bank. Data points such as demographics, household relationships, financial variables, purchase behavior, and social metrics give you instant insight into your customer’s needs, behaviors, and preferences. By segmenting customers based on these factors, financial institutions can more effectively target promotions and product campaigns that target each customer’s unique needs. This approach not only helps improve ROI, but it also gives you a competitive edge that helps drive sustainable growth.
2. Use data to understand your customer in the larger context of the market
Once you have the data from customer segmentation, how can you use it to build an effective strategic marketing plan? That’s where customer profitability comes in. Customer profitability shows you how your institution drives profits so that you can retain your most profitable customers and grow unprofitable ones. With this data, you are able to identify and implement the processes and programs that will maximize your bottom line.
3. Use data to power effective strategic planning and expansion
Strong customer and market analytics will ultimately empower your strategic planning and expansion efforts. The insight that you get from customer data, segmentation, and profitability will drive effective lead generation and cross-selling by giving your team the tools they need to maximize each customer and prospect interaction. By empowering your marketing and customer-facing staff with this information, you can focus your activity and resources where they will have the strongest effect on profitable growth.
The effective use of actionable customer data in your marketing and sales strategies can help you identify key opportunities within your customer base to drive profitable growth in a highly competitive marketplace. Analytics becomes “Actionlytics” when the right data is integrated with your marketing and sales strategy effectively to achieve desired results.
Want to learn more? If you are not taking advantage of the strategic and tactical advantages that come from using a CRM, talk to us about how 360 View can help you take your marketing to the next level.
