Index
Introduction
The rapidly evolving digital landscape has fundamentally transformed the banking industry. Today’s customers expect personalized, instant, and seamless experiences from their financial institutions.
Two powerful tools that are helping banks to meet and exceed these expectations are Marketing Automation and Real-Time Analytics. While they serve distinct functions, understanding how they interact can unlock a wealth of benefits for your organization.
Incorporating new digital tools can be advantageous to automating certain tasks and generally improving the efficiency of the services offered.
Banks can use marketing automation platforms and software to perform repetitive daily tasks, like sending emails, push notifications, or social media posts. On the other hand, real-time analytics use real-time customer transactional activity and customer insights to personalize engagement across all channels.
Marketing automation: the proactive powerhouse
Think of marketing automation as an all-seeing, ever-ready aide, breathing life into your marketing strategy. It streamlines, automates, and quantifies marketing tasks, promoting operational efficiency and accelerating revenue growth.
The goal of marketing automation is to optimize marketing efforts, enhance customer engagement, and drive conversions, but in the banking sector, we can also use marketing automation to:
- Streamline Customer Onboarding: Automating welcome emails, account setup instructions, and relevant documentation.
- Lead Generation and Nurturing: Marketing automation helps banks capture leads through various channels, such as website forms, landing pages, or online campaigns. These leads can be nurtured with automated email campaigns to deliver targeted content based on their interests and behaviors.
- Cross-Selling and Upselling: Marketing automation enables banks to identify cross-selling and upselling opportunities by analyzing customer data and automatizing targeted offers and recommendations based on the customer’s financial needs and preferences.
- Customer Engagement and Retention: Banks can use marketing automation to send personalized messages, relevant content, and timely reminders, for example, automated birthday greetings, account balance notifications, or legal communications.
- Customer Feedback and Surveys: Automation can facilitate the collection of customer feedback and conduct surveys to gather insights and improve customer satisfaction. For example, banks can automate the distribution of surveys after specific interactions or transactions.
Each customer’s actions on the company’s digital channels can be used as triggers to generate a step-by-step experience, introducing the user to a guided customer journey.
What are real-time experiences?
On the other hand, real-time analytics, as its name indicates, refers to collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data as it is generated in real-time, providing immediate insights and allowing informed decision-making.
In the banking industry, real-time analytics involves continuously monitoring and analyzing data from various sources, such as transactions, wire transfers, and ATM transactions. This enables banks to proactively serve their customers with real-time experiences while the customer is living his life in the real world.
As with marketing automation, real-time analytics allows banks to offer better customer services, increasing engagement. These are some examples:
- Fraud Detection and Prevention: Real-time analytics can identify and alert about potentially fraudulent activities, such as unauthorized transactions or detect suspicious patterns in real time. Banks can take immediate action to mitigate risks and protect their customers’ assets by having this information in real time.
- Personalized Customer Experiences: With real-time analytics, banks can better understand customer behavior and their preferences in real time and deliver customized offers, recommendations, and tailored experiences to customers.
- Customer Service and Support: Real-time analytics can also support banks in providing proactive customer service by identifying issues, resolving them promptly, and ensuring a positive customer experience.
- Operational Efficiency: Not all the benefits of real-time analytics relates to customers. Real-time analytics can also significantly help optimize operational processes within banks. Banks can identify bottlenecks, streamline workflows, and make data-driven decisions to improve efficiency and reduce costs.
- Regulatory Compliance: Real-time analytics can assist banks in meeting regulatory requirements. By continuously monitoring data and transactions, banks can promptly detect and report any potential compliance violations, ensuring adherence to regulatory guidelines.
Each transaction, or moments as we like to call them at Latinia, can be an opportunity for the bank to be proactive with its customers, provide useful information, advice, and even sell to the client.
Moments vs. customer journey
In marketing automation, a customer journey is like going on a hike with invisible walls, where the customer is “forced” to follow the path the bank created to reach its objective. It limits the customer’s options to what has been predefined by the bank in its marketing automation tool.
In comparison, with real-time analytics, each step the customer takes during the hike can be considered a moment or micro-moment. In this case, there are no invisible walls; customers can go right, straight, or left as they wish.
In one case, the customer must follow the predefined steps the bank configured in their marketing automation tool, hoping they will convert at one point in their lifecycle.
However, with real-time transactional analysis, customers are free to live their life how they see fit, and the bank can be relevant in real time when the client needs it, not when it feels like it’s a good time to send an offer.
Same objectives, different triggers
While marketing automation offers a variety of solutions when the bank’s customer is present in the bank’s digital channel, real-time transactional analytics allows banks to take advantage of when the client is not present in the bank’s digital channels.
One important question to consider is:
How much time does a bank’s customer spend on average in the bank’s digital channels?
And the answer is: just a few minutes!
How can banks then take advantage of the rest of the day when customers live in the real world, making purchases, investing, or facing financial struggles?
One of the big differentiators between marketing automation solutions and Latinia’s real-time analytics solutions are the touch points or triggers.
| Latinia | Marketing Automation |
| Card Payment (Credit & Debit) | Website |
| Wire Transfer | App |
| ATM Operations | Store |
| Bank Offices | Email (open/click) |
| Online Payment | Push Notification (open/click) |
| Debits | Instant Messaging Interaction |
The Power Duo: Real-Time Intelligence Fuelling Automated Actions
The secret sauce is not choosing between marketing automation and real-time analytics – it’s merging their strengths. Latinia’s unique product suite – Next Best Action (NBA), Subscription Engine, and Gateway – merges marketing automation with real-time analytics.
Latinia’s NBA, for example, utilizes banking transactions and customer intelligence to generate timely and personalized actions, ensuring banks can meet customer needs proactively and effectively.
For instance, imagine a customer buying a trip online. With Latinia’s solution, the bank can automatically propose its travel insurance based on real-time data, ensuring the offer is relevant and timely.
This degree of personalization not only enhances customer experiences but also paves the way for cross-selling and upselling opportunities.
But Latinia doesn’t stop at just providing timely notifications. It can also provide seamless integration with classic marketing automation software. By seamlessly connecting with established marketing automation tools, Latinia opens up a realm of possibilities for banks to enhance their customer engagement strategies.
For instance, when Latinia detects a significant customer activity, it can automatically enroll the customer into a targeted workflow in the marketing automation software. This workflow could include a series of follow-up messages, offers, or personalized content designed to nurture the relationship with the customer and provide them with further assistance or incentives.
Furthermore, Latinia can help enrich customer profiles within the marketing automation tool by updating relevant real-time information. For example, if a customer’s financial situation changes due to a major life event, such as getting married or buying a home, Latinia can promptly update the customer’s profile with this information. This enables the marketing automation system to adjust its approach accordingly, tailoring future interactions to suit the customer’s evolving needs and preferences.
The seamless integration of Latinia with marketing automation not only streamlines the communication process but also allows banks to deliver hyper-personalized experiences to their customers. By leveraging real-time data and insights, banks can create targeted marketing campaigns that resonate with each individual, fostering stronger customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Categories: Marketing & Sales