Today the client journey doesn’t end with they sign the papers – that’s only the beginning. Earning clients is hard work, but retaining them can be even harder. Keeping them is obviously critical to success. But if you don’t engage them intelligently and appropriately at each step, they’ll become disenchanted and seek guidance with competitors.
And while engagement with clients, and client satisfaction, are monumentally important, engagement with your internal teams is also essential. Given the turnover trends and attrition rates, engagement with your agents, advisors, and brokers extending from recruitment to onboarding and through their years at the firm is necessary.
This engagement and enablement must be a continued focus. Companies must become easier to do business with, internally and externally. They must be accessible across all communication channels.
But triaging personnel and fiscal resources to address this growing multichannel marketing demand can be a challenge. Opinions on resource allocation can lead to misalignment across the business. Firms must make smarter business decisions based on collective analytics.
Learn how to:
- Define and develop a niche brand
- Collect and analyze data and metrics to make smarter business decisions
- Enable resources internally to effectively engage clients
And now this helpful content can be shared beyond traditional mailers and word of mouth. There is no doubt that social media is changing how we communicate. Social media is allowing financial services organizations to extend beyond content delivery, and is becoming a platform for real conversation.
Several months ago I conducted a social media study of 5 FinServ companies. My hypothesis was that financial services would be laggard compared to other industries.
I was wrong. FinServ companies are socially aware and discovering new ways to converse.
New York Life is a great example. They focus on the human element of their social community. They pose questions that garner an emotional response and drive the community to share positive and fond memories. Because many of these experiences are shared across communities other social followers comment and “like” the status. It really drives positive interaction. By doing this, New York Financial added 6,289 new Facebook followers in just 10 days
When it comes to social, don’t just push content for consumption, ask for community input. Run polls, ask people to vote on scholarship or nonprofit donations. Get topical, not just with current events, but find out what personally motivates your community and gets them excited and talking. Probably a no-brainer, but use images. People engage with photos. Be relatable and relational. Don’t be afraid to show the human side of your organization. Let your community know who the people are that they interface with, and what those people are doing to contribute to the community and the business.
And while social is a growing trend, it’s important not to overlook the more tried and true communications channels as well. Email campaigns, delivering personalized 1:1 communications can be some of your most effective tools.
Fifth-Third Bank saw great success with this when driving trial interest of Fifth Third’s image processing solutions.
They launched a program to deliver 1:1 communications to each contact. They automated this program to incorporate multiple touches and channels to increase conversions. They tied together emails, hypersites, forms, purl pages, direct mail, and an online resource center.
Marketing also knew that they needed to provide the sales team with more than just a list of people who requested a trial. Marketing created real-time alerts and visitor notifications that were segmented by territory and were emailed directly to the correct sales person. This allowed each sales person a view into their buyer’s motivations and behaviors. In addition, Marketing worked with the internal CRM to monitor the results of opportunities related to this initiative.
In the first 2 quarters Closed opportunities directly attributed to this campaign equaled $2,510,057.76.
Influenced opportunities equaled $8,165,318.59.
This initiative also contributed to building awareness for many other pipeline opportunities. More than 24% of opportunities created during this initiative, were also included in this program.
Having that data insight really empowered the organization to understand the return on their marketing investment.
Zurich NA was tired of managing their data in spreadsheets.
In order to better understand their broker events, they began to leverage digital marketing technology. By integrating various communication channels like their websites, registration forms, and emails Zurich gained insight into which brokers attended which events, and what their insight before and after the event looked like…. And they did that by simply pulling a dashboard report. Much easier than managing multiple spreadsheets.
More importantly, this allowed them to better serve the customer because the content received after the event and on was driven by the digital body language of the broker.