Learn how to acquire, engage, retain, and reactivate banking customers by building seamless customer experiences on different channels.
|
Digital banking is essentially the traditional banking experience going online. Over the past few years, banks all over the world have gradually transitioned simple activities such as opening and operating a savings account to complex financial services such as managing investments to the internet.
Physical branches do exist but customers are increasingly encouraged to carry out banking transactions digitally, through their bank’s website or mobile app.
Mobile or digital banking is not just a whim. Post the onset of the pandemic in 2020, downloads of mobile banking apps globally grew by 20% in Q2 over Q1. The daily active users (DAU) also increased by close to 6% for banking apps in the same period.
According to The Financial Brand, 35% of customers adopted online banking, with 30% specifically increasing their use of mobile banking since the start of the COVID-19 crisis. The absolute numbers for mobile banking are even more revealing.
Business Insider Intelligence’s Mobile Banking Competitive Edge Study reports that 89% of consumers, including 97% of millennials, use mobile banking.
The best banks are trying to keep pace by focusing on creating digital platforms through which customers can manage their entire personal finance ecosystem – including investment management, utility bill payment, wire transfers, credit, and loans, etc. They’re also simplifying financial processes through seamless onboarding experiences, easier transactions such as remittances, pushing contactless payments, sending out targeted communications, etc. Additionally, we have a plethora of fintech companies offering P2P lending, digital wallets, free trading apps, etc.
However, merely going online or building an app for your customers is not enough. Nor is the simple stacking up of channels such as email, social media, app, website one on top of the other.
You need to position your online banking app as the hub around which you build an omnichannel consumer engagement strategy.
Bonus Content
👉 Ebook – State of Mobile Finance in 2021 👉 Ebook – Your Guide to a Winning Customer Experience in Financial Services in 2021 👉 Ebook – Fintech and Omnichannel Banking Trends For A Connected Customer Experience |
Why is an omnichannel marketing strategy essential? Because your customers are not restricting their use of online banking to a single channel. According to research from Google, consumers typically switch between three to four screens before completing a transaction. An omnichannel strategy enables you to use all available marketing channels to achieve an integrated and seamless customer experience. The customer, on the other hand, is able to move from your app to website to push notifications to social media, experiencing the same branding and messaging throughout in a synchronized way.
For an example of better integration of online and offline banking, look at Singapore’s DBS. The bank has moved eleven processes online to reduce the need for manual intervention. They have been running webinars during the pandemic to train staff on how to use digital tools. They are also building online services for SMEs to apply for short-term loans.
Simply put, imagine creating the Netflix experience in banking – ease of subscription and access, seamless continuity across devices and locations, greater choice for customers, and data-driven recommendations. The rewards for consistent customer experience integration in online banking are huge – companies that use omnichannel strategies retain 89% of their customers on average as compared to 33% for those with weak omnichannel engagement, according to a study by Invesp.
How can banks and financial services organizations master omnichannel customer engagement? The first step is to start looking at your app and website as a lifestyle offering rather than just a utility. This approach brings customer experience under the lens. It gets you thinking about how to make customers stay and engage longer with your app the next time they log in for a transaction. Could you push an exciting offer while they’re buying coffee at Starbucks? Or shopping at a Max retail outlet?
Rakbank of UAE is an excellent example of extending touchpoints with customers beyond traditional banking transactions. Three out of the bank’s six apps are related to food delivery, football and school fee payment. Through these apps, the bank is accessible to customers at various points in their lifecycle.
Once you have made the mindset change to position your brand as a lifestyle one, follow these steps to deliver omnichannel engagement to your customers –
A successful omnichannel experience is one that earns the customer’s trust. In an age riddled with fears of cybersecurity breaches, trust is what will drive the quality of consumer engagement, irrespective of the kind of online banking strategy you come up with.
A dream state would be to emulate American Express, which has the world’s most successful credit card referral program, with over 10% new customers coming in as referrals. To get there, especially for fintech with Millennial and Gen Z customers, you need to:
Banks face some inherent challenges when it comes to making the changes required to win and engage customers with mobile banking trends in this age of digital finance. Here are the most pressing obstacles you are likely to find on this journey:
Personalization is the way to go to win the customer engagement game in digital banking. And automation is what will help you get there. Manual processes have a large margin of error, tend to leave out data, and are simply too time consuming when customer attention spans are constantly shrinking.
A recent BCG survey of global executives reports that 90% of marketers are now using AI to optimize the customer journey and deliver the most rewarding experience. As we’ve seen earlier, personalization has helped banks multiply business results in no time. For other financial services, take the case of Kredivo, Indonesia’s fastest growing digital payment channel for e-commerce in Indonesia. Using MoEngage’s AI driven solution to engage and convert new users, the brand achieved a 20% uplift in push notifications delivery and a 64% conversion rate for triggered emails.
Another example of effective use of AI to drive better customer engagement is Mashreq bank , which saw a 2x increase in customers onboarded, 37% reduction in app uninstalls and 18-28% increase in cross-selling.
Successful campaigns also use AI to segment by mapping consumer life cycle. For example, an insurance plan that offers life cover as well as tax benefits would be the right fit for a middle-aged customer. A young adult, on the other hand, may get more excited by low interest rates on an automobile or college education loan. Communicating the appropriate plans to customers builds trust, drives adoption and improves retention .
All your digitization, omnichannel engagement and AI enabled processes should be driven towards efficiently acquiring and retaining customers. This means you need to:
Track and treat these different kinds of users differently:
The first fourteen days of the user journey on your app are critical. Get them to explore all categories such as loans, e-wallets, cash transfers, deposits etc during this time. Use smart trigger campaigns, especially for users who haven’t explored any category even two days after signing up for the app. When users take steps such as adding a beneficiary to a transaction, using the deposit calculator, viewing e-wallet statements, you’ll know that your campaigns have been successful. Driving product discovery in the first fourteen days will set the stage for higher conversion and retention in the future.
Segment your users based on the categories that they have engaged with or used on your app. Use this data to generate upsell opportunities among existing customers. Through smart trigger campaigns across channels such as SMS, push and in-app notifications, you can drive higher numbers of bill payments, loan registrations, fund transfers, credit/debit card applications. You can also push geo-location based offers to drive higher usage.
Access Templates
Identify why customers no longer use the app or have uninstalled it and win them back. Some of the ways in which you can reactivate dormant customers include:
Some of the ways in which you can win back lost users include –
MoEngage is instrumental in solving the tough challenges banks, financial services, insurance and fintech brands face every day.
The solution lies in MoEngage’s powerful ability to create orchestrated campaigns across multiple digital touchpoints such as emails, SMS messages, push notifications, and social media.
MoEngage strives to make customer obsession a core quality for the financial institutions we work with. We analyze, segment, engage, and optimize campaigns that delight end users and improve the performance of our banking customers’ marketing strategies.
It is this razor focus on customer obsession that has made us work closely with some of the biggest banking brands internationally, including Ally bank in United States, Mashreq in the Middle-East, CIMB in Southeast Asia, and Airtel Payments Bank in India. Here are some ways in which we enable our banking customers:
We help you get a single view of the customer (geographical, demographical, behavioural data). By bringing together the best of automation and analytics on one platform, we help marketers design and monitor customer engagement campaigns. Our state of the art machine learning algorithms enable you to make the leap from just a performing campaign to a high performing one. AI-enabled algorithms reduce the time taken to make decisions by automating the right content at the right time on the right channel for every banking customer.
Design High-Performance Campaigns: Segmentation is looking at your user data and grouping users who exhibit similar behaviour or share similar attributes. Some examples of segmentation are ‘users who browsed for Mutual Fund Investments on the site/ app’, ‘users who completed more than five transactions in seven days’, ‘Users who browsed Mutual Fund Investments and ended up buying them’’. Segmentation could also include user attributes such as model of cell phone used, place of residence etc. With MoEngage you can create easy segments of users in two main ways:
1. RFM Analysis (Recency, Frequency, Monetary): Create a chart of your users based on their likelihood to make a purchase, overall frequency and the monetary value of purchases. The RFM chart gives you a quick overview of all users right from Dormant to Champion and helps you create appropriate marketing campaigns.
2. Advanced Customized Segmentation: Segment your users based on user events (for example, completed a fund transfer in the last 7 days) and derived user attributes (for example, located in Singapore). Such custom segments help you design high performing marketing campaigns with ease.
Banks and fintech brands acquire users through multiple channels and mediums. There is an obvious challenge to onboard these users and get
them to explore different product offerings. With MoEngage, it becomes easy to onboard new customers, engage, retain and also seek referrals from existing customers. With MoEngage Flows, banks and fintech brands are able to design marketing automation flows that are easy to create, visualise and deploy across channels. From onboarding new prospects to earning referrals from existing customers, Flows takes care of all customer touchpoints.
Emails are still an effective communication channel, if done right.
However, they might not be as effective as a standalone marketing channel as being used in conjunction with channels such as SMS, Push Notifications and web personalisation. Sending emails to your banking customers doesn’t assure you of ready conversions or high-performing marketing campaigns.
Here’s how email marketing can be revamped with an intelligent customer engagement tool such as MoEngage:
1. Personalised content: With MoEngage you can customise the placement of products/features in the email based on the customer’s likes and dislikes. Placing relevant content leads to higher conversion rates.
2. Deliver right to the ‘primary’ inbox rather than ‘spam’: As marketers, we’ve all seen our well-crafted emails land up in spam, never to be viewed by customers. With MoEngage we assure you over 95% inbox placement rates.
3. End-to-end assistance with delivery optimisation: Our special drag-and-drop Email Builder tool lets you insert gifs and other interactive elements. We don’t just help you with the creating an email marketing campaign but also help you analyse it