Sophis­ti­cat­ed tech­nol­o­gy is enabling brands to mar­ket one-to-one with mil­lions of cus­tomers in ways nev­er before pos­si­ble. This cou­pled with email’s con­tin­ued reign as the top direct mar­ket­ing chan­nel pro­vides ample oppor­tu­ni­ties across all indus­tries. For finan­cial brands, reg­u­la­tions can present chal­lenges, but with the right strat­e­gy, mar­keters can deliv­er con­tex­tu­al emails that boost engage­ment and loy­al­ty.

Despite the death knell for email mar­ket­ing ring­ing for the bet­ter part of the last decade, email as a chan­nel remains the gold stan­dard when it comes to return on invest­ment for dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing. The sta­tis­tics remain com­pelling:

• Email mar­ket­ing yields a 4,300 per­cent ROI for U.S. busi­ness­es, accord­ing to the Direct Mar­ket­ing Asso­ci­a­tion.
• Com­pa­nies using email to nur­ture prospects gen­er­ate 50 per­cent more sales-ready prospects at two-thirds the cost, accord­ing to Hub­Spot.
• Con­ver­sion rates are three times high­er than social media and more than 40 times bet­ter than Face­book and Twit­ter at acquir­ing cus­tomers, accord­ing to McK­in­sey & Com­pa­ny.

And that’s not lim­it­ed to big brand retail mar­ket­ing. Heav­i­ly reg­u­lat­ed indus­tries like finan­cial ser­vices rely on email as a cost effec­tive tool to con­vert prospects, build rela­tion­ships with clients, and ser­vice long­time cus­tomers.

Financial Spending Is Up

The U.S. finan­cial ser­vices indus­try spends bil­lions annu­al­ly mar­ket­ing to prospects and loy­al cus­tomers. Accord­ing to eMar­keter, dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing spend in the finan­cial ser­vices sec­tor is expect­ed to rise to $7.19 bil­lion this year. That’s up 14.5 per­cent. Send­ing clear, action­able mes­sages to spe­cif­ic groups is cru­cial for all finan­cial ser­vices from cred­it cards to com­mer­cial banks to invest­ment hous­es. With a fast and con­stant­ly chang­ing reg­u­la­to­ry land­scape, it can be dif­fi­cult to keep up. That said, even with extreme con­straints, email mar­ket­ing, imple­ment­ed cor­rect­ly and strate­gi­cal­ly, offers effec­tive and unique solu­tions to known chal­lenges faced by finan­cial mar­keters.

Tabula Rasa – With Regulations

While most indus­tries have an open can­vas for their email pro­grams, indus­tries like finan­cial ser­vices have sticky chal­lenges to deal with as they com­mu­ni­cate with their cus­tomers and prospects. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Con­sumer Pro­tec­tion Act signed into law in 2010 intro­duced the con­cept of Unfair, Decep­tive and Abu­sive Acts or Prac­tices (UDAAP) into the lex­i­con of finan­cial mar­keters across the U.S. and inter­pre­ta­tion of those terms has proven chal­leng­ing. But the truth is, the abil­i­ty to imple­ment dynam­ic and cre­ative finan­cial ser­vices cam­paigns is lim­it­ed only by the mar­keter’s imag­i­na­tion in terms of mes­sag­ing, design and tech­ni­cal capa­bil­i­ty. With the right plan­ning and tech­nol­o­gy, you can use dynam­ic con­tent to boost email engage­ment and remain safe­ly with­in the reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work. Here are sev­er­al exam­ples of how to use dynam­ic con­tent to lift engage­ment, dri­ve traf­fic, and con­vert cus­tomers, all while oper­at­ing with­in estab­lished reg­u­la­tions.

Consumer Finance — Credit Card Marketing

Card mem­ber acqui­si­tion is vital to the suc­cess of all card issuers, and a vast amount of work is involved in gath­er­ing the data required for a suc­cess­ful pro­gram. The pain points here are many and com­pli­cat­ed, but most sim­ply, the mes­sage needs to be time­ly, accu­rate, and attrac­tive enough to dri­ve action. Per­son­al­iza­tion can be high­ly effec­tive. Per­son­al­ized mar­ket­ing emails have 29 per­cent high­er unique open rates and 41 per­cent high­er unique click rates than non-per­son­al­ized emails, accord­ing to Exper­ian. Stud­ies show that one of the most effec­tive per­son­al­iza­tion meth­ods for a card acqui­si­tion offer is to per­son­al­ize the card art with the applicant’s name. This is an effec­tive choice, but a cost­ly one in direct mail con­sid­er­ing the expense of print­ing and mail­ing. Com­pare the same func­tion­al­i­ty in email, and it’s a sim­ple, cost-effec­tive choice. Like­wise, cus­tomiz­ing the APR offered to a spe­cif­ic prospect is a key dri­ver of suc­cess. In email, the cus­tomized APR can be pre­sent­ed and styled to match the email design for a spe­cif­ic prospect. With API tech­nol­o­gy, mar­keters can update an email with live rate infor­ma­tion right up to the moment a con­sumer opens it. And email con­tent updates auto­mat­i­cal­ly with real-time infor­ma­tion as the email is opened a sec­ond or third time. If an APR becomes unavail­able, the email cre­ative can be swapped out entire­ly, alle­vi­at­ing calls from irri­tat­ed or dis­sat­is­fied con­sumers.

Retail Banking

A key chal­lenge faced by many banks is inte­grat­ing the phys­i­cal and dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences in a way that deliv­ers more for a cus­tomer. For gen­er­a­tions, retail banks ded­i­cat­ed enor­mous bud­gets to their brick and mor­tar busi­ness­es. In addi­tion, they com­mit con­sid­er­able resources in devel­op­ing and sup­port­ing online tools. Still, most banks have been stuck in a world of “snap­shot” emails show­ing out­dat­ed account infor­ma­tion. To raise the stakes on the email expe­ri­ence, banks can deliv­er an aug­ment­ed, up-to-date expe­ri­ence using real-time data pop­u­lat­ed at the moment of open. Using geo-loca­tion, mar­keters can rec­og­nize the account hold­er geo­graph­i­cal­ly by IP address. This enables an email to fea­ture:

• Retail bank and ATM loca­tions and hours in real-time.
• Spe­cial num­bers for pri­vate bankers or branch man­agers.
• Mobile tar­get­ing for app down­loads.

With the right tech­nol­o­gy, mar­keters can also include detailed rep­re­sen­ta­tions of online account man­age­ment tools in real-time. The result is increased click through rates and high­er engage­ment on their web­site. Sim­ply, a more inte­grat­ed cus­tomer expe­ri­ence.

Asset Management

Asset man­age­ment requires a del­i­cate bal­ance between the per­son­al and the pro­mo­tion­al. This is where con­sumers are most tight­ly con­nect­ed to their own sense of mon­e­tary worth and require the deep­est lev­el of trust with their asset man­agers. The chal­lenge to asset man­agers is to com­mu­ni­cate with a large num­ber of peo­ple in a per­son­al way. Not only do clients expect to feel like they’re being treat­ed with the utmost care and secu­ri­ty, they expect to actu­al­ly be man­aged with the utmost care and secu­ri­ty. One solu­tion is to per­son­al­ize the name and phone num­ber of a par­tic­u­lar bro­ker into the emails sent to that broker’s clients, pro­vid­ing both a per­son­al touch and rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion. The func­tion­al­i­ty allows for mak­ing the phone num­ber appear larg­er and bold­er on mobile devices to add val­ue and make con­nect­ing with a finan­cial advi­sor quick and easy.

Online Brokerage

Email mar­ket­ing in an online bro­ker­age set­ting presents clear chal­lenges that must be addressed before an email pro­gram can be suc­cess­ful. From a tech­ni­cal stand­point, clients demand up-to-the-moment stock mar­ket infor­ma­tion and per­son­al­ly rel­e­vant oppor­tu­ni­ties. Beyond that, bro­ker­age clients, like all finan­cial clients, absolute­ly require the utmost data secu­ri­ty. To add a per­son­al touch not eas­i­ly repli­cat­ed, a per­son­al nota­tion, bro­ker pho­to and con­tact infor­ma­tion can eas­i­ly be fed into each email with­in a seg­ment­ed list. Web crop­ping tech­nol­o­gy enables an email to present real-time stock prices relat­ed to a customer’s pref­er­ences. It’s vir­tu­al­ly an inbox-based per­son­al stock tick­er. With this capa­bil­i­ty, each time an email is opened, the lat­est price of a stock is fed into the email auto­mat­i­cal­ly with no fur­ther research required.

Customer Loyalty Programs

Con­sumers love their cred­it card loy­al­ty pro­grams. They love earn­ing points, miles and rewards. They love to cash in their loy­al­ty for some­thing of ben­e­fit to them. For finan­cial mar­keters, these pro­grams may not track direct­ly to rev­enue, but they do keep active cus­tomers hap­py and are a means to under­stand more about cus­tomers upon which to build actions. What do they pre­fer? How do they choose to act? What will get them to do more? An effec­tive email pro­gram that con­nects the cus­tomer to their loy­al­ty in action brings this effort to life for all cus­tomers. One that miss­es the mark runs the risk of alien­at­ing some of a bank’s most fre­quent cus­tomers. Noth­ing is more frus­trat­ing for a cus­tomer than receiv­ing an email pro­mot­ing out of date or incor­rect infor­ma­tion – few­er points, rewards or miles than she’s earned or a coupon that’s expired, for exam­ple. This is actu­al­ly one of the biggest chal­lenges to any com­pa­ny send­ing points pro­gram updates to their cus­tomers. “Web crop­ping” tech­nol­o­gy enables a bank to deliv­er actu­al, real-time updates to their cus­tomers. Cus­tomers see in real-time how many points they’ve earned and avail­able rewards. And per­son­al data remains secure and pro­tect­ed. The email is nev­er out of date with the web­site, the app or the call cen­ter. Real-time is actu­al­ly real-time.

Exceeding The Challenges

Unlike most oth­er indus­tries, email mar­ket­ing in the finan­cial ser­vices sec­tor has high­ly spe­cif­ic chal­lenges that need to be met head-on in order for an email pro­gram to be suc­cess­ful. The right solu­tions must be lever­aged in order to ensure the secu­ri­ty of client data, meet fed­er­al legal require­ments and sim­ply keep cus­tomers hap­py.