Learn how to do marketing automation for financial services
Oct 07, 2024
Oct 07, 2024
10 min read
10 min read
Table of contents
- What is marketing automation for financial services?
- The Role of Automation in Financial Services
- Examples of Marketing Automation for Finance Businesses
- 1. Email and SMS Marketing
- 2. Optimizing Landing Pages for Targeted Conversions
- 3. Reporting and Analysis
- Want to reduce your CAC to half?
- Companies Already Using Marketing Automation for Financial Services
- 1. Market Financial Solutions (MFS)
- 2. CSB Group
- 3. Mercian Accountants
- 4. Subscription Stopper
- Top 5 tools for marketing automation for financial services
- 1. HubSpot’s Marketing Automation Software
- 2. QuickBooks AI
- 3. AlphaSense
- 4. Chatbots
- 5. Algoriz
- Conclusion
Finance is one of the industries that can easily adopt AI. The industry handles much data, customer relations, and day-to-day trends.
Adopting automation tools and strategies changes how financial businesses operate and engage with clients as technology advances.
This blog explores how financial services businesses leverage automation for growth, focusing on key areas such as email and SMS marketing, landing page optimization, reporting and analysis, and more.
What is marketing automation for financial services?
Marketing automation in financial services refers to using technology to streamline and enhance marketing processes, enabling financial institutions to engage with customers more effectively and efficiently.
This approach is increasingly important as financial organizations seek to improve customer experiences, drive growth, and maintain compliance with industry regulations.
Marketing automation transforms how financial services engage with clients by enabling personalized interactions, improving operational efficiency, and ensuring regulation compliance.
Leveraging these technologies will be essential for financial institutions aiming to thrive in a highly competitive market.
The Role of Automation in Financial Services
Automation in financial services extends far beyond simply replacing manual tasks. It involves transforming operational processes, customer interactions, and strategic decision-making.
By integrating automation into their workflows, companies can achieve remarkable efficiency gains, reduce operational costs, and provide a positive overall client experience.
Adopting automation is particularly relevant in an industry where data management, compliance, and customer service are critical.
Financial services businesses increasingly rely on automation to handle large volumes of data, ensure regulatory compliance, and provide personalized client interactions.
This shift helps these businesses grow because employees can now dedicate their time to important activities instead of being bogged down by routine tasks.
Examples of Marketing Automation for Finance Businesses
1. Email and SMS Marketing
SMS and email marketing automation are critical to financial services marketing. Automation tools can help manage campaigns, target audiences, and customize messages.
Examples of Email Marketing Automation:
- Triggered Emails: Automated responses based on user actions, such as welcome emails, account updates, and reminders.
- Drip Campaigns: Sequential emails sent over time to nurture leads and engage customers.
Examples of SMS Marketing Automation:
- Transaction Alerts: Automated notifications for account activities, fraud alerts, and payment confirmations.
- Promotional Messages: Timely offers and updates sent via SMS to keep customers informed.
2. Optimizing Landing Pages for Targeted Conversions
Landing pages are essential in any digital marketing campaign, especially for financial services firms that want to convert visitors into leads or customers. Automation can improve landing pages by allowing companies to create and manage them better.
Marketing automation services allow you to design landing pages tailored to specific audiences and campaigns. Automation tools can analyze visitor behavior and dynamically adjust the content of landing pages to better align with user interests and preferences.
Example: A bank looking to promote a new investment product can use automated landing page tools to create targeted pages for different customer segments. By leveraging visitor behavior and engagement data, the bank can present personalized offers and content that resonate with each segment, ultimately increasing conversion rates.
3. Reporting and Analysis
Reporting and analysis are fundamental to understanding business performance and making informed decisions. However, traditional reporting methods can be time-consuming and prone to errors. Automation is revolutionizing this aspect of financial services by providing more accurate and timely insights.
AI-driven automation tools can quickly analyze vast amounts of data, generating reports highlighting key trends, opportunities, and risks. This reduces the time spent on manual data processing and improves the quality of insights available to financial professionals.
Example: Financial companies can use AI-powered analytics tools to monitor market trends, track client behavior, and assess the performance of marketing campaigns. These tools can generate real-time reports that help businesses make data-driven decisions and adjust their strategies accordingly.
Want to reduce your CAC to half?
Companies Already Using Marketing Automation for Financial Services
Several financial services companies have successfully implemented marketing automation to drive growth and improve efficiency.
Here are a few examples:
1. Market Financial Solutions (MFS)
With the help of HubSpot’s CRM system, MFS improved its marketing approach through automation. Automated email and audience segmentation increased the open rates of the emails by 10% and the number of inquiries by 30%.
These results highlight the impact of marketing automation for financial advisors and services in improving client engagement and lead generation.
2. CSB Group
Specializing in fraud detection, CSB Group leverages AI to analyze data and identify potential risks. Using AI in automation has improved CSB Group's ability to make accurate risk assessments and projections to avoid possible threats.
3. Mercian Accountants
With the help of QuickBooks AI, Mercian Accountants has streamlined its bookkeeping processes. The routine tasks were automated to increase efficiency and improve the quality of client interactions, proving that automation is helpful in accounting and financial services.
4. Subscription Stopper
Subscription Stopper’s founder utilizes machine learning algorithms to manage recurring subscriptions and analyze user behavior. The insights provided by AI-driven automation help users track and optimize their spending, showcasing the versatility of automation tools in financial management.
Top 5 tools for marketing automation for financial services
Here are some essential tools for automating various aspects of financial services:
1. HubSpot’s Marketing Automation Software
This platform offers all-in-one solutions for email marketing, audience segmentation, and campaign management. It helps marketing automation experts assist financial services businesses in developing and implementing tailored and compelling marketing messages for the target audience.
2. QuickBooks AI
This tool is ideal for streamlining bookkeeping and accounting tasks; QuickBooks AI integrates with existing systems to provide real-time insights and improve financial management accuracy.
3. AlphaSense
Another powerful tool known for its AI-based analytics feature, AlphaSense assists financial experts in tracking the latest market information. The tool’s ability to summarize and analyze data facilitates more informed decision-making.
4. Chatbots
Popular in customer relations, chatbots answer clients' questions instantly and perform essential functions. Using chatbots in CRM and marketing automation systems improves the client experience and support.
5. Algoriz
This tool specializes in algorithmic trading, using historical and real-time data to develop and test trading strategies. Automation in trading helps finance businesses optimize their strategies and respond more effectively to market changes.
Conclusion
Automation transforms the financial services industry by enhancing efficiency, improving customer engagement, and driving growth.
Industry experts generally agree that finance businesses should keep up with trends and invest time and money in AI and automation.
However, they advise approaching this cautiously, starting slowly and gradually scaling up automation.
If you are a business offering financial services and want to leverage the power of automation, Saffron Edge can help. Our marketing automation and CRM integration expertise can drive your growth and optimize your operations
Contact us today to learn how we can help you leverage automation for your business success.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is marketing automation for financial services?
Marketing automation in financial services entails using technology tools and applications to enhance marketing processes such as e-mail marketing, mobile marketing, and lead generation. It helps financial institutions streamline their processes and improve client engagement.
How can financial advisors benefit from marketing automation?
Marketing automation can be helpful for financial advisors, as it allows them to send out emails regularly, categorize the audience, and provide relevant content. This improves communication with the clients and assists the advisors in the proper handling of their marketing activities.
What are the advantages of marketing automation for banks?
Marketing automation has several advantages for banks, such as the ability to better control marketing campaigns, better segmentation of customers, and better communication with them.
What should be included in a marketing automation strategy?
A marketing automation strategy should include audience segmentation, personalized messaging, automated workflows, performance tracking, and data analysis. It’s essential to align the plan with business goals and continuously optimize based on performance insights.
How do CRM and marketing automation work together?
CRM and marketing automation integrate client data and marketing efforts. CRM systems store client information while marketing automation tools use this data to deliver targeted and personalized marketing campaigns, enhancing client engagement and overall marketing effectiveness.
Digital Marketing Tips For Lawyers To Lower Their PPC Costs
Google's parent company, Alphabet, generates $183 billion in revenue. Almost 80% of their total revenue comes from their Google Ad business. It is needless to say but a large number of businesses are playing their bets on some kind of digital marketing strategy. In fact, 95% of the small businesses plan to increase their spending or investment in digital marketing tactics. Digital marketing is the soul of most businesses that helps them survive in this modern, cut-throat competition. Using the latest marketing ways, optimizing the business website to attract clients, computing keyword relevancy for more web clicks, and adding quality backlinks- are a few things that you can do to make your digital marketing project a success. In 2020, we saw that more and more businesses were relying on digital marketing strategies to ensure revenue growth in Covid-19. In 2020, the digital space for advertising outgrew itself by surpassing the print media industry and became the second largest medium after TV. Online marketing is one of the crucial pillars for every business, be it a manufacturing firm or a professional service provider. It significantly creates opportunities for a company to expand to the global marketplace by realizing its target audience and building brand credibility over the years. In addition to that, every business aims to reduce their annual marketing cost and simultaneously obtain more quality traffic. However, this would sound hare-brained without an organized strategy. So, here comes the role of digital marketing- to help publish your content in an efficient state that successfully stimulates customer visits. Source: Pexels Digital Marketing - Insight! A digital marketing plan consists of various policies and immediate actions that need to be addressed by the business firm to digitally improve their brand image and communicate with their target groups. By analyzing the data figures and stats received from a local advertisement to campaign drives run for a unique product/service, the process of digital marketing has a lot on its plate for you. Being in a generation where the internet decides your brand's online visibility, it is evident that digital marketing is a way out for you to acquire brand exposure and earn profits. Given that if you have a law firm or are a lawyer yourself and aspire to take your services online, you have multiple reasons to take up online marketing practices and accelerate the process real quick. Since a law firm requires detailed research for client cases and compute brand-related information in a systematic form for the customers, digital marketing tactics form the bedrock of such a smooth procedure. Source: Pexels Advantages Of Digital Marketing To Law Firms While being in a law firm or providing legal marketing services yourself, there are ample opportunities that come your way if you focus on effective digital marketing. Here are a few benefits that a lawyer gets to enjoy by using online marketing to expand their scope of support - Focussed Towards Clients - Customers are the blood of any business and especially essential for service professions such as lawyers. It is imperative to include them in the online marketing drive and strive to find what interests them, in terms of the website interface, service efficiency, to bring an upward shift in client satisfaction. Optimum Conversions - Once a customer visits your legal website, it is your duty to take them forward from thereby providing them the resolution via services and gaining an agreement. It results in a conversion of a visitor into a successful client. Lawyers can also use conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools to obtain quality conversions in lesser time. Monitor and Analyse Online Performance - With the help of digital marketing tools, a lawyer can quickly track their online marketing metrics' success and act on the present efficiency via different strategies. Since every business over the globe gets impacted and rapid changes in this dynamic market, a credible diagnosis of your online marketing framework is essential to enhance and develop the further process. Pay-per-click Costs Pay-per-click or PPC refers to a basic fee that advertisers pay whenever a visitor clicks on their website. You can calculate the cost of pay-per-click by dividing the total advertising expenses by the number of clicks of the visitors on the website. Thus, the search engines' estimated PPC cost could be high or low, depending on your target groups. According to online research, legal terms like a lawyer, personal attorney individually bag in many PPC costs. Since this practice comes under paid advertising, there are numerous ways a lawyer can use digital marketing to lower these PPC costs for the firm's success - Geo-Target Your Prospective Clients - Most of the time, you need to Geo-target a radius to target your clients, be it within a state or a region. A lawyer can easily use online marketing tools to set a defined location where most of your potential customers would reside. Run trial campaigns before setting up the radius to get an advanced search and prepare ads accurately. As a lawyer, you can take advantage of online tools or consult an expert to help you through this in an effective way. It will enable you to lower the PPC cost as only those customers will visit your website in that location and are targeted as per the advertisement. Structure Your Keywords As Per Customer’s Search Intent - Structure Your Keywords As Per Customer's Search Intent - Before publishing the advertisement on the website, it is essential to understand the customer's search query intent so that your website is visited with a purpose. Based on that, include keywords necessary and apt in the customer's search, so it directly lands on your website, thus ensuring to-the-point pay-per-click. Connect With Clients - Often, your competition rises when you fail to effectively contact your prospective clients after they have landed on your website. Responding quickly to their inquiries helps you eliminate the probability of shifting to another platform, thus ensuring that the PPC cost incurred provides a positive return. Managing PPC Drives - Once your advertisement is online and you're set to acquire leads in terms of the number of visitors on your legal website, the next step is to analyze the things that are non-efficient on your website. It could be irrelevant keywords, limited geotargeting, etc. After tapping down the ill-factors, you can reduce bidding on those keywords that do not perform, ultimately reducing your PPC costs. Schedule Your Ads - A lawyer's requirement might increase on specific days, at particular times. Observing these patterns and scheduling your advertisements or remaining active on the website at that time potentially helps you to save some on PPC. Need expert assistance to help you climb the ladder of conversions, reduce the PPC budget or implement digital marketing tactics for customer engagement? We know what you want! We at Saffron Tech will help you in this journey. Our well-strategized and consistent approach towards your client base will enable you to reach new levels of customer satisfaction and simultaneously save on your pay-per-click costs. Furthermore, with our team of digital marketing professionals, we assure you of the best possible service so you can elevate your brand image and performance. For more information, reach out to us now! ...
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7 Ways to Ace Your SEO in 2019
The way search engines like Google rank websites changes everyday. Yes, you heard that right! Apart from the big algorithm changes that Google announces once in a while, certain little tweaks and optimizations are made to their algorithms everyday to provide better results to searchers which you don’t even know about. And 2019 is going to be no different! With a few new algorithms introduced this year, Google will give more importance to those websites that adhere to those algorithms for sure in some time to come. Also, Google is focusing more on providing the best search experience to their searchers and if your website doesn’t, you will lose a few rankings on the SERPs for sure in the year to come. So, what should you do exactly to stay in the good books of Google and ace your Search Engine Optimization in 2019? This post is all about that and a lot more. So, let’s dive right in - Rankbrain is going to be more prominent than ever Rankbrain is one of the most prominent algorithms Google has released in recent years. But what exactly is it? It is a Google indexing algorithm backed up with AI which promotes/demotes websites on SERPs based on a certain set of factors. It is designed in a way to make sure that the best results come first for searchers searching for a specific query. Since it’s a machine learning algorithm, it automatically adjusts websites on the SERPs and doesn’t require human intervention at all and can make changes to SERP almost instantly. But what’s it based on? The algorithm was implemented to make sure users get the best search engine experience and the websites that they click on do that as well. So, websites that focused more on providing the best UX to visitors were rewarded by gaining Google’s top real estate, which gets the most clicks. Doing all of that is handled by Rankbrain now. So, you’ll have to keep Rankbrain in mind and optimize the UX of your entire website to provide a better experience to the people who stumble on your website after searching on Google. Doing this is going to be extremely important in 2019! But to ace Rankbrain, you need to know the exact factors on the basis of which it grades websites on the SERPs, which are - 1. Dwell Time Dwell time is the time a visitor spends on your website. Obviously, a visitor won’t stay on your web page or blog if the content is irrelevant to them or is of bad quality. So, providing quality content that aligns with searchers intent is of utmost importance to excel in the Rankbrain era. 2. Click-Through-Rate Rankbrain is designed to look closely at the CTR of each and every web page on the internet to give an appropriate ranking to them. For example, if a search engine result on the 6th position is getting a higher number of clicks than a result on the 3rd position for the same query, Rankbrain would notice and bump up the rankings of the result on the 6th position. But since dwell time is a factor as well, just getting a higher number of clicks on your web pages will not be enough, you will have to provide the kind of content that makes users stay as well to improve your search engine rankings. Take care of these two factors for all your webpages & blogs and Rankbrain would do the rest. Go Mobile or go obsolete Google cares about their searchers. And apparently, a majority of them search for queries from their mobile devices. Mobile searchers have long surpassed desktop searchers and Google wants to provide them with the best user experience. For the same, Google rolled out the Mobile-first indexing algorithm in March this year which changed how the algorithm accessed websites forever. Under this new algorithm, Google crawlers would prefer a mobile website first for indexation and ranking to primarily provide better results to their mobile searchers. So, having a mobile website that properly supports your desktop website is not something you can procrastinate anymore, it has become an absolute necessity under this new algorithm. Google prefers having a mobile responsive website over other methods of going mobile because of its ease. But having a mobile website is not enough, you’ll have to provide a great user experience on your mobile website as well (remember, Rankbrain) to make an impact in 2019. Focus on working on the speed of your website According to a study performed by Google themselves, a website’s speed is the greatest factor that determines if a website’s UX is satisfactory or not. And since, Google has been lately focusing so much on providing a great user experience to all their users, they rolled out an update that ranked websites based on this sole factor. They called it the ‘Speed Update’. While the factor is not the heaviest, focusing on optimizing the speed of your website will certainly give you a advantage and it would greatly improve the UX of your website, which is always a nice thing to do under the watch of Rankbrain. To make your site load faster, you can get rid of heavy elements on your website or minify or combine scripts. Or else, you can use Google’s own tool to check and optimize the speed on your desktop and mobile website - PageSpeed Insights. This tool will tell you everything there is you can do to make your website load faster and perform better in SERPs. The increasing relevance of unlinked Brand mentions Google has long been solely dependant on backlinks for determining the authority of websites over the web. The general idea is, the more backlinks a website has, higher will be it’s authority in the eyes of Google, and higher it will be placed in SERPs. And it has been like this since the inception of Google. But all of this is going to change. The way your brand is mentioned over the web on social media conversations, blog posts, forums and any other medium is closely looked over by Google. It takes into account the tone, intent and context of each brand mention over the web to ascertain if it’s positive or negative and the way people talk about you over the web will certainly affect your ranking in 2019. ‘Unlinked brand mentions’ over the web are gaining relevance each day and it calls for social listening. You’ll have to jump on each and every conversation happening about your brand over the web and make sure it’s in positive light to maintain your brand reputation in the eyes of Google. Google’s Gary Illyes mentioned it himself. So, if you’re not actively monitoring your brand mentions over the web and making sure they add to the overall reputation of your brand, you will struggle to increase your search engine rankings is some time to come. To monitor your brand mentions over the web, you can make use of tools like ‘Awario’ and ‘Brand Mentions’ that would help you do just that with ease! Searchers are consuming more video content than ever People preferring to consume video content over any other type of content is nothing new and has long been a trend that’s still going strong. If you are looking to gain a lot of engagement from your audience on your website, social media or blogs, then video is certainly your best bet because people simply prefer video over anything else. Obviously, quickly watching a video about something is always easier than reading a ton of content and that’s why video is still so popular. In this world, where every brand is throwing up a lot of content on the web and is seeking attention from their audience, people have found a better way to consume content on a daily basis that quickly gives them the facts and is engaging to consume. So, if you’re not making use of Video, you're definitely missing out on a lot of engagement and additional SEO benefits. I would suggest you quickly start creating some video content for your brand and publish it on Youtube. Since, Youtube is owned by Google, you can also enjoy some obvious search engine benefits in the time to come. Target people searching for answers on Google Assistant Optimizing your content for voice searchers is currently a hot topic. And it has all the reasons to be. Voice searches globally are on a tremendous rise and you’ll be missing out if you don’t write content that targets those users head-on. But how do you target them? Here are 3 ways that would help Google Assistant pick your content over others when it comes to answering voice search queries put up by searchers - You need to be on the top 3 results for Google Assistant to even consider picking up your content. If your content appears in the featured snippet, your chances to get picked up by the Google Assistant increases by folds. Here’s how you can get featured in the featured snippet. Answer your own questions in your content. Usually, most of the voice queries start with a question and to answer that question, Google Assistant usually picks up the content that revolves around that exact question. So, try answering the most basic questions people might have around your focused keyword. To know more about what else you can do to target those voice searchers, Forbes compiled a list of best advices from 15 members of the Forbes Communications Council… do have a look at it. Quality content and backlinks are still important While the above suggested ways are vital to ace your SEO in 2019, don’t forget that content and backlinks are still the top ranking factors that matter the most to Google. With Google placing more importance on the user experience that each search engine result provides to users (Rankbrain), I think creating quality content should be your top priority for acing SEO In 2019. If your content provides real value to your target audience, they will be inclined more to read it all. And when they dwell more on your content, Google will notice via Rankbrain that you have a knack of providing quality content to all your users. Which I think is the point of SEO in general. Link building and providing quality content goes hand-in-hand as only when people love your content, they’ll want to share that content on their own blogs and within their own social circles, expanding the reach of your content and building some valuable backlinks along the way. If you continue to provide awesome content to your audience, the biggies in your industry will notice and would want to link to you too. That’s the essence of natural link building right there, and it’s not going to lose value in 2019 and beyond! If you are looking to approach your SEO in 2019 with a bang, the above mentioned ways are the perfect way to do it. But before you start implementing them, keep this in mind, Rankbrain ranks website keeping in mind the response of your audience to your content. If they bounce even before your site loads completely, Rankbrain would not even let you reach the first page of Google, let alone acing it. It’s a machine learning algorithm that does it all for Google and looks at the UX signals of your website really closely to award rankings. And it’s not easy to game Rankbrain because of it’s self-learning mechanism. You’ll have to provide quality content to your audience to get your SEO ball rolling in 2019 and there’s no escaping it now! Having said that, I hope the above mentioned ways will help you greatly in improving your website’s overall SEO potential! Being a SEO agency ourselves, we’ll rely greatly on these tactics as well to provide the best services to all our clients. If you think there are other ways (I know there are) that have helped you greatly in achieving SEO success lately and you're confident that they’ll be of equal importance in 2019 when it comes to increasing a website’s search engine rankings, do let us know about them in the comments. ...
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Using Social Media To Create Hot Leads From Your Content Marketing
There is more to inbound marketing than creating compelling content. Even the best writing and visuals are no good if it doesn’t attract readers and entice people to visit your site. If you don’t feel like you have the skills to create or market your own content, you can always decide to use outsourced inbound marketing. Be sure to hire a reputable agency, though, because, since you can’t see or monitor them, you want to make sure they are honest and not acting in ways that reflect badly on your company. In what ways can you market your brand? You can and should use all the traditional methods of getting people to respond to your content and check out your product: forum posting and commenting on blogs are great ways to link back to your site. But there is one way to get noticed that trumps even that. Social Media. Social sites are one super way to build leads and get your brand out there and noticed. It is a terrific way to post content that will lead readers back to your website. Here are 4 popular social media outlets and how you can use them to market your product: Pinterest Pinterest is a photo-sharing site and is one of the most popular ways that people share content on the internet today. Users create ‘boards’ which are basically collections of ‘pins’-or images-related to particular topics. When someone likes your content, they can re-pin it to share it. The best way to get people to visit your boards is to use eye-catching images with your content. You can re-pin other content you find to fill up your boards with interesting materials and entice others to visit. YouTube YouTube videos tend to rank high in Google search results and can be a great way to boost your popularity. You can create and upload a video of anything related to your product; how-to, instructions, demonstrations, before and after, etc. Videos keep the reader engaged and can really show off your product’s benefits. Add a link at the end of each video to encourage people to visit your website. After all, every visit is a potential sale. Encourage members to visit your YouTube channel by commenting on other videos and interacting with the community. Google+ Google Plus content is highly favored on search results. Posting SEO-friendly articles will improve your chances of getting views and clicks. Google Plus has a couple of really unique features that come in handy. One is it’s ‘circles’ which allow you to group followers together into specific categories based on their interests. This allows you to target the proper audiences for your content. Another great feature is the Hangouts. Hangouts are video and audio recording that you create and share with your followers. Hangouts are automatically uploaded to YouTube and shared on your Google Plus page to attract even more viewers. Facebook It may seem like an easy way to promote your brand, especially if you have a lot of followers. However, what you need are followers who are interested in what you have to offer. Blog posts, images and videos tend to do very well on facebook. You can encourage visits by placing a link to your facebook page on your other social sites, so interested parties can click on it and follow you. Two great tools Facebook offers is their Pages Insights-a graph that shows how well your content is performing and Audience Highlights-which gives you the demographics of your visitors. This way you can see if you are reaching your target audience and adapt your content accordingly. All in all, social media is a marketing tool you don’t want to skip. You can grow by connecting accounts, getting shares and building followers. Engage with all the social media sites at first. Once you’ve established where most of your traffic is coming from, you can start to concentrate on utilizing those media platforms more. ...
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