Digital Transformation in Financial Services has been accelerated by COVID-19 - as a lot of consumers are making purchase decisions online, and as a result, competing online is harder than ever. 88 percent of consumers buy where they receive personalized, cross-channel messaging, and brands with cross-channel strategies have 23x higher customer satisfaction rates. This makes omnichannel presence and omnichannel marketing analytics critical for providers in the financial services landscape.
Omnichannel is about a consistent and seamless engagement between buyer persona and their financial institutions via multiple channels. Finance sectors and Financial Services Marketing can use omnichannel to not only meet customer's explicit needs but also anticipate their needs and preferences.
The goal of omnichannel marketing for financial services is to provide relevant and appropriate information across multiple channels that connect to create a coherent message without becoming monotonous. Many businesses attempt, but fail, to create an omnichannel experience for every channel and customer. Leaders should instead focus on the top three or four cross-channel customer interactions.
One of the European banks that implemented large-scale changes saw sustainable revenue growth of up to 20% over two to three years, indicating that the benefits of optimizing omnichannel capabilities are continuous and significant.
This trend toward more personalized experience and customer-centric services and offerings means that staying ahead of digital marketing trends is critical for reaching new and existing audiences.
While on the one hand, a McKinsey article states that a lot of consumers in retail banking propositions like savings accounts and credit cards, in Northern Europe are now willing to purchase digitally. On the other hand, loans and mortgages, have much lower digital purchase rates and a large gap between willingness to buy online and actual purchase rates. This implies that increasing digital sales will necessitate a multi-touch approach that integrates with customer preferences for using offline channels to discuss purchase decisions, especially for more complex products.
If your company is among those still struggling to get it just right, here are the examples of the brands that have achieved customer experience goals through their omnichannel strategy.
- Stripe:
Stripe Payments is a payment processing platform. Stripe partners with companies such as Shopify, MindBody, and DocuSign to help their customers boost growth and revenue. Stripe payments are scalable, omnichannel, and have high uptime.
Stripe assists businesses in growing, globally, and increasing conversions in other countries by providing customers with their preferred omnichannel payment options via a unified integration. Following are some of Stripe’s highlight-worthy CX-enhancing offerings:
- Wallets: Wallet payment methods that digitally store credit and debit cards allow your customers to check out faster.
- Bank redirects: Increase conversion by offering customers a more convenient and secure way to pay from their bank account.
- Buy now, pay later: Allow your consumers to pay in a variety of ways, increasing their purchasing growth and enhancing conversion and order value.
- Cash-based vouchers: Customers can use cash-based vouchers to pay bills and online purchases in-store.
- Currencies: Process charges and display prices in the currency of the customer's choice to increase sales and help customers avoid conversion costs.
Stripe and Wix have expanded their partnership to provide businesses with robust omnichannel solutions.
Adding, Stripe's programmable point of sale, Wix can provide stripe customers with everything they need to run and scale an omnichannel business, including the ability to accept payments across multiple channels. All of this is done with a 360-degree view of their business activity, including website creation and management as well as logistics and operations.
Example 1:
Lightspeed is a large-scale commerce platform used at over 115,000 locations that collectively drive $29B+ in gross transaction volume annually. Lightspeed partnered with Stripe to power omnichannel payments in the US and Canada.
Stripe Terminal allows Lightspeed to expand its offerings to omnichannel payments, further helping to drive the long-term success of its growing customer base.
Example 2:
SHOPLINE is global omnichannel e-commerce that has partnered with a stripe full-featured platform. Merchants can register a Stripe account at SHOPLINE’s dashboard and accept credit card payments instantly. Payments will go straight into your Stripe balance right away.
Figure 4: Stripe payment app website traffic v/s mobile app users by SimilarWeb
- Robinhood:
Robinhood has brought up investing under the social finance umbrella. The company behind the popular trading app has a web platform to help deliver the second part of its mission to make stock trading accessible to everyday people: which helps them make more informed decisions. It’s adding tools, features, and information on other user’s activities that makes the experience feel more like a social network.
Robinhood, which began operations in 2013, claims to have surpassed 3 million users and a transaction volume of more than $100 billion. The way profiles set the groundwork for Robinhood as a social network is particularly intriguing. Using the fee-free app, Robinhood consumers have saved over $1 billion in commission fees.
Baiju Bhatt the CEO of Robinhood touted that Robinhood has “the best organic growth of any financial product,” claiming that it has more engagement than all of its immediate competitors combined.
Robinhood pulls info from FactSet, Morningstar, and other trusted sources to figure out which stocks and ETFs go into sector lists
The original Robinhood app allows users to make predictions such as "17 percent growth in Facebook share price over the next 11 weeks," along with comments explaining why. It showed users’ prediction accuracy, their average holding time for assets, a point score for smart foresight, and community BUY or SELL ratings on stocks.
Robinhood users are used to social networking and the way it keeps users locked in because they don't want to flee their community.
Figure 6: Robinhood is now the number one app in the App Store in the US after a stock-buying frenzy sparked by social media Source - Robinhood
Robinhood product manager Shanthi Shanmugam - says when thinking about how to reflect who you are as an investor, they looked at how other apps represent and it felt natural to leverage a design that felt more user friendly. It was easy to imagine this as a playlist you might find on your favorite platform when assisting people in grouping their investment ideas. Offering social validation for trading helps Robinhood earn more from its customers, even if their total account balances are small.
Robinhood states more social features built safely, more guarantee, more trading, more revenue. Robinhood has raised $910 million through its app and social presence.
Robinhood used referral marketing in a unique way to build hype and trust, which resulted in nearly a million signups before they even launched. Because of its simplicity, their strategy can be easily replicated. Referral marketing is one of the fintech industry’s most influential user acquisition tactics.
Figure 7: Robinhood desktop user's v/s mobile users by SimilarWeb
Figure 8: Robinhood Social Channel presence and traffic (Source - SimilarWeb)
- Cred:
Cred is a forward-thinking fintech company that aims to change Indian’s attitude toward credit cards and personal finance. It is currently focusing on the specific niche of credit benefits, with the goal of being the first movers in the category.
Cred, as an organization, works through its app to facilitate its users' credit card transactions and reward them with Cred Coins, which can be used within the app to redeem discounts and cashback.
Cred, in a nutshell, rewards its users for paying their credit card bills on time. Its founder's vision is to create India a creditworthy country by paying credit bills on time and enhancing credit scores.
Figure 9: Source: Cred
Target Audience of Cred:
Cred's current multichannel marketing activities are centered on capturing the attention of Generation Y. It presently does not charge its users any entry fees. It has also not incentivized its audience with any sort of membership. It has, however, collaborated with various brands, to whom they charge a commission in exchange for giving them a space on the CRED App.
Figure 10: Cred partnered brands (Source - Cred)
CRED Stash, in partnership with IDFC First Bank, was established to provide loans to its subscribers. With aggressive marketing strategies and reward offerings such as cash backs, huge discounts, etc., Cred is currently solely focused on targeting its niche.
Consider Cred's usage of omnichannel marketing for its financial services. It might be as complex as viral marketing campaigns, or it can be something as straightforward as producing simple finance-related blogs, and rewarding visitors with cashback and discounts. Uniqueness and the potential to establish brand awareness and brand recall are two elements that all strategies have in common, though.
During the last three seasons, Cred has been an associate sponsor of the Indian Premier League (IPL).
Figure 11: Source: Cred
Furthermore, Cred had correctly capitalized on the bitcoin trend, as the launch of this campaign coincided with Bitcoin trading at an all-time peak and was the hot topic across the globe.
Figure 12: Source: Cred
This campaign marked Cred's first foray into television advertising. It publishes finance-related content on YouTube as part of its CRED – On the Money series.
Figure 13: Source: Cred
This campaign had a tremendous impact on Cred, resulting in a 700% increase in Cred App downloads.
As stated, the goal of Cred is to educate Indians on financial literacy and to make them trustworthy credit holders. It also feeds into this with blogs on its website about credit cards, general finance, and fintech.
Your Financial Services Marketing Strategy Using Omnichannel Approach
As a Financial Services company, you will need to tweak your marketing based on your customer’s emotions towards financial transactions, and by integrating the power of customer segmentation (banking, savings, investments, etc.). You’ll need to meet customers where they are, so they know you care about them.
Are there any areas of concern? Are there any specific financial products that they are searching for right now? What do they want from a financial product right now?
As a result, omnichannel in financial services includes the crucial human element. The banking sector must effectively blend digital and human channels to provide an omnichannel offering that is fluid and easy to navigate.
To remain relevant and competitive in an overcrowded market, you must use multichannel marketing. Also having so much competition means you need to figure out efficient and effective ways to stand out and really connect with your consumers.
Empower your customers to interact with your brand via any media channel, any device, anywhere with a personalized, effortless, and consistent customer experience throughout their customer journey.
As a final piece of advice, creating an effective omnichannel customer experience needs you to overcome some significant challenges across various aspects of people, processes, and technology. Knowing the customer journey inside and out, giving consumers options, and incorporating a human touch will help get you to stay on the right track.
Altudo enables you to define and implement a market-leading omnichannel marketing strategy for the Financial Services sector, focused on your customer lifecycle. Without an Omnichannel campaign mindset, you may be lacking behind on influential opportunities to improve your financial services brand experience across all channels, at every stage of the sales funnel. To help you boost your digital marketing approach and gain more customers, we offer inbound marketing solutions catering to your industry.
Discover our digital customer experience (CX) solutions that is geared to the fast-evolving fintech and financial services landscape. Get in touch!
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