At Kurtosys, we put customer experience at the heart of our activity, through our tool development, design principles and strategic guidance and support for clients.
Personalization plays a large part in customer experience – it can enhance your brand, support your business goals and drive revenue. But too often, asset managers execute personalization poorly.
Earlier this year, we gathered some of the most influential marketing leaders in asset management for a webinar that featured a frank discussion around personalization and gated content.
We debated whether asset managers have kept up with customers’ changing habits and perceptions, changed their tactics, and realized revenue gains through personalization.
For the webinar, I was joined by Keith Evins, head of UK marketing at Schroders; Ross Duncton, head of marketing at BMO GAM; and Dominic Traynor, global head of digital experience at BNY Mellon.
In this article, we bring you the key points that were discussed as well as some key take-outs and recommendations. The complete webinar can also be accessed here.
Changing customer expectations
We kicked off by looking at how customers expect more relevant personalization — rather than dated, cross-sell style product adverts. This creates a demand for information pertinent to each user.
One key point that emerged is that, if used properly, rich data enables you to have a better interaction and more valuable conversations with customers. So focus on quality over quantity, who you want to attract, and what you want to deliver.
Be aware of content available elsewhere – will people want to log in to get your information, or can they get it somewhere else without logging in? Is yours different enough?
Don’t overlook what customers find valuable by focusing too much on what you and your business value. Also, do you have the right software to do all this seamlessly? Whatever level of personalization you want to achieve, you need the right technology— whether it’s a full customer relationship management system, or basic contacts database and automation software.
What does personalization mean?
Many industries tend to execute personalization badly and with little regard for their responsibility towards data use. Asset managers are no different. For example, too often related products are poorly tagged or have spurious connections to mailing lists with little relevant content.
Our webinar commentators agreed that the key to personalization is to get the right message to the right person, at the right time. Rich user data and better interactions with audiences are only possible with a clear understanding of what you want to say to whom and when.
This should be part of your strategy. Another core component is therefore knowing your audience.
Do you understand what customers will find helpful or valuable and at what stage? What do they expect from you? A good reference point is the Customer Experience (CX) Pyramid from Gartner. How far up the pyramid is your content getting for your audiences?
source: Gartner.com
As an asset manager, you need to understand your audience well enough to know how and how much to personalize content; and when is the appropriate time in the funnel to ask customers for data. You should understand the quality and maturity of your data.
Accept you cannot always identify each individual, but that’s ok. And do not be too clever – play to the strengths of the data you have. But do tie all these factors to your overall strategy.
Audience participation
One of the most interesting questions from the webinar audience was whether messaging should come from a single person or the organization. Debate about this continues among asset managers. Reports from tested campaigns suggest one-to-one communications don’t always yield better results, though they may give you a better gut feel.
A continued theme throughout the session was about finding the right balance of both. It depends what content you are pushing, when. For example, if there a need for more dialogue, less broadcast and more personal communication work better. Some team members are concerned about their reputations and may not want to take a personal approach, but others are happy to.
Unsubscribes can increase if the content is not relevant or if users see it as too generic.
Conclusion
The conversation provided some fantastic insights into what asset managers are doing – and should do better – on personalization and gating content.
It is crucial to keep improving in these areas and connecting them to your marketing and commercial strategies. It has also never been more important to balance the capture of useable data with adding value to the customer experience, removing barriers and making it easier to transact online with your organization.
Takeaways
- Are you making it easy for customers to transact and exchange data?
- Are you using the insights you gain to change your engagement model?
- Are you contacting your customers at the right time, or simply because it is scheduled or targeted?
- Technology can enable rule-based personalization strategies that target relevant messaging and support revenue growth.
- Client profiles can enable tailored messaging and understanding of their needs and interests.
- Client relationships evolve constantly – personalization can support this.
- If we understand our clients’ interests, we can focus on sales enablement.
- It is important to keep showing benefits to the client through our personalized activity.
At Kurtosys, we are proud of our fast, scalable and easy to use technology. We love solving personalization problems with smart applications of technology and creativity.
Are you struggling to keep up with changing trends in personalization? Do you need to automate difficult and costly processes, deliver critical data at pace, or update your user interfaces and website design?
If so, get in touch today. We’d love to hear from you. Talk to our team and arrange a demonstration of how our tools can add value to your digital transformation.
