The way financial organizations communicate with customers has a subtle yet strong impact on profitability. The research shows that people that interact with their banks using social media are 12% more likely to be mass affluent. Social media lovers are also 18% more likely to be emerging affluent. Surprisingly, if you want to reach an upscale audience, social media is one of the leading marketing channels to use.

Apart from social media interactions, you will also need to send customers direct mail, emails, pop-up messages, and other communications. Multiple touchpoints are necessary to ensure an omnichannel banking experience and make a customer journey customer-centric. For effective financial marketing campaigns, it’s also required to measure the performance of marketing channels, properly connect them, and solve a range of other tasks.

To help you deal with omni-digital banking consumers' experience with ease, we prepared this article. Read on to discover the possible ways to cope with the most common customer communication challenges.

Why Banks and Financial Organizations Need to Reach Customers Across Multiple Marketing Channels

As the quality of financial services improves, switching between banks becomes easier than ever. 46% of customers are rather or very likely to switch their current traditional banks if a new one offers a better deal. Hence, to keep their customers and attract new ones, banks and financial organizations are forced to compete. They have to ensure the best omni-digital banking consumer journey to stand out from the crowd. Only those who enable consumers to choose the most convenient communication and marketing channels win.

In addition to the competitive advantage, a proper customer reach helps banks to increase customer lifetime value. When you constantly communicate with customers, the chances they will start using some other of your services are higher. This translates into higher income and more satisfied consumers.

Finally, omni-digital banking consumer services are just the demand of the times. All the latest marketing trends are strongly omnichannel. Despite bringing challenges, their advantages are apparent and worth the try.

Read Takeaways About Omnichannel Marketing from Engage21

Customer Reach Challenges & Solutions Across the Customer Journey in Finances

When it comes to financial and banking services, the target audience is more careful than, let’s say, in retail. After customers have interacted with your company, they take more time to think about your product or service. Convincing them to use your offer requires stepping in the customer’s shoes and persuasive arguments. That’s the first challenge you'll face creating a customer journey in finances and banking. Here are some other issues to keep in mind and the possible solutions to them.

Customer Reach Challenge #1. Too Complex Software Integrations

To ensure customer interaction with your brand across multiple marketing channels, you will need to integrate many tools. That’s a common problem among financial and banking organizations with no marketing team or the necessary experience. They pile up random tools that seem to match but don’t complement each other. As a result, the marketing strategies of such financial organizations fail. For example, customers don’t receive a personalized email when a specific trigger event happens. This spoils their customer journey and experience.

Solution

To avoid integration problems for the omni-digital banking consumer experience, you should pick a platform with a broad integration network. It will serve as a backbone for all the tools you are going to integrate in the future. Inkit is one of the options to consider. It covers offline marketing needs and supports hundreds of third-party tools for building a seamless omnichannel customer journey.

Customer Reach Challenge #2. Outdated Knowledge About the Target Audience

Banks and financial organizations use lots of personal data to provide their services. They know where you live, how much you spend, your age, and other personal details. Yet without regular verification checks, this information becomes obsolete very soon. This is one of the customer reach pain points in banking and finances.

When the information stored by financial organizations is inaccurate, they cannot get in touch with customers. For example, if banks have outdated address data, they cannot deliver invoices, bills, statements, and other critical documents necessary to provide financial services. Print marketing materials also never get to the destination. The same works for other contact details used to communicate with omni-digital banking consumers, like emails or phone numbers.

Solution

To increase the accuracy of customer data, your financial organization should implement automated verification. Make sure to verify emails of newly registered online banking users by sending them a confirmation letter. Adopt address verification software to match physical addresses in your database with USPS records. Reliable data is critical at any stage of the customer journey.

Customer Reach Challenge #3. Proper Balance Between Offline and Online Marketing Channels

When mapping out the customer journey, many marketers get obsessed with digital channels. Even though online marketing plays a vital role in financial promotions, for an omnichannel experience, you will also need offline interactions. Hence, it may be challenging to decide what kinds of marketing efforts to focus on and how to combine them.

Solution

To smoothly align online and offline marketing channels in banking, you need to decide what customer touchpoints are a must-have. After that, it’s essential to implement software that automates customer interactions at these touchpoints and to set up a trigger-based workflow. As a result, customers will be automatically treated differently depending on their real-time actions and events. They will automatically get follow-up emails, enjoy personalized social media ads, etc.

Generally, we recommend connecting your emails, social media, online bank platforms, website, call center, and direct mail. These are the core channels through which a customer interacts with a bank or financial organization.

Discover 5 Steps to Achieve the Balance Between Paper and Digital

Customer Reach Challenge #4. Difficult Customer Analytics

An omni-digital banking consumer experience is complex. The customer journey map includes multiple touchpoints, from content marketing to social media ads. This complicates marketing analytics and prevents banks or financial organizations from measuring the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. They can only see the overall number of new leads, track income, and losses. Because of this, marketing teams cannot figure out which channel generates the best result and deserves additional investments and which doesn’t meet their expectations.

Solution

To avoid problems with measuring your omnichannel and omni-digital banking consumer campaigns, make sure to pick the right software. Opt only for the solutions that support detailed analytics of customer behavior across marketing channels. They should track open rates, clicks, scrolls, bounce rates, and other metrics that help you learn more about the customers.

The selected software must also smoothly integrate with a customer relationship platform of your choice. The CRM will aggregate all the collected data for detailed analytics.

How to Reach Omni-Digital Banking Consumers with Inkit

Inkit is a reach enablement platform (REP) that helps financial organizations and other businesses to stay in touch with customers. It automates both official communications and marketing customer interactions for comprehensive optimization.

Inkit offers three products that automate customer data verification (Verify), offline marketing (Send), and PDF document rendering (Render). They allow you to make customer communications more accurate, connect online and offline marketing channels for omnichannel experiences, keep track of all messages with PDF copy creation, and more.

Want to test Inkit capabilities or have any questions about how it works? Contact us for a demo.