Marketing Automation: Which Tech Stack is Future?

Marketers and leader are always wondering making their campaigns more productive and efficient via multi-channel communication with the support of self-learning and decision-making emerging technologies is still something financial services are eager to implement. The article discusses those technologies and how to get the most out of them.

Continuously increasing market size in Financial services calls for Innovation!

Multi-channel campaigns have been a favorite recipe within digital marketing campaigns these days, according to Global Market Report 2021 by The Business Research Company financial services industry grows whopping $22.5 Trillion in 2021 and expected to reach $28.5 Trillion. Have we not experienced several times getting not relevant, a digital ad or an email talking about how great a certain credit card or a checking account is or how to better invest money? The Financial Services industry is one of the significant users striving to utilize technologies as much as possible to get the right message to retain, upsell, cross-sell existing clients, acquire potential new leads and nurture that relationship with communications in both B2B and B2C space.

To achieve these goals at the same time to maintain the scalability, technologies like artificial intelligence, data analytics, blockchain and RCA could be leveraged for more than what we could aim for. Here are top 4 rising technologies and cross fusion of these used in digital marketing within financial markets.

1)    Artificial Intelligence

Although FinTech companies utilize AI in processing client requests and transactions, for example multiple retail banks have employed Chatbots to deal with everyday customer problems and processes. No doubt AI brings great deal automation there, but it can significantly improve communication channels by identifying accurate segments and predictions backed by analyzed data on client’s preferences, past interactions. Segmentation based on AI can derive decisions on multiple factors transactions, demographics, firmographics, geographic and more to predict the probability of a particular group of clients deciding to make next financial decisions, trends and investment choices. In turn AI also reduces the information asymmetry and uncertainty of transactions.

The application of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ technology in the financial industry plays an important role as well in content customizations, aiming for the right time for personalized services. One example: How many database marketers or analysts wonder what would be the best time to send a marketing email campaign? Instead, many of the emails are being sent as mass email today. With machine learning it can be determined the optimized time when someone opens their emails ensuring higher open rate and click-through. Study from Deloitte shows that 56.5% companies using AI in Marketing for Content personalization Predive analytics.

In Customer segmentation different aspects of AI such as machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, self-supervised learning jointly accelerates the flow of real-time financial information and derive an accurate decision tree, propensity model or Support vector to get an accurate target and derive personalization for client groups.

2)    Blockchain

Blockchain is already exposed to applications in the fields of digital currency, cross-border payment, securities clearing, trade financing, cross-chain protocols, hybrid collaborative innovation, and DeFi (Decentralized Finance) reducing the operating costs of financial institutions. Blockchain can play vital role in -

•  Identifying the target audience: With a set of automated rules, campaigns can accurately pinpoint clients without risk of leveraging inflated metrics. Engagement will not only help existing clients but grow leads and subscribers.
• data management with utilizing the right KPI simply for decision making for the next best treatment for clients. 
• control and customization - dynamic ad, banner placements and content personalization can be much easier.

Due to blockchain’s decentralized nature, marketers can collect all campaign metrics without any misinterpretation, which would ultimately help to paint an accurate picture.

3)    Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Financial Institutions often use Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to eliminate manual errors in speeding up compliance processes, increasing procedural efficiency or account reconciliations, although there are use cases where RPA can be leveraged in optimizing digital marketing processes since running marketing campaigns is a repetitive task! 

Enhancing Customer engagement - With the rise of Robo advisors and self-financial planning. Enhancing the experience means a great deal in taking conversation from start to final conversion. Robotics processes can leverage unassisted, autonomous bots to react with client’s keyword inputs, one great example is chatbots integrations enabling compelling discussion with clients and providing repetitive research results to marketers.

Another characteristic of RPA is to maintain consistent data, speed up record level assignments across multiple systems which helps greatly in lead engagement much faster. 

With the added benefit of using machine learning with robotic process automation applies algorithms for learning insights and leverage experienced decision making in addition to specified rules. This reduces great time dependency on repeat analysis on online Ad placement campaigns.

4)    Cloud Computing and Big data

Organizations usually collect, store massive amounts of data and utilize for focused use cases, however many times data is scattered across multiple business units and in various formats and pose challenges in unification of all consumer profiles. Cloud services provide database marketers scalability, computations power, functionalities to find insights in the high-volume data in real time and can enable decision making for the marketing activation, as an alternative to building all infrastructure, data centers and designing solutions costing a fortune. When it comes to leverage cloud computing, Let's compare 3 service types based what’s offered and when to use:

• Infrastructure as a service (IaaS): For example, storage and servers from AWS, Azure, Rackspace, Linode, Google. Organizations get more control but need a team of professionals to manage applications, data, middleware and operating systems. 

Who can use- Organizations looking to control complete applications and use of infrastructure, budgetary concerns or companies that are growing fast and need for scalability in near future.

• Platform as a Service (PaaS): For example, where developers can build applications, automate on top of services provided by AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Google app engine or IBM Bluemix. Highly available, easier deployments but complex integrations and data security concerns on consumer’s personal data.

Who can use - Organizations looking to create their own Martech analytics applications, flexibility on deployment of project worked on by different team of developers.

• Software as a Service (Saas): These services pretty much use it out of the box such as Hubspot, adobe creative cloud or Salesforce. Sales and Marketers directly install an application or use a web browser. Organizations do not need technical development teams or spend on maintaining the hardware or software but have almost no control over applications, servers and limited customizations.

Who can use - Firms that are looking for a quick, easy way and launch their marketing engagement faster without losing time on maintaining services, hardware and software.

Takeaway:

The advancement in technology is the driving force that has facilitated the emergence and growth of digital marketing. Financial services with ingrained legacy processes often struggled with technology migrations however pandemic has given leaders and marketers a new outlook towards leveraging deeper insights with creating an omni-channel experience. As being global nature of financial services products and services technologies driving marketing are critical part of the organization in retention and leads generation. As the technology and automation continue to evolve, digital marketing campaigns automation will be easier and widely used.