Marketing complex products when you have low engagement rates is difficult. In this article we show how these types of challenges were tackled by an implementation of Odyssiant at RBS.
A good way to “herd the cats” and to understand the challenges for complex product marketing is by using the “4P’s of marketing” and reviewing the questions that you need to ask to define your marketing mix.
Product: What does your customer want from your product? Which needs does it satisfy? Financial Services products are complicated but more than that, identifying the needs that the product fulfils is very tough and can be an endless list – literally, anything money can buy! For a “simple view”, however, the things that money can buy can be “grouped” to give us some head start on the customer’s product needs, for example: home, car, security and a safe future which translate to mortgages, loans, insurance and pensions. But the transactional data doesn’t tell us anything about the customer’s needs. Obviously, this is at the highest level as there are as many financial products as there are needs that they fulfil but there is also the problem of who the customer is – for financial services it is B2C and B2B and actually whole lot of other models!
Place: How can customers discover your products? How can you access the right distribution channels? Do you need a sales force? How does “digital” work for your business?
Price: What is the value of your product to the customer? Is the customer price sensitive? How will you compare to the competition? Again, you have to connect to the needs that you are fulfilling indirectly to understand the value your product has to the customer.
Promotion: Where and when can you get your messages across to your target market? Timing is one the hardest things to get right for Financial Services. Firstly, timing is totally driven by the customer because if they don’t need a loan (or any other product), now you won’t get a response. Secondly, some financial products are very “low contact” (but with a long life) and maybe you only interact with your customer once per year so you don’t have the opportunity to engage. Traditional campaign approaches are all at a moment in time, therefore you will always be engaging only a small portion of your target audience for any campaign.
At RBS we took a different approach than the traditional methods to solve these challenges.
But first some context:
The focus of the Odyssiant implementation is for the Asset Finance product for businesses over £5m in turnover. The goal is to generate leads for the Lombard brand from marketing to be passed to relationship managers. Before the start of the project, no leads were being generated from marketing. Contact with customers was at most once per year with the relationship manager. Customers’ needs may be discovered by the relationship managers, but this is ad hoc and in their heads!
What the implementation of Odyssiant achieved for RBS:
- Consistent flow of leads created on a monthly basis.
- Leads are “marketing qualified” with identified needs and customer timing requirements.
- Ongoing sustained engagement – always on. Works on the customer’s time and is there when they are ready. (Engagement rates are significantly higher than for other communications and campaigns. Also, significantly higher than the industry average.)
- Detailed needs analysis by Persona and individual.
- Deep insight into buying, rollover, loyalty and other customer behavior’s not previously possible.
How:
The short answer is that RBS implemented the Odyssiant engagement AI!
The highlights of the implementation:
- Created a new way of communicating that creates sustained, ongoing engagement with customers, reigniting relationships that have gone quiet.
- Took customers on a buying journey using needs-based content using the engagement AI.
- Created way of communicating that is not constrained by marketing suppression flags and GDPR.
To read the full case study, with all the juicy details click here: http://www.odyssiant.com/all-rbs-case-study/
