As you grow your bank to serve more and more customers, your regular marketing tasks can become increasingly laborious and time-consuming. If you find yourself drowning in work, manually sending follow-up emails to every customer who fills out your contact form, you’re doing it wrong. Know that there is a better way. And that’s automation.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is the use of software to automate your marketing activities. In most cases, an action taken by a prospective customer will set off a chain of one or more actions that move them closer to your goal, without you doing any of it manually. This reduction of manual labor on your end is why automation might be one of the most valuable digital marketing tools.
One great example is email automation. Say you’re offering a free mortgage payment calculator on your bank’s website, and you require that visitors enter their email to receive access to it. Naturally, you want to make the most of this new email address you’ve been gifted.
Without automation, you would have to add that email to a list and manually send them a follow-up email to start nurturing that potential customer. With automation, you don’t have to do a thing. The prospective customer receives a pre-written email automatically with additional content about buying a home and ways to get in contact with a lender. Then, they’ll continue to receive emails related to their interests based on your preset timeline. Fortunately, you’ve already prewritten these emails and put them into an automated workflow, so this process takes zero work on your part.
Automation makes your job easier and makes you better at your job at the same time. And it’s why more than 68 percent of businesses are using automation in some way. Starting to get the picture? Here are the things we love about using marketing automation and how you can do it yourself.
It Saves You Time
Marketing automation helps you work smarter, not harder. It has the ability to save your staff many hours of work, freeing up their time to do more in other areas. Spend the time at the front end building quality emails, creating and scheduling social media posts or crafting ads for retargeting, then start the machine and let it run.
It Helps You Scale Your Business
The beauty of marketing automation is that it allows you to scale your business easily. No matter how many new customers bank with you, the process and level of effort remain generally the same. You can serve more customers and draw new ones without having to use more of your precious resources to do so.
It Fosters Lead Nurturing
Automation is a great asset for lead nurturing and making sure your bank stays top-of-mind for customers. You can easily develop drip campaigns to keep your leads engaged and moving toward desired actions. Drip campaigns generally consist of a series of touchpoints initiated at specific times or following specific actions.
These campaigns can be as simple or complex as you want, and they aim to follow and feed a customer’s interests based on the actions they take. A triggering action might include signing up for a newsletter, subscribing to your blog, downloading an offer on your website, or clicking on a particular link in one of your emails. So, no matter where someone is in the process of a financial endeavor, you can meet them where they’re at and engage with them in a way that’s relevant.
How Do I Do It?
Thankfully, there is a long list of unique marketing automation systems that offer solutions for banks. It's important to note that before shopping for a marketing automation software system, your bank needs to clearly define the goals it wants to achieve from the software. In addition to the goals of the company, defining a marketing automation budget should be another pre-shopping consideration.
As you shop for a marketing automation system, research all of the attributes of a system and keep in mind how each system would integrate with your current marketing process. Utilize those free demos and video tutorials! It's easy to find a seemingly well-priced marketing system only to discover that it doesn’t integrate well with your company or it isn’t federally compliant for banks, and features that you're paying for will go unused.
At PRIME, we’re a HubSpot agency partner. We might be biased, but we’ve found it to be one of the most valuable marketing automation systems we can offer to our financial institution clients. Looking for an experienced partner to help manage automation for you? Let’s talk!
If you enjoyed this edition of PRIME Pulse, take a look at some of our other related articles:
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- Social Media for Financial Institutions: What's Relevant?
- How to (Effectively) Gather Feedback About Your Financial Institution