Three Ways That Funds Can Ride the Hyper-Personalisation Wave
Why personalise when you can hyper-personalise? For some fund marketers, this may seem like running before walking. But when funds overcrowd the digital room vying for attention, the only way to truly grab investors is to appeal to their hyper-specific preferences.
So much so, we’re even seeing the B2B space pumping budgets into YouTube adverts that get triggered by their customers’ digital interactions. Data is integral to compete in the personalisation game – learning who’s on the other side of the screen, and knowing a lot about why they’re reading, listening or signing up to content. However, data is only the jump off point. Tailoring messages to investors is a highly synchronised dance also involving marketing strategy, input from relationship teams and automation platforms. Elsewhere, AI maturity is becoming a more necessary skill, given how many funds are implementing its data processing capabilities more with each passing day.
According to Infosys Finacle and Qorus, despite financial services honing personalised campaigns in their go-to market plans, only half go further in striving for hyper-personalisation with artificial intelligence, data management and micro-segmentations. Understanding the technicalities of language learning models or trusting outputs prone to hallucination may be off-putting. Still, a lot of fund brands should be focusing on integrating AI in their CRM and email automation platforms to make the most of their own data, surfacing the recommended content and potential investors that matter.
AI fluency builds with time and experimenting with the technology for day-to-day demand generation and analytics tasks can be instrumental to maintain data quality, and put personalised fund information, thematic content, or nurture emails in front of those more likely to invest. As McKinsey finds, it could grow marketing ROI up to 30%!
What is Hyper-Personalisation, Anyway?
This big trend in fund marketing requires gathering an awful lot of digital marketing data and detailing user profiles accordingly, to strategically target engaged investors. Firstly, automating this task hinges on advanced AI technology, where algorithms can condense, segment, and visualise investor preferences clearly. After this, client-facing teams can truly start understanding the online activity they see, then put on their psychology caps to gauge repeated behaviours and deliver brilliant, tailored experiences as a result.
In that way, hyper-personalisation is part art form, part data science. It goes a few steps beyond generalising investors based on their past portfolio interest, demographics, or region, to making detailed insights more actionable. In essence, this strategy is about being as one-to-one as possible: identifying individual challenges, and providing insights and solutions to their ‘story’ and financial goals right when they need it.
Centralise Your Data Points
When we receive hyper-personalised messages to our inboxes, we may jump to the conclusion that the sending company’s data cleanliness is so top-notch that it’s almost like magic. That’s probably untrue. While we all do our best to combine behavioural data across multiple social websites, portals, emails and more, you cannot adhere to everyone, everywhere, all the time. Instead, hyper-personalisation relies on serving consistent offerings to the most engaged customers first – your ideal audience – after identifying them amongst the masses.
A central repository is paramount to compartmentalise your sprawling prospect base with AI, in more granular groupings than broad categories:
At a base level, you can identify your key targets if they accrue high lead scores, group inbounds according to which platforms they have arrived from, or flag when existing customers are snooping around additional funds they have yet to invest in.
CRMs kitted with AI automations can extract even finer details, helping marketers and salespeople reach out to engaged contacts with campaigns fully attributed to their age, lifestyle choices, locations, financial goals, risk appetites, and investing experience.
Dashboards also help track investor’s online activity against ROI-related indicators, so long as a fund marketer sets them up in the right way––for instance, measuring inflows according to increasing activity in a particular jurisdiction. Knowing these metrics, it’s worth feeding popular thematic content to similar investor profiles and draw them toward a conversion.
Don’t Be Afraid To Experiment
AI is no longer the big sci-fi experiment of the past. Underlying automations on many digital marketing platforms, it’s a more subtle and actionable technology than most realise for data processing tasks. So long as the fund marketer retains control over their inputs and what the AI churns out at the end, it’s a great tool to tailor outreach to human investors:
AI’s pattern recognition shows historical touchpoints over time, and can therefore offer content recommendations based on these bespoke interactions.
AI can also autonomously learn individual behaviours over time, and optimise their future experiences should a fund marketer want to implement ‘dynamic content’ on their website UX, essentially customising front-end content based on these actions.
Automated remails can also be set up by marketers, triggered by recent activity to reengage investors. E.g., if one signs up for a webinar but doesn’t join, an automation will send a follow up with further steps that could reignite communications.
For split testing (or A/B testing), AI can segment hyper-specific ‘research’ groups for you to road-test how hyper-localised content resonates with certain investor profiles, before rolling out to other user bases.
AI-backed automations make discovering hyper-individual tastes in fund products or investment thought leadership thick and fast. When this data is capitalised on by the marketers and salespeople, it results in more meaningful, personal messages.
Get Quick Wins With Email
Building templates for fund updates, factsheets, or monthly content rundowns is a sure-fire way to not only maintain brand consistency, but account for interchangeable components and salutations that increase the hyper-personalisation factor:
Templates can be segmented according to A/B tests, adhering content to different areas of interest per investor personas.
Region-specific emails can be enhanced with AI tools to identify language-specific nuances, currencies, political content, market sentiment, and translations to make them respectful, timely and professional.
Likewise, jurisdictional compliance can be covered with disclaimers or risk warnings able to be swapped in and out as necessary. Regulation goes hand in hand with crafting great investor experiences, rather than a hindrance.
It could be tempting to go all out and fire off hyper-personalised campaigns across the board, but it’s a slow burning mix of upfront marketing strategy, and choosing useful automations that makes data discovery simple. By incrementally building on your MarTech stack expertise and getting confident with CRM automations and integrations to gather the most pertinent data, you’ll put out exacting content to the investors you know in detail.
In doing so, jumping from personalisation to hyper-personalisation doesn’t feel like a quantum leap, just a necessary progression in the constant evolution of the modern digital fund marketer!
ProFundCom can help fund marketers personalise their content to the most engaged using tools and strategies tailored to the financial industry:
Personalised Content Recommendations: Using data analytics and user behaviour tracking, ProFundCom can recommend tailored content to website visitors and leads based on their interests and engagement history.
Unified Data Management: Fund marketers can consolidate customer data, engagement metrics, and campaign performance from various sources to gain a comprehensive view of their audience and marketing activities in one platform.
Automated Lead Nurturing: Set up automated lead nurturing workflows to engage with leads at different stages of the customer journey, delivering targeted content, follow-up emails, and personalised messages to drive conversions.
Cross-Selling Opportunities: ProFundCom’s reporting capabilities highlight cross-selling opportunities by identifying when a prospect shows interest in additional products or services.
Email Marketing Campaigns: With ProFundCom’s email marketing platform, create targeted campaigns that promote brand messaging, thought leadership content, and industry insights to a segmented audience, increasing brand visibility and recognition.
