They’re not bright, colourful, fancy or loud. They rarely get to go to glitzy award ceremonies. And they’re never first in line when the budgets are handed out.

But every Financial Services (FS) marketing department has them. And in our experience they can make up around 80% of what your customers see from your brand.

Mandatory and Regulatory communications are the Cinderella of Financial Services marketing. Hiding away in a dusty corner, under the shadow of their higher profile big sister (discretionary marketing).

An unloved and overlooked underdog (think how your customers feel!)

We know these communications are tricky. We’re not denying that. 

They are expensive and a great deal of hard work. They need to communicate complex changes, bad news and mundane details to apathetic customers. And their effectiveness can be hampered by a lot of internal ambiguity, numerous stakeholders and a hard stop on the deadline (just don’t mention pumpkins). 

Yet these communications are crucial to the everyday experience of your brand. It’s these letters and emails (about changes to terms and conditions, fee increases, and bank errors) that customers remember when it comes to deciding on whether to take a new product or service from you, or switch to a shinier, sexier competitor (such as rapidly growing challenger banks like Monzo and Starling). 

This is the place where customer loyalty is won or lost. 

We strongly believe it’s time for these communications to be let out of the proverbial cellar, and put into the spotlight. Like Cinderella, they are destined for much greater things. 

A succession of external factors like GDPR, digitisation of services, and branch closures has meant that direct interactions between the customer and the brand are becoming less frequent. Therefore, mandatory communications have become an increasingly important brand touchpoint, perhaps second only to mobile apps. 

They ought, then, to be tailored to fit each individual customer’s needs as perfectly as a custom-made glass slipper. 

In reality, our research has shown that the bulk of what lands on the doormat is in fact a very poor fit for each individual customer. The communications we’ve reviewed tend to lack any of the same attention to best practice that you would typically see with discretionary marketing communications. 

And there will be hundreds of millions of them being sent to customers every year. Which means that timely, accurate and personalised delivery is a surefire way to secure a competitive advantage for your brand.

Financial Services brands could be missing out on millions

Of course, we understand that improving M&R communications is not as simple as waving a magic wand. 

That said, we believe there are very good reasons to tackle those challenges head-on in a way that reduces, rather than adds to the complexity involved.

For one thing, it’s not just the customer experience that suffers. UK Banks and Building Societies are throwing away millions of pounds each year on under-optimised M&R activity. 

Whether it’s high print and postage costs due to poorly constructed messaging; sending multiple communications to customers when one would suffice; perceived inability to use digital channels as the default medium; or the high costs of telephony support to customers that are concerned (or just confused) about what the latest letter actually means. 

The status quo is high on waste, low on efficiency, and few are pleased with the outcome. Surely that’s a good reason to recognise the hidden value in your M&R communications and elevate them to a starring role.

Thankfully, there are some proven tools for optimising these communications (that don’t awkwardly expire at midnight).

Behavioural economics holds the clues to radically better content design, with improved wording and layouts that take people’s natural psychological biases into account. And better content design in M&R comms means less printing and more informed, more confident customers, who go on to make better financial decisions. They also place fewer “what the hell is this?” calls to call centres. Better CX and lower costs. Win-win.

Channel choice. Some customers prefer to get comms through email, but many banks are still using print as the dominant channel for M&R comms. The requirement for a ‘durable medium’ is enforced by the FCA, but this needn’t rule out using email as the primary channel (albeit it helps to have automated bouncebacks in place like we do for our major clients).

One message per customer. With a UK average of 1.2 current accounts per customer, and that data potentially being held in multiple sources, it’s easy to see why banks might take the less risky route and send one message per account (rather than one message per customer). But with smart data aggregation in place, the process of removing duplicate messages and sending one message per customer can cut 20% of the total production cost of the project.

Smoother processes. The number of people and teams involved in M&R activity can lead to rushed processes, full of errors, rework, and frustrated staff. Yet, the risk of making changes to established processes (however painful and inefficient they might be) can be daunting for senior management and leads to inertia. By introducing a collaborative planning approach, we get client teams together early - across disciplines – to define the critical path for each project and prioritise the customer experience. This aligns the vision, clarifies the capabilities across data and content, allows for leaner production, and allows for change while also reducing risk. 

Ok, so maybe we’re stretching the Cinderella analogy to breaking point. We may not be able to guarantee a fairytale happy ending, but we can make a real impact that benefits both your brand and customer.

By using a truly behavioural approach to content and design, as well as changing the way data and content are processed, we’ve been able to help our Financial Services clients create millions of communications that deliver the right information, to the right customer in the most engaging way possible.

Better financial decision making and understanding for customers, which means happy regulators, increased customer loyalty and significant cost savings. As well as an invitation to every (award) ball. 

To find out more about how we can help you improve your customers' experience at every touchpoint, get in touch. 

The ‘Cinderella Syndrome’ that could be costing FS firms millions

Mandatory & Regulatory communications are often unloved & overlooked in financial marketing. However it's time for them to be put into the spotlight. 

Mandatory & Regulatory communications are often unloved & overlooked in financial services marketing. However it's time for these communications to be put into the spotlight. 

The ‘Cinderella Syndrome’ that could be costing FS firms millions | Signal Blog 

Mandatory & Regulatory communications are often unloved & overlooked in financial services marketing. However it's time for these communications to be put into the spotlight.

The ‘Cinderella Syndrome’ that could be costing FS firms millions | Signal Blog

GDPR one year on - a legitimately interesting time for marketers - Signal.pdf

GDPR was one year old on the 25th May. But from a consumers’ perspective it seems like marketing communications have hardly changed since the regulations were introduced. 

In fact, over 70% of those surveyed by Marketing Week said that the relevancy of emails they have received is either no different or has got worse. 

On the face of things this seems a little odd. This could have been a watershed moment for the marketing industry, where we were forced to think and act differently in how we plan and deliver communications to customers. 

GDPR provides brands with a golden opportunity to adopt a much more tailored, timely and relevant communications strategy; a catalyst to improve marketing effectiveness and, critically, create a better experience for customers. 

Brands who fully embrace the spirit of the regulations in this way will therefore have a significant competitive advantage.

Many brands will have quite rightly had to prioritise time, effort and money on the core tasks of ensuring compliance. This has involved a lot of complicated IT tasks, especially for those with big legacy infrastructures. For example, there have been essential data processing and storage changes, which are complex to implement. These include responding to the right to be forgotten and subject access requests within the strict time periods.

Legitimate interest has protected the status quo

The ICO published guidance for when 'Legitimate Interest' can be used as a legal basis for processing data. The guidelines are pretty broad however, giving many brands licence to use Legitimate Interest as a rationale for maintaining their existing strategies for contacting customers.

Changing marketing practices is always harder than not changing

This means there is currently no regulatory burning bridge forcing brands to drastically change. And change is always harder than doing nothing, especially when existing activity is more often than not still profitable. Decision-makers need convincing that less contact, or a more appropriate level of contact is better for business as well as for the customer. 

Moving towards more personalised, relevant communications that also nurture and protect customer privacy may be hard for big brands, but it’s also inevitable given how customer expectations are evolving. Which means that brands who embrace the spirit of GDPR at this early stage will quickly differentiate themselves from their less proactive competitors. 

There are three key aspects to doing this well:

1. Modernise data strategy and management practice

We know that customers prefer personalised, more relevant communications and are more likely to respond to relevant offers. Refining what data you request at the point of collection can do more than just ensure compliance. It can also help to gain more insight into each individual’s interests and preferences, thereby enabling better segmentation to target the right people much more efficiently and effectively. 

2. Develop a data-led contact strategy that’s based on value-exchange

Personalised communications is one thing. However a contact strategy that moves from a push to a pull model of communications needs to factor in a number of things; the volume that are sent; their relevance; which channels they are sent through, and considerations on what else is being communicated. 

A recent survey commissioned by Google suggests that consumers expect to get value from their loyalty or sharing of personal information. Permissions are a precious commodity, so personalised and relevant offers at scale is the opportunity, or rather it is the ‘must do’. Their research calls out that relevant offers is not just a nice-to-have, but can lead to resentment and disengagement if it doesn’t happen. 

A GDPR-friendly contact strategy will therefore be built on triggers and interaction opportunities where there is a genuine value exchange for consumers.

3. Lay the operational groundwork and celebrate small wins

There are two key technical considerations for making a contact strategy work. The decisioning (the brains), and the data processing and messaging composition (the engine). Quite often the decisioning is well taken care of, with triggers built, next best action algorithms written and technology deployed. But the composition part, where data meets content, might not get picked up. Or the sales pitch of a specific technology platform might not quite match the reality of the quality of the source data. 

While navigating these roadblocks can undoubtedly be daunting, a ‘think big, start small’ and ‘test and learn’ approach is likely to be the best way forward, including being able to track progress and demonstrate what’s working and what’s not is essential. 

Once you have a proof of concept in place, it will be easier to persuade colleagues of the benefits of taking action. This can be achieved by partnering with people who have already successfully managed similar programmes of change.

Conclusion: This is a second chance for brands

One year later, GDPR may not have yet had the expected impact when it comes to progressive communication strategies, but that doesn’t mean that brands should rest on their laurels. We may well see tighter guidelines on Legitimate Interest from the ICO in the future, for example, if they want to prompt more meaningful action from brands. And we have yet to see what impact the new ePrivacy regulation will have when it finally lands.

In the meantime, with basic compliance now in place for most organisations, the first anniversary of GDPR provides marketers with a perfect opportunity to take a step back and reflect on progress so far. Those who use the learnings of this last 12 months to reboot their strategies and take small steps in the right direction are likely to find a very receptive audience amongst existing and potential customers. 

Taking a progressive approach to implementing GDPR is therefore not only the right thing to do, but is also likely to lead to much more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.

Originally published by the Financial Services Forum.  

Signal helps brands get better results, faster. Find out more about our services.

GDPR one year on - a legitimately interesting time for marketers

Why brands still have time to fully embrace the spirit of GDPR, and how it can provide a better customer experience (and competitive advantage).

GDPR one year on - a legitimately interesting time for marketers | Signal Blog

https://cellosignal.com/blog/gdpr-one-year-on-a-legitimately-interesting-time

The traditional view of CRM (Customer Relationship Marketing) is too simplistic. Relationships, by their nature, are constantly changing - and our approach to communicating with customers must evolve to reflect this. 

In her recent opinion piece for The Drum, Signal senior planner Joie Chapple makes the case for viewing CRM not just in terms of making the most of which channels are being used, but also in terms of the overall customer experience: 

“All of this doesn’t mean the demise of email and DM as a key tool to build relationships. These channels can still help to build trust if they provide real value, but we need to use them in a way that considers the broader context of how a customer experiences your brand.”

Joie also addresses ways in which agencies can work together with clients to support and challenge them to create better experiences for their customers.

Read the full article at The Drum or below.

To find out more about how we’ve helped clients improve their CRM programme, read our case studies for npower and the British Heart Foundation.

Redefining CRM: relationships are about experiences, not channels

Agencies and clients often think of Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM) in very narrow terms, focused solely on what channels are being used. But most of us would agree that the opportunity to strengthen, change, or damage a relationship occurs at every brand interaction.

 Wouldn’t it be better if we all began to consider all of our activity; online, offline, digital, real life, and the product or service itself, to be a form of CRM?

Ask a typical agency or brand manager how they would define CRM and they would probably describe it along these lines: 

‘Direct communications between a customer and a brand, with the aim of building a long-term relationship with the customer, and delivered via email, DM or another 1-2-1 channel.’

 As our ability to analyse, interpret and utilise customer data has grown exponentially, so has a laser like focus on tailoring, automating and optimising CRM as a channel. And for many brands, this has undoubtedly improved the relevance and effectiveness of their communications.

 But the old definition is still too simplistic. If we really want our direct marketing efforts to connect with customers, we need to break down silos and think much more broadly.

 Think about a brand you have a connection with. How did it form? How would you express it? How would you say it gets stronger or weaker? 

 Take my mum for example. She’s a lifelong advocate of a Center Parcs holiday. We’ve been going there as a family since shell-suits were acceptable and have photo albums dedicated solely to documenting our highly embarrassing badminton antics. A pretty solid brand-customer relationship, then. So, I asked her how she views it:

 “We get a discount every time we book because we’ve been so many times, and I like the little chat we have when we arrive at the arrivals lodge and that they can see we’ve been before – it’s great that they care about the memories we’ve created as a family. They are also really good if something goes wrong. I remember Dad once put the electric kettle on the hob (don’t ask) and within an hour they had replaced the entire hob, no questions asked. I loved the recent advert with the bears, it made me feel all nostalgic about when you were kids.”

 Note she did not mention the ‘CRM’ email she gets every fortnight, or the occasional glossy brochure.

CRM is not a channel, it is every brand experience

 If as customers we view relationships as experiences, not channels, and don’t silo the interactions we have with brands, why do we do so as marketers? It’s ironic that the activities we’ve historically defined as being responsible for ‘managing relationships’ may not even feature in a customer’s view of their relationship with a brand!

Of course, this differs dependent on the market, brand, product or stage of that relationship, and different experiences will play more of a role at different times.

Center Parcs is likely to have an easier job of delighting customers at every stage of the process because they are associated with pleasurable memories. While low engagement brands, who provide necessities such as bank accounts and home energy, need to work harder to engage customers – which makes getting CRM right even more essential.

 But with so many brands using the same tactics, it’s no surprise that people are either overwhelmed by the sheer volume of brand communications, or underwhelmed by the generic nature of a lot of the content. According to our email delivery partner Communicator, email unsubscribes doubled in the lead up to the GDPR deadline on May 25th and this doesn’t account for all of those who simply ignored re-permissioning requests.

If consumers aren’t finding enough value in these traditional forms of CRM, what’s next for us as agencies, clients and brands in our quest to build valuable and sustainable relationships?

Brands need a holistic Customer Relationship Strategy

All of this doesn’t mean the demise of email and DM as a key tool to build relationships. These channels can still help to build trust if they provide real value, but we need to use them in a way that considers the broader context of how a customer experiences your brand.

 It is about picking the right way for your brand to achieve its goals, not jumping to traditional CRM thinking as the answer by default. There is little point in investing in a specific channel if there are critical problems elsewhere having a much bigger effect on the way you attract, develop and retain customers.

We should be developing holistic customer relationship strategies that meet (or exceed) expectations - regardless of ‘channel’. It must be driven by need and desire, and by asking what kind of relationship you want with your customers, what do they want from you and how best can that be done at every relevant touchpoint?

Unfortunately, big organisations are often not set up to facilitate this way of thinking. Legacy structures can create silos and put invisible barriers between brand, sales, digital, retail, etc. An external catalyst is often required to break the inertia and implement new approaches.

Agencies need to play a fundamental role supporting and challenging their clients to create better customer experiences:

Bringing client teams together, when politics or structure make this a challenge;

Relentlessly championing the consumer, when it’s easy to forget who you’re talking to;

Taking a holistic view of experience, when the nitty gritty takes over the big picture.

If clients and agencies can work together to make this happen, we can collectively do a much better job of developing a meaningful, long-lasting relationship with customers – and finally do proper justice to the concept of CRM.

Relationships are constantly changing - and so must our approach to communicating with customers.

Relationships are constantly changing - and our approach to communicating with customers must evolve to reflect this.

CRM is about experiences, not channels | Signal Blog

https://cellosignal.com/blog/crm-about-experiences-not-channels

If you want more people to like your website then make it faster - particularly on mobile.

According to research shared by Google,  40% of shoppers will abandon a retail or travel site if it has not loaded within three seconds.

In fact, the search engine giant is such a strong advocate of this message, that it launched an open-source Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project last year.

News organisations were Google’s initial target for the project, but the company is now working hard to boost the attraction of AMP to all sorts of brands.

So do publishers of all kinds need to be jumping on the AMP bandwagon, or is it just beneficial for the big newspaper brands? 

Rapid loading is just one of the perks of Google’s AMP. The search engine also rewards those sites which use it by qualifying them for prominent positions in search. AMP has been quickly adopted by many of the major news publishers for this very reason.

The fact that the setup helps reduce the impact of ad blockers (by hosting ads on the same server as the content) is also a big lure for an industry that increasingly relies on online advertising income.

However AMP has not been without controversy. For a start, AMP versions of your web pages aren’t even on your website but are hosted by Google’s lightning fast content delivery network (CDN) instead, raising questions over content ownership.

Additionally the rules that help ensure AMP content loads as swiftly as it does, also place wide ranging restrictions on design and technology - for example it doesn't allow render-blocking javascript.

This week, a study from SEMRush looked at over 300 of the top publishers across eight countries and discovered far less than 50% of them had added AMP content to their sites and over 70% had technical errors in the content they had published:

So if newspapers are struggling with implementing AMP, should you adopt it for your site?

Being fast to load is also an advantage for ecommerce sites. At Google Marketing Next this year we were reminded that conversions can drop by up to 20% for every one second of page load delay:

Google Ads, Analytics and DoubleClick Announcements Keynote

In addition, AdWords, Google’s PPC offering, will soon be expanding to cope with AMP landing pages. In their introductory blog post on the rollout, ecommerce is used as the example:

It's a powerful demo as it shows, very quickly, that when a customer knows what they want to buy, they will be more likely to buy from the fast and faff- free option.

There are already some good examples of how AMP is working for a wider range of brands.

Over at State of Digital the technical SEO expert Barry Adams shared some details from an ecommerce client that saw an improvement in conversions after introducing AMP.  Barry admits problems with the case study though - noting that the AMP content was only used for the site’s blog posts because AMP doesn’t yet provide the full functionality required for ecommerce - and that the average order value dropped.

Another examination of the value of AMP pages comes from Seven League’s Daniel Ayers who looks at the performance of the Newcastle United website. They had a new kit to launch and here AMP played a vital role helping to improve clickthroughs (CTR). Seven League conclude that mobile search should be a key source of traffic for football sites and that failure to adopt AMP will make that challenging.

In the Middle East and Asia Pacific the travel comparison site Wego.com used AMP for some specific customer searches, terms like ‘cheap flights to Hong Kong’, and reduced page loading times from 11 seconds to less than one. The results were dramatic, with conversion rates to partner sites soaring by 95% and search-to-conversion rates going up by nearly 50%.

Ultimately, AMP should be on the consideration list of any brand paying attention to digital transformation.

Right now, AMP is worth doing for the immediate wins it will bring publishers across all brands, but there are still some limitations. And it also needs to be considered in relation to all the other challenges digitally savvy brands are addressing today - and in most cases AMP will not be priority.

Therefore, the platform has secured its place on the to-do list but is unlikely to be at the top for most.

Meanwhile, Google will be working hard to push their mobile program up that list. And we'll be keeping a close eye on how the project develops so we can advise our clients on whether it's right for them.

News sites are struggling with AMP. Can your brand do better?

Google's AMP has many benefits for brands - but may not have been implemented properly by news publishers.

News sites are struggling with AMP. Can your brand do better? | Signal Blog

https://cellosignal.com/blog/news-sites-are-struggling-amp-can-your-brand-do-better

But I have never, never ever, been driven to a website.

And yet we talk about driving traffic all the time. We treat the driving of traffic as a keystone of every digital marketing strategy. We enshrine this fallacy in strategy documents.

Driving traffic is a convenient, reassuring fiction. It is an exercise in wishful thinking. And it is a shit marketing metaphor.

It’s a metaphor that treats people like one of those sardine bait balls, corralled into a dense, unthinking sphere and pushed to the surface where dolphins, sharks and gannets can gorge on the helpless bounty.

If only digital marketing were as easy as that. If only our media spend worked to corral and push a human bait ball to the top of our conversion funnels.

People are not bait balls. They are not flocks nor involuntary herds.

As a freeman of the City Of London you can drive sheep over London Bridge.

But you can’t drive human traffic to a website. Human trafficking is illegal for lots of good reasons.

This funny post, called the About Us Page Of Every Digital Media Agency, is a list of the ridiculous, self-aggrandising terms that agencies use to describe the ways in which they add value. Its humour derives from the fact that the terms are only mildly hyperbolic. In amongst such gems as “buzz mothers” and “pivot coxswains”, are the terms “audience catalysers” and “audience cattle-isers”.

How apposite. When we do our jobs properly we do sort of catalyse audiences. We generate positive reactions that result in people wanting to take things further. But, even if we talk like we do, we don’t herd people like cattle. We don’t cattle-ise. Sadly, our shit marketing metaphor makes no distinction between the two.

Paid search doesn’t drive traffic. It directs traffic that was already actively looking for something similar to what you have to offer. (Catalyse not cattle-ise.)

Emails and tweets don’t drive clicks. They sell the idea of clicking, they sell your link or your button, to an audience that has already signaled a degree of interest by opting in to receive said emails or by following your account. (Catalyse not cattle-ise.)

Display ads and promoted social media posts also sell your link, your page, your content, your site, but to a cooler set of prospects. (Catalyse not cattle-ise.)

Does this distinction matter? We spend the digital media money and the traffic arrives at our digital destination. Google Analytics confirms both the correlation and the causation. Therefore, we drove traffic did we not? QED - Quad Erat Driven.

Yes, the distinction does matter. Digital media spend does not drive traffic. It puts marketing content in front of a relevant, hopefully receptive, audience. I worry that our shit metaphor plays down the role of the content versus the media spend. It prioritises the eyeballs over the eye candy. It commoditises creativity.

Digital advertising is broken in several ways – its distribution, its measurement, its user experience. And poorly chosen, imprecise, misleading, wishful language like “driving traffic” can only serve to compound the problems.

You lead the horse to water, you don’t drive it to drink.

We talk about driving traffic all the time, but it's an exercise in wishful thinking.

https://cellosignal.com/blog/driving-lesson

customer experience

The ‘Cinderella Syndrome’ that could be costing FS firms millions

GDPR one year on - a legitimately interesting time for marketers

CRM is about experiences, not channels

News sites are struggling with AMP. Can your brand do better?

A driving lesson

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Edinburgh

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