Marketing Archives - WealthEngine

October 14, 2019October 14, 2019

Retail Marketing: Using Technology to Drive Personalization at Scale

We’ve heard that personalization should be at the core of retail marketing strategy. Does this mean that you send discounts on jeans to previous customers who bought jeans? Yes, that’s a part of it, but there is so much more. Every touchpoint needs to make the customer feel like they are having a one-on-one conversation with you. However, from a business standpoint, your strategy needs to be scalable as well. The question then becomes about balancing scalability with that personal touch.

Bob Ghafouri, Senior Managing Director, Founder, Bloom by Accenture recently addressed this question and others at WE Prosper Summit.

How Can You Scale Personalization?

Platforms are disrupting every industry. Retail marketing is no different. In fact, platforms can enable you to achieve personalization at scale. They are able to do this by focusing on three elements:

Experience Disruption- creating a frictionless customer experience that makes everyone pivot. Eg: AirBnB made it so convenient to find the comfort of home in a new city that people started to prefer them to hotels for certain types of trips.
Business Model Disruption- changing the value chain or existing business models to find an advantage. Eg: Dollar Shave Club cut out other players in the value chain and went direct to consumer. By doing this, they were able to keep costs very low and provide value and convenience to their customers.
Technological Disruption- when technology enables you to take leaps, speed up innovation or benefit from convenience. Eg: Amazon’s Redshift platform- a new business could use this to launch themselves into the market in a matter of days

These disruptions all allow retail marketers to personalize their offerings. For instance, experiences can be curated to meet customer preferences. Similarly, value and/or convenience can be factored in based on what is most important to each customer segment. With the help of technology, these offerings can remain customized but can be scaled as businesses grow.

What do Retail Customers Want?

When it comes to retail, customers know what they want. They want personalization & control. This means that they don’t just want to be offered a multitude of choices. Options generated by retail marketing should cater to their preferences. Furthermore, they want to be in control of their journey and the information you hold about them. The statistics speak for themselves:

45% of consumers left a website due to being overwhelmed by too many options
82% of customers are willing to share data- as long as there is transparency, control, and service
79% of consumers have never felt a brand was too personal or invasive
81% of consumers will shop more if you recognize, remember, and make relevant recommendations
75% of consumers want to control their journey

If you’re in retail marketing, the data above shows you that listening to your customers is a large part of the exercise. Let them educate you on how best to serve them.

How can Retail Marketing Address Customer Wants and Needs?

Think service design: a dynamic service experience is critical to getting 1:1 personalization. Customer experience should be designed in such a way that every touchpoint must feel personal. Focus on three elements to develop this design:

Personalized Shopping: Stalking is Not Personalization

You have several kinds of data at your organization. You don’t have to track your customer’s every move or stalk them in order to get insights. Personalized shopping can be driven by combining different types of data- both your own and that acquired from third parties.

You can use transactional or historical data + shared intent by the customer + insights from machine learning that can provide inferred intent. These three combined can provide actionable insights and be powerful to drive personalization. Further, your communication can be more proactive through these.

For example, your customer may have bought entry-level luxury handbags before. You then notice that they add a high-end luxury bag to their cart and abandon it there for some time. This shows you their intent or preparedness to spend on a big-ticket item. Using data science, you can analyze similar patterns among other customers to predict the value of their next purchase or even predict the likelihood of a big-ticket purchase on their next transaction.

When you have this kind of insight, you can send them tailored offers- maybe a personalized shopping experience in-store or a promotion offered specifically around high-end handbags.

Personalized Merchandising: Profiling is Not Personalization

Data and machine learning are powerful tools in retail marketing, of course. Data-driven segmentation can also help you refine personalization. However, even the best algorithm may not be enough to create something highly personalized. Applying human intuition on a digital platform is what will get you there.

For instance, let’s consider the previous example. Your predictive model indicated that the customer is ready for a luxury purchase in their next transaction. However, as a seasoned retail marketing professional, you may realize that the bag remaining in their cart is a sign. Your instinct can take you from prediction to anticipation. Prediction is about retailers being in control, but anticipation puts the control back in the hands of the customer. In this case, your experience tells you that the customer is hesitant about making such a big decision.

Knowing how likely they are to make a purchase empowers you to approach them with personalized merchandising. You may send them a video about craftsmanship on the brand of handbags they are interested in. Thus, you showcase the value of the product to them. On the other hand, you may realize that they are ready to make a luxury purchase but maybe the handbag is a bigger commitment than they are ready for. In this instance, personalization could be in the form of promotions on belts, wallets or other smaller items from the same brand.

Personalized Advisor: Chatbots are Not Personalization

Retail consumers seek experts just like anybody else. They are looking for personalization in the form of advice. While chatbots are a nifty solution to interact with customers at scale, they cannot replace real advice.

In the spectrum of virtual to real experts, there are three archetypes that are typically used in retail marketing.

Retail marketers are pivoting towards 1:1 personalized orchestration engines. These are not just about sharing advice but also listening to your consumers.

For instance, when a customer is shopping online your recommendation engine may be showing them similar products. However, customers seek advice more than recommendations. You can drive personalization by showing them how to pair the item they are looking at with others or how to style it for different occasions based on their lifestyle.

You could also offer advice in the form of answering frequently asked questions about the product. This can go beyond product specs to show how the product functions in different settings, how durable it can be, etc.

Thus, you can build personalization into the entire customer journey. By listening as much as recommending, retail marketers can ensure that customers control their own journeys.

Top 4 Retail Marketing Takeaways:

Here are four top takeaways from Bob’s talk on personalization in retail marketing.

Consumers don’t mind that you have data on them. In fact, they preferred to be recognized and offered relevant offers. But, they want transparency and control over the data.
Combine your knowledge of your customers with data science to gain insights.
Become proactive in your communications, open yourself up to listening to your customers. Go from predicting customer behavior to anticipating it.
Retail experiences need to be personalized in every step of the customer journey. In order to achieve this in a meaningful way, you need to combine technology and human instinct.

Catch a Recap of Making it Personal

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August 28, 2019August 29, 2019

How to Market a Financial Services Company- Strategy for CEOs & CMOs

Marketing a financial services business can often be complex due to the nature of the products and services. Customer decision cycles tend to be longer than other retail products. Moreover, a customer needs a high degree of trust to engage with a brand or organization. With this being the case, personalization becomes key. If you have wondered how to market a financial services company, the answer lies in building long-term relationships.

If you have your own firm or are a high-level executive at your financial services company, keep reading to learn more.

As a leader in financial services, you may not be concerned about marketing on a granular level. You may have a team that implements financial services marketing for you. However, knowing the overarching strategy of how to market a financial services company could prove beneficial in two ways: Firstly, you will weave marketing into your overall business strategy. Second, you will be able to collaborate more closely with your CMO and marketing team.

The next step seems simple- find wealthy clients. To do this, however, you need to start with the right kind of data. Furthermore, you will need the right strategy to build trust and establish long-term relationships with these individuals. You’ll also need to stand out from your competition. Let’s examine what challenges might stand in your way.

Challenges in the Marketing of Financial Services

In a dynamic industry such as yours, trends are constantly shifting. Keeping up with them can pose several issues:

1. Digitization disrupts the industry, threatening customer lifetime value (LTV).

2. FinTech companies are set to outrun traditional companies in the sector.

3. The volume of data has grown exponentially, posing challenges for analysts.

4. Data is stored on unsecured platforms and there rise is a marked rise of cyberattacks.

5. The growth of AI/ML adds pressure to balance automation and the human touch.

If you’re interested in learning more about these financial services issues, read our article on the subject.

Marketing a Financial Services Business

Before you think about how to market financial products and services, it is important to understand how to market your financial services business as a whole.

This begins with having the right brand strategy. Let’s examine how you can build an effective brand for your financial services company. Follow these 5 steps:

1. Understand Your Audience:

In the financial services sector, your customers and their needs can be quite varied. When you analyze your database, you can understand who your customers are. For instance, WE Analyze can study your database and identify patterns among your customers. You could find out, for example, that you primarily have two types of customers- baby boomer men and millennial women. With this insight, you can create a brand that speaks strongly to both customers. You might even decide to create different product lines with different identities to serve these two diverse groups.

2. Talk to Your Customers:

Conduct a survey among major groups that you have identified. This survey should tell you more about your customers’ needs and preferences. This primary research, combined with other industry reports, can tell you how to position yourself best.

3. Build Awareness:

You have created a brand identity that best suits your story and your audience. Now, it is time to ensure that the right people become aware of your story. You need to curate imagery, typeface, language, and media channels that all reflect your identity. Use owned and paid media channels to promote your story to your audience. Ensure that your brand’s personality stands out from your competitors. You may, for instance, need to adopt a luxurious and business-like image to appeal to major corporate clients/executives. On the contrary, your tone and imagery may need to be more personal and relatable if you are appealing primarily to millennial women.

4. Refine Your Message:

As your awareness campaigns see results, you will learn more about which aspects worked well and what didn’t. As you analyze, you can continue to refine your messaging until you ensure that it resonates with your audience.

5. Find More Customers Like Your Best Ones:

When you know what kind of person engages with your brand and your story, it becomes easier for you to find more people like them. In fact, WE Analyze can generate a look-alike model. The model can help you go through your database and find your best customers.

Segmentation of the Financial Services Market

Building your brand is the first step. But it is not a one and done kind of activity. The process is ongoing. So, the next step in the how to market a financial services company guide is refined segmentation. This is especially important as your audience’s life stages change or your market segments shift. Here are 3 steps for effective segmentation:

1. Identify Your Company’s Strengths:

Your story is always unique to you. This is a strength that your brand can leverage. Ensure that your brand is authentic to your company’s story and its culture. Study the market to see where you best fit in. For example, maybe most advisory services are directed at older customers. Your niche could be offering a tech-savvy, relatable wealth management solution for millennial millionaires. Furthermore, this may be a great fit for you as your company has a lot of younger executives and wealth managers.

2. Segment Customers Based on Interests:

You will segment your audience based on demographics. This is definitely a great foundational step in how to market your financial services company. You can go further by segmenting them based on their interests. You may find needs that are similar across different demographic groups. This type of segmentation can help you expand your business into various financial services sectors such as retail banking, home loans, advisory, risk management, etc.

Wealth screening can help you gain great insights into your customers’ lifestyle and interests. Screening your database regularly helps you stay up to date as customer life stages change.

3. Address Gaps in the Financial Services Market

You cannot be everything to everyone. This is usually true of most businesses. But in the financial services products and services, you may find that you have more leeway. Because trust is a major factor when choosing a financial services company, you may find that customers are willing to stick with you for all their needs.

This may trickle down further into their sphere of influence or as we like to call it, their inner circle. You need to begin with a strong brand identity and an authentic story. With this as a solid foundation, you can then grow your business to offer a variety of financial services products and services. These can cater to generations of customers.

Your expansion strategy can rely on identifying gaps in the market. Find niches of services that are unavailable for certain groups or segments. This may be microloans in large metro areas for example.

How to Market Financial Services Products & Services

Segmentation and identifying gaps can serve as your guide for expanding your business.

When it comes to the marketing of financial services products and services, trust is key. Before you try to expand your business, you need to ensure that your brand has a solid foundation. When you offer a minimal range of products and services, but your customer experience is par excellence, you are working on building long-term relationships with your customers.

These customers who trust you and expect to be served well by you will rely on you for more services with time. By screening and analyzing your audience regularly, you keep up with changes in their needs and preferences. Doing so can help you offer personalized products and services to them.

Furthermore, you can use wealth data ratings and scores to identify the right customers for the right set of products. For instance, WealthEngine’s Propensity to Spend (P2S) score can help you understand a person’s likelihood to spend or save.

Additionally, you can also run wealth models to answer specific marketing questions. For instance, you could build a model to find out who among your customers is most likely to invest in a holiday home. The model can automatically scan your entire database and identify the top 10% of people who are most likely to do this.

Thus, when you are looking to expand into a new product or service, a model can indicate whether this would be a prudent path to growth.

How to Grow Your Book of Business

Finally, we’ll leave you with 3 tools that can help you grow your financial services company:

1. Use wealth signals to personalize your offerings:

2. Leverage Inner Circle:

Identify connections of your current or most influential clients to build a referral business. The tool identifies prospective clients with a connection already to your firm. Thus, you can increase the conversion rate of new clients. Relying on your referral pipeline with prospective clients already connected to your firm.

3. Integrate Through API:

API integration can not only bring you wealth insights right to your CRM, but also provide you with real-time insights.

Take advantage of all these tools within one convenient platform to market your financial services business.

August 5, 2019October 3, 2019

Wealth Indicators: How to Use Wealth Signals to Spot Wealthy Prospects

Wealth indicators can help you identify your top prospects fast. Use these wealth signals to determine if you’re talking to someone who has the capacity, and even the propensity, to give or spend.

As wealth continues to grow across generations and geographies, it’s becoming progressively harder to identify High Net Worth and Ultra High Net Worth Individuals. Some can be found easily based on their spending and giving behaviors. But, with the increased accessibility of consumer goods, tangible items are becoming less useful to indicate wealth. So, to maintain their status, HNWIs and UHNWIs are investing their money in new areas. Which begs the question: are there universal wealth indicators? If so, what are these wealth signals?

Wealth indicators can be broken into two types: traditional and intangible. Let’s explore specific wealth signals to look out for so you can easily identify HNWIs and UNHWIs who may be hidden in your database.

Traditional Wealth Indicators

Traditional wealth indicators are tangible items or easily discoverable characteristics that would indicate that your customer, donor, or prospect is wealthy. For example, an individual may be wealthy depending on these four wealth signals:

1. Profession

Is this person’s profession similar to the average profession of a HNWI? If so, their job can give you a better impression of how much they earn, their net income, and what their potential spending and giving capacities are.

2. Foundation Affiliations

Do they sit on any boards? Have they started any foundations? If so, they are far more likely to give to causes or spend on high-end goods.

3. Size of their Charitable Gifts

How much have they contributed to causes? Could their donation be considered a major gift? By looking into this further, you’re able to determine if the individual has a history of donating major gifts. Otherwise, based on their income and net worth, they at least have the capacity to make considerable contributions to your cause, or others.

4. Real-Estate Holdings

Does this HNWI or UHNWI own additional properties? The number of properties or value of the existing property the individual possesses can indicate their net worth.

So, by using WealthEngine’s wealth and lifestyle insights, you can easily search for wealth attributes, do a wealth screening, build a wealth model, score your contacts, segment your audience, and drive outreach and learn more about current and prospective donors and customers on one seamless platform.

WealthEngine Customers: Login to see wealth signals for your contacts.

Intangible Wealth Indicators

Intangible wealth indicators are consumer choices or investments that aren’t blatantly obvious or material in nature. Since 2007, the United State’s top 1% (individuals who earn >$300k each year) are spending significantly less on material goods. Why? Since more goods are readily available, including luxury products, many HNWI/UHNWI and members of the middle class own many of the same things. So, there’s no differentiation between the rich and middle class. To secure their status and maintain their exclusivity, the wealthy are now investing more in cultural capital. This would include investments in services such as:

Education
Healthcare
Retirement

As a result, their wealth signals are becoming less overt. By pouring their liquid assets in services, not only are wealthy individuals able to cement their status in an exclusive way, but they have a greater amount of influence in their communities and beyond.

That being said, what is the best way to understand or appeal to individuals who approach their wealth this way? Well, when you combine wealth data with interest and affinity information, you can gain a 360-view of your donors and customers. This equips you with the essential tools to engage prospect in ways that are personal and relevant.

Check Out Profiles On the New WealthEngine9 Platform

WealthEngine9 or WE9, our newest release, is transforming the prospecting landscape. Explore how our Engagement Science™ speeds up the way you screen, analyze, find insights, and predict outcomes through modeling.

February 15, 2019October 3, 2019

Customer Segmentation Models for Increased Conversion

As a marketer, you are well aware of the power of customer segmentation analysis. However, segmentation is not an end in itself. Its impact grows exponentially with customer segmentation models. These models can increase personalization and engagement.

Importance of Customer Segmentation Models

Personalization is going to be a major theme in marketing. Tailoring the experience to your customer’s interests makes your message resonate. Robust customer segmentation analysis is the foundation for personalization.

In a diverse marketplace, organizations need deeper insight into demographics, lifestyle, and interests. To this end, customer segmentation models help you understand the nuances of the market.

Once you create main segments, you can analyze them further to improve personalization.

For instance, let’s say you’re a luxury car dealership based in suburban Chicago. You are looking for customers with the capacity to spend over $50,000 on their next car. There are more indicators than a prospect’s wealth score.

You can identify prospects who live in zip codes within a certain radius of the dealership. The next step is to filter for prospects who already own a luxury vehicle. You can refine this segment further by identifying who owns your brand. This helps you determine if they are due for an upgrade or if they are looking at other luxury automakers.

You can then personalize your message in a way that speaks to each micro-segment. You can have one message for those who are loyalists to your brand. For those who own other luxury cars, your messaging could focus on comparative statistics. Focusing your marketing budget on targeted micro-segments reduces costs. Further, it also increases the likelihood of conversion.

Customer Segmentation Analysis

Segmentation models reveal patterns that help you increase engagement within these micro-segments. They also enable you to personalize marketing at scale.

WE Analyze, our analysis and modeling solution can create such models from your data. In the previous instance, you found your micro-segment. Chicago area millionaires who have a net worth of at least $5 million. You narrowed your list down further to those who own luxury cars. You then divided them into a group that owns your brand and a group that doesn’t.

Customer segmentation models can identify patterns of traits within this group. You can then apply these patterns to your database to find more prospects like your chosen segment. A customer segmentation analysis can also help to drive predictive prospecting. This includes finding lookalike prospects that match the profile of your best customers.

Customer Segmentation Models and Personalization

Customer segmentation analysis helps to drill down into smaller sub-segment to fine-tune messaging. A personalized message that reflects customer interests is more likely to resonate. If your customer relates to the message then he is more likely to engage with the brand or cause.

For example in your micro-segment, you can create smaller groups of prospects based on age and type of pet.

This will help you personalize your pitch to them. Further, it can guide you when selecting a medium that is most effective for each subgroup.

Segmentation Analysis and Lifetime Value (LTV)

Customer segmentation models increase engagement over time. This results in improved customer LTV. Which means that the customer stays connected to the organization. LTV is a great metric for you to rank your prospects.

Prioritization means your budget and message focus on the most responsive segments. Thus, your efforts will see increased conversion at reduced costs.

Segmentation Analysis and Models are Cyclical

The more you use customer segmentation analysis and modeling the better it is for conversion. We have already established that micro-segmenting helps personalize your message and increases engagement.

Therefore, increased engagement results in higher conversions and lower costs. The other important attribute of these models is that they learn to get better over time. Every customer segmentation model helps WE Analyze learn from it. Your models become more refined, thus creating better segments for your next campaign.

Increase Conversion Rates

Learn more about how WealthEngine’s data science team can help you increase conversion rates through customer segmentation models. Get insights now.

Financial Services Marketing Tips That Leverage Current Industry Trends

Financial services trends have all veered towards digitization in recent years. While these trends are indicative of progress, they can also present certain issues for marketers. Marketers at financial firms need to leverage technology and data to make their offerings resonate. With this in mind, let’s review financial services marketing techniques that will modernize your approach.

Omnichannel Marketing for Financial Services

One of the major issues in financial services stems from digitization. This means that more customers prefer to interact with FinServ professionals via digital channels. As a result, marketers are tasked with the ability to maintain a human touch in new ways.

The primary way to achieve this is by taking an omnichannel approach to your financial services marketing. This means that your customers must have a consistent experience no matter what channel they choose to interact with you through.

For instance, let’s consider the case of a retail bank. More customers bank online these days. Whether they use your website for a money transfer, your mobile app, or they come into a branch, they should have the same kind of experience. If your brand’s tone is more personable when local residents interact with their teller, the same warm interaction should come through, as if they were communicating with a chatbot.

Let’s consider different channels and how you can make marketing effective in each medium.

Digital Marketing for Financial Services

Financial Services Marketing is now more reliant on digital techniques. It is possible and necessary to take an omnichannel approach even in your digital strategy. Your email marketing, content, social media marketing, among other strategies, should all reflect your core brand.

For instance, a customer care query could come in through email or via Twitter. Your response time and tone must be consistent across channels.

When it comes to digital marketing for financial services, one thing is crucial: maintaining a personal touch with your customers. Financial services marketing needs to build a high degree of trust. This can be enhanced through the human touch.

As a marketer, you need to find the right balance between leveraging technology and making your customers feel like they are receiving personal attention. Artificial Intelligence is becoming more adept at this over time.

Personalization comes from refined segmentation. Begin with understanding what makes your customers unique. Then, segment them on the basis of preferred channels, life stages, wealth indicators, etc. When you understand what each segment values, you can communicate in a way that truly resonates and makes an impact.

Let’s review different digital media and how you can increase engagement across them.

Content Marketing for Financial Services

Thought Leadership is a dominant theme under content marketing for financial services. This stems from the fact that financial products not only require educating customers, but they also require building trust.

However, for your thought leadership strategy to be effective, you need to offer real value to your readers. Clickbait or misleading titles guiding readers to pieces that don’t offer any insight will have an adverse effect on your brand.

To differentiate your content strategy, don’t just discuss trending topics in your industry. You need to weigh in on these topics by contributing your own point of view. This offers your customers insight into where you stand, plus it helps you stand out with your unique perspective.

Furthermore, content marketing needs to help solve problems and provide pertinent information. Your customers search for certain keywords, read your blog posts, emails, or your how-to manuals in the interest of learning about something. When your content is written to help provide clarity or new information around a particular subject, it will automatically draw your customers in.

Email Marketing for Financial Services

Email marketing is all about personalization. This does not end by addressing your customers by name in your mass emails.

For email marketing to be effective in the financial sector, you need to understand customer preferences beyond the surface level. This means that you should know what product or service best fits their life stage. Further, it is important to know what kind of messaging would resonate with a specific customer. This extends to the tone of voice, images, and even the frequency of your email communication.

Automation tools for financial services marketing can help you understand what topics a customer is interested in. Knowing this means that you can tailor your communication to offer them the right solution at the right time. This, in turn, also helps build long-term relationships with customers.

Marketing Automation for Financial Services: Find Wealthy Clients

Many wealth managers and marketing teams fall into the trap of using the same old techniques for financial services marketing. Marketing automation for financial services is only possible when you know your customers well.

Personal networking, social media, sponsoring events, and other methods to meet wealthy prospects, are all useful techniques. However, you may end up spending your valuable time pursuing leads that are not qualified.

By using automated data analysis and prospect modeling, you can quickly screen and qualify prospects. Better yet, you can reduce sales cycle time and find new clients that are very much like your best ones.

How do you begin?

The answer lies in big data. You may already have large volumes of data. But, do you have the right kind of data? Furthermore, are you leveraging this data in the right way?

In other words, you can find wealthy clients that most financial firms overlook. When you tap into these methods for marketing financial services, you can shorten your sales cycle dramatically. Here are 5 strategies that will help you understand if you are using the right kind of data, the right way:

1. On-the-Fly Wealth Screening from Your Phone

You meet people everywhere: professional events, networking breakfasts, the gym, maybe even at your daughter’s soccer tournament.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could enter your new-found acquaintance’s name into your phone and instantly learn whether they could be a good prospect for you?

You can.

WealthEngine’s instant wealth search feature lets you scan over 250 million U.S. contacts and see their wealth profiles. You will learn details on their interests, donation history, real estate, and other luxury property holdings and many other data points. The data is gathered from numerous publicly available databases and compiled into an easily accessible system. This information can completely change the game in your company’s financial services marketing efforts.

It also provides ratings and scores. These can indicate a person’s propensity to spend, to save, and to give (known as P2G). Propensity-to-Spend (known as P2S) can indicate a person’s likelihood of purchasing luxury goods. You can then use these personalized marketing insights to guide your dialog appropriately.

propensity to give score on mobile — Example of what a propensity score would look like on your phone

2. Batch Prospect Research Before You Attend an Event

Let’s say your company sponsored an event, maybe a golf tournament, an art expo, or a dinner for charity. You’re going to attend these events to meet new people. You want to focus on the individuals who have the highest potential to do business with you.

Traditionally, you would mingle and look for introductions from those you know. You would spend time talking to many people to determine whether they are a qualified prospect.

There is a much better – and significantly more efficient – way to do prospect research. More importantly, this form of financial services marketing will help you find who you should talk to at these events.

Wealth screening can pinpoint exactly who you should look for so you spend your precious time effectively.

Prior to the event, ask the host for a list of people who have RSVP’d. Then, you can upload the list into WealthEngine as a batch to do a wealth screen on everyone before you attend.

Within minutes, you will get back a list of the most wealthy attendees who will be at the event.

These are the people you should spend the most time with.

This method of marketing financial services allows you to do prospect research quickly. It will save you hours of wasted time pursuing unqualified leads.

You can also connect WealthEngine’s data directly to your customer relationship management (CRM) tool, such as SalesForce. When you use APIs in the financial services marketing, you can discover wealth insights on everyone as you add them to your CRM. There’s no need to login to WealthEngine or change your workflow.

3. Create a Model of Your Best Wealth Management Clients

Your financial institution’s research department produces financial models all the time. You can use the same concept of modeling to create a detailed profile of your best wealth management clients.

To illustrate, these models identify the characteristics of your top clients. You will learn your prospects’ demographics, assets, real estate and luxury property ownership like boats and planes, luxury goods spending habits, favorite charities, and interests.

This level of detail in financial services marketing is significantly more useful than simply knowing someone’s name and address. In fact, the more data you provide, the more information our data scientists can model.

Many of our clients learn that they are spending their time pursuing prospects who have a very low likelihood of turning into wealth management clients. Financial services marketing becomes a lot easier when you use machine learning to get deeper clarity on who your best prospects really are.

4. Finding New Prospects Who Match Your Model

Once you have a well-defined model of your ideal client, you can use it to find others who have similar characteristics. There are several ways to do this efficiently.

API Connected to SalesForce

If your wealth management firm uses SalesForce, you can use WealthEngine’s SalesForce Connector to instantly get a score of every new prospect you add. This way, you don’t have to change anything in your workflow to accelerate the marketing of financial services.

Just add names to SalesForce and we’ll instantly send you a match rate based on the model of your best clients. You’ll know right away whether this prospect is someone you want to spend your valuable time on.

Match Your Model to 250 Million Records

WealthEngine can also run your model against our massive database to find people you don’t know but who match your ideal client profile. This is one of the fastest ways to leverage financial services marketing to find wealthy clients who could become some of your best clients.

You can then reach out, invite them to breakfast, or a round of golf, knowing that they fit the profile you want to pursue.

5. Identify Money In Motion

Creating a model and prospecting for clients based on that model will help you identify people to pursue. Next, you’ll want to monitor their money in motion.

Money in motion refers to knowing when an individual you are tracking has a financial event. Real estate purchases and public company stock sales are examples of publicly available data, all of which WealthEngine tracks.

When you know that a prospect has a liquidity event, you know they are likely going to do something with that money. WealthEngine’s tools can email you a report as soon as someone on your watch list sells public company stock.

These wealth indicators give you more clarity on what’s happening in the lives of your prospects, giving you the ability to hyper personalize your marketing.

Financial Services Marketing Using WealthEngine

WealthEngine can help you create very detailed segmentation and analyses to focus on the exact audience you want to reach.

Schedule a Demo →

October 29, 2018October 29, 2018

Ethical By Design – Marketing in the Age of Personalization and Privacy

Over the past few years, marketing has experienced a shift. As businesses moved into digital channels, and with the emergence of social media platforms, they were given the opportunity to communicate with customers on an individual level. Although personalized marketing has allowed businesses to understand their customers individually, how ethical is it for businesses to use affinity data to learn more about their consumers?

Momentum always follows money and motivation. In 2017, over $15B had been invested in AI-focused startups. As of this year, that amount has been surpassed and is forecasted to be over $58B by 2021. Industry analysts believe AI-enabled businesses will create over $2.1T worth of business value and generate over 2.3M new jobs while eliminating 1.8M existing jobs. Technology has always been the core of our economic growth, where disruption and business value are constantly created and recreated in a virtuous cycle.

Creating business value is defined by new revenue, new markets, new customer experiences, and cost reductions. Although the needs of the consumer are the main focus, their personal values seem to fade into the back as companies digitally transform. How do we unlock business value that also serves the beliefs of the greater good? Creating this balance can be challenging.

AI-enabled experience economies, for example, face this challenge. However, these technologies come with self-learning techniques, so they are able to seamlessly gather and sift through information on individuals and their interests. Although this data provides businesses with the ability to understand and persuade consumers on a personal level, without human judgment and intervention things can go awry. We will need a moral and ethical playbook for the practice of personalization.

Data is our frenemy. It’s our fuel. It’s also the basis of the Information Age.

Consider Facebook, Google, and WhatsApp’s business models. We don’t value them simply because they’re free. We value them because they adapt to our needs and values. These platforms allow us to connect with our external environment by adapting to our behaviors, and subsequently suggesting where we should go, who we should meet, and what we should do all day, every day.. It is free because businesses realize, in the long run, that having and subsequently monetizing your data is much more valuable than having you pay for their services.

Although these platforms make daily life easier, we are collectively subsidizing our personal data for access to free browsers, searches, ratings, and reviews. Digital social platforms, in some cases, have been able to manipulate this data to influence our way of thinking and being instead of serving us what we have consented to. This helps businesses understand your values and provide you with items that may be of high value to you. Data, in that sense, helps businesses and users cut through the digital noise, and provides us with an experience that feels more gratifying and focused. Instead of having to enter our information constantly, or searching for related items, we are given recommendations that are just a click away.

Well, Data is still your frenemy. But, so is Personalization.

So that begs a few questions: Where are our ethical boundaries in our data usage? What are the gray areas? Who gets to store, share, secure, and govern our data? Who decides? It is our responsibility to be vigilant and to remain aware of how and where our data is being used.

Ethics isn’t a pile of red tape that we have to maneuver around in order to forge connections. Ethics is the system upon which our businesses and technological systems should be designed-in.

In the conquest for privacy, personalization takes a hit.

In the quest for personalization, individual freedoms take a hit.

So what does ethical marketing look like? That will be the focus of our series on ethical marketing and personalization. Why? Because it’s personal.

October 10, 2018March 18, 2019

Redefining “Luxury Brand” for Your Luxury Marketing Strategy

Why do consumers consider one brand to be a “luxury” brand and another brand not? Exclusivity? Performance? Quality? Innovation? Heritage? For the most part, those all have been defining characteristics of a luxury brand, and they still are. However, there’s been a shakeup underway. The traits that carry the most weight with consumers in today’s luxury market have changed.

“The definition of ‘luxury’ is undergoing a paradigm shift in the consumer market,” said marketing expert Pamela Danziger. Unity Marketing and Luxury Daily recently surveyed over 600 luxury retailers and marketers. They found that the definition of luxury is the “number one disrupter of the luxury business.”

What does this mean for a luxury marketing strategy? If you know how consumers think of luxury and what drives their purchases, it can help you determine the best strategy to attract wealthy clients. You can also reduce the cost of acquisition.

Quality Is Now the Top Characteristic That Defines a Luxury Brand

Ask any Apple buyer how well they like their Mac or iPhone. They’ll undoubtedly tell you they believe Apple products are far superior to any competitor. It doesn’t even matter if competitive products offer better features. Apple may got its start by launching a unique computer product to compete against Microsoft. But Apple’s following has grown far beyond disgruntled PC users. There may be a certain “status” to owning an Apple product. However, the company built its brand on a reputation of quality and performance.

Now consumers are defining luxury differently. Just a few years ago, quality took over as the leading characteristic of luxury. Data from a recent major report confirms that quality, not exclusivity, is now the key definer of luxury for consumers globally. According to Albatross Global Solutions and Numberly’s fourth annual “The Journey of a Luxury Consumer” report, 85% of luxury consumers say quality is the most important characteristic.

“What separates true luxury from the idea of luxury is quality,” says Javier Calvar, chief operating officer at market research firm Albatross Global Solutions.

Younger Consumers Are Playing a Bigger Role in the Luxury Market

A change in the demographics of today’s luxury consumer is behind the shift in what defines luxury. Traditionally, the luxury market has been made up of older consumers, many with inherited wealth. Baby boomers and those older still make up 60% of the total global luxury market. But the other 40% is made up of Generation X and millennials. So younger consumers are representing an increasingly significant portion of the luxury business.

Younger people, with newfound wealth, are not only moving into the luxury market, they’re redefining it.

“When money goes into the hands of people that didn’t have much of it before, the relationship those individuals have with luxury brands is very different from those who have been exposed to luxury brands for a long time,” said Calvar. “A really large percentage of our top-end product customers are between the age of 30 and 50. It’s no longer a retirement plan to buy yourself a yacht to enjoy in your golden years. ”

Millennials in particular are a luxury marketing segment growing in importance and wealth. They see exclusivity as less important. Instead, they prefer to “belong,” and have little interest in something that separates them from their peers.

Connecting with the New Luxury Market Consumer

How can you connect with this new luxury market customer? Identify the specifics of your target customer’s profile. Once you know about their likes, dislikes, and best methods of contact, you can build a more effective luxury marketing strategy.

So it’s more than demographic data, it’s about understanding your customer’s mindset, whether your luxury customer is 35 or 65. Appealing to a baby boomer is different than connecting with a millennial, though both may have interest in the same product. Knowing the buying motivations of each allows you to tailor your message to that niche segment.

“Quality always will be essential to luxury, said Lyle Maltz, a director with Kantar Vermeer, WPP’s global marketing consultancy. “But now emotional value and a strong, personalized relationship with consumers are of great importance in luxury marketing.”

Today’s luxury marketing is “highly personalized marketing. It has a very specific and defined message that resonates with an individual’s affinities, interest, and wealth capacity,” agrees WealthEngine’s Patrick Bischoff, president of the Commercial Markets Group at WealthEngine. You need to build that one-on-one relationship with your customer to make them feel they are being treated as an individual.

Following a Customer-Driven Luxury Marketing Strategy

The new luxury market consumer will define what makes a brand a luxury brand, not the other way around. Today it’s less about marketers and more about consumers. That can make it more challenging for luxury marketing strategy, as the definition of “luxury brand” continues to shift. Still, to truly prosper in the luxury arena, luxury marketers will need to follow the lead of their target luxury consumer.

“The change in how consumers define luxury and the new path to purchase is dramatically redefining the marketing strategy,” said an unnamed marketing industry insider in a Forbes article. “Luxury brands must be very agile and innovative in order to gain the favors of the new luxury consumer.”

Giorgio Armani is a brand known globally for its high-end designer men’s clothing. It began by targeting the ultra high-end professionals who desired a high quality product. Since then, Armani has gradually expanded its brand scope with products aimed at broader customer segments. Armani launched a line of jeans in the U.S. market for fashion seeking, price-sensitive youths in urban metro areas. It’s an example of a luxury brand creating sub-brands to capitalize on and cater to a different customer segment.

As stated in a WARC article, “The traditional luxury model has been challenged further with the rise of digital platforms, social mobility, the emergence of ‘affordable luxury,’ and the particular preferences of millennial shoppers.”

With more younger luxury buyers who grew up in a digital world, you must also change your luxury marketing strategy. Part of building a luxury brand involves communicating with customers in the way they prefer. Years ago, that may have been print ads, direct mail, or TV commercials. Today it’s more likely to include special videos, social media, apps, and other digital means that provide a “total customer experience.”

October 7, 2019October 9, 2019

Luxury Product Marketing: Understanding the Luxury Consumer

Wealth trends are constantly changing. While using a standard luxury product marketing strategy for every consumer may generate sales, by fine-tuning your approach you can get more business from the luxury consumer who becomes a loyal customer.

Listen to the full podcast.

What is Luxury Product Marketing?

Luxury product marketing is the business of promoting and selling high-end products. Not only do luxury brands draw consumers in with their high-end products, but they also actively manage the perception of these products.

Luxury Goods Market Study

Revenue from the US luxury goods market is estimated to be between $85 and $100 billion annually, according to Euromonitor.

The luxury market is more relevant than ever. Over the past year, the luxury market has grown by 5% worldwide. This growth stems from the sales of three major items: luxury cars, luxury experiences, and personal luxury goods. These three items alone, account for more than 80% of the entire luxury market. Luxury car sales dominated the market in 2017, increasing by 6%. Sales in luxury experiences increased by 20% in two areas: high-end food and wine (up by 4% since 2017) and luxury cruises (up by 16%). As for personal luxury items, which are the core of the luxury consumer market, sales have increased by 5%.

The best luxury product marketing efforts focus on more than just those who can easily afford luxury goods. They target every person who is willing and interested in saving up for high-end products.

Understanding the Luxury Consumer

Reaching the same luxury consumer today can be different a few months from now. Wealth changes. But there’s more to it. When you learn about the interests and buying habits of individuals, you’re able to find more ways to influence those consumers and new ones. Knowing this information can help you find ways to generate more sales.

You might think that only affluent consumers want to purchase luxury goods. But, the truth is that there are other groups who are equally likely to purchase these products, and you can’t neglect them.

Think about the person who has been saving up for that new BMW or that new Louis Vuitton bag. All of those consumers are so drawn to high-end items, that they’re willing to save and splurge on your products. This gives you an opportunity to nurture them as loyal lifelong luxury consumers. As a result, luxury product marketing targets consumers who have both the capacity and intent to buy your products.

Download WealthEngine’s free Millionaire’s Report to find hidden gems about the buying habits of your wealthy customers.

The luxury market is no longer solely dependent on managing brand reputation and recognition. It’s also dependent, if not even more dependent, on understanding luxury consumer behaviors, clarifying your goals and intentions, and using this information to motivate buyers. These qualities will equip you to build a loyal customer base.

Luxury Product Marketing Questions

As you clarify your messaging, ask yourself:

What are people buying – what is the brand promise?
What are our luxury consumers interested in – causes, issues, other non-product related drivers?
How can we enhance customer profiles with wealth and interest data to reach more people who fit our buyer persona?
How did, and how are, we engaging our customers based on what we know about their purchasing influencers?

When you create luxury product marketing campaigns that are tied to the things that influence your buyers, you naturally forge deeper connections.

Adapting to Changes in Luxury Consumer Behavior

Creating a strong foundation is only the first step. There’s much more.

How do you keep that luxury machine churning?
What can you do to captivate your customers?
What methods get people to recommend your luxury brand?
How can you maintain their interest?

Luxury product marketing requires you to be nimble. It’s important to recognize that there isn’t one type of customer coming through your door. More so, they have different needs to satisfy and it is ever-changing. The wealth-profile and buying propensity of a customer today can be different next year. As a result, it is important to stay on top of the changes in the wealth and interest of your luxury consumer.

By tailoring your messaging, you’re able to communicate your mission in ways that are accessible and appealing to more individuals. You’re maintaining the mission of your brand as you continue adapting to your customers’ needs.

Developing targeted messaging creates a good foundation for your brand. However, by leveraging wealth data, you can see how likely your new customers are to make a purchase, and when. This means that you don’t need to keep waiting for consumers to return! You have the power to evaluate demographic data to determine what they’ll need in the future.

When your customer is about to retire, they may be more inclined to buy luxury products associated with travel. They have a greater need for it. This information allows you to create messaging that’s more personalized, for individuals and groups that have similar experiences.

Luxury product marketing, in this case, allows consumers to feel that they’re part of a novel and elite experience. Customers are that much more excited knowing that they’ll have an individualized experience.

Learn More

Learn more about how personalization can enhance luxury product marketing to generate loyal customers with higher LTVs. Take a minute to fill the form on the right and a WealthEngine rep will contact you very soon.

August 24, 2017

A Tale of Two Marketing Timelines – Infographic

To set yourself apart from your competitors, it’s important to personalize your marketing through both online and offline channels. WealthEngine provides you with powerful wealth data in real-time, giving you the ability to customize the buying experience for your customers when they are actively engaging with your company and build the most effective omni-channel marketing program possible.

Take a look at the infographic below to see a timeline of what your marketing process might look like using WealthEngine vs. what the process looks like when you’re left marketing in the dark.

August 23, 2017

Conversations with Leaders in Luxury

WealthEngine’s President and CEO, Mark Logan, recently participated in Conversations with Leaders in Luxury Led by Chris Olshan, CEO of The Luxury Marketing Council. Mark discussed everything from how he got his start in business, to WealthEngine’s presence in the luxury space, and even what he enjoys doing outside of work (did you know he’s an avid hockey player and fan?)

Take a look for yourself to learn more about:

SaaS products
WealthEngine’s presence in the luxury space and how we help organizations
Big data
What differentiates WealthEngine from others
Our work with nonprofits
Trends in luxury
And more

Commercial

Nonprofit