Real time marketing poses complex integration challenges to banks
2011-03-04
One of the trends that big banks are capitalizing on to improve their customer retention rates and consumer satisfaction levels is through real-time marketing. This relatively new technique allows bank representatives to offer banking products to customers based upon their financial history and previous transactions with the bank.

However, for one reason or another, major financial institutions have been reluctant to adopt this technology in to their marketing initiatives. Analysts have often cited internet mega-retailer Amazon as a perfect non-banking example of how real-time marketing works. Amazon uses this kind of marketing intelligence to recommend members books, CDs and other products they may like in real-time based on recent page views and past purchases, Bank Technology News writes.

"There's a lot of interest on the part of banks to build out their competencies in this area," said Ron Shevlin, a senior analyst at Aite, according to the source.

Yet what many of these analysts overlook is the complexity of applying this technology to FIs. There are both business and technology challenges that banks will have to confront, such as identifying which sales triggers will be built into the system and how to integrate a real-time marketing solution with front and back office systems, Bank Technology News explains.

As a result, banks have taken a slower, more piecemeal approach to real-time marketing. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing as one banking expert explains.

"You need a single view of the customer and understanding of the customer to do real-time marketing and they don't have that," Bart Narter, a senior vice president at Celent, told the source. "They need to get batch marketing down before moving toward real-time marketing. Why make mistakes in real-time as well as batch?"

A few ways FIs are instituting this type of marketing is through mobile and email marketing. Through emails, banks can make use of "intelligent content," which gives readers preference-specific offers.

According to Memeburn contributor Georgia Christian, "The result is that you have a higher chance of your emails being read and converted and your customers are happy because they are getting relevant offers that don’t expire. A precursor to intelligent content is 'time-sensitive messages,' which automatically delete from an inbox once the offer expires."

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