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Co-écrit avec Sophie-Pascale Videau

According to Gartner’s recently released CMO Spend Survey 2017-2018, budgets allocated towards marketing technology for all industries are down by 15% and remaining budgets are receiving more and more scrutiny for scale, relevance and resilience.  In this environment, more and more banks have been appointing Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs), promoting internally or, in some cases, hiring from outside.  Banks have then dedicated large budgets for these CMOs to invest in data analytics.

The CMO agenda within banks is evolving to provide a “connected brand experience” that includes seamless access to brands at any time, omni-channel engagement and participation, personalization through data and tracking all points of customer experience to ensure effectiveness and efficiency.

Data intelligence is now providing tools to marketing including:

• Launching data-driven marketing programs to optimize conversion rates;
• Generating and managing personalized content;
• Creating dynamic lending pages to create tailored experience for prospects;
• Creating lead factories for lead generation, qualification, and conversion; and
• Executing multichannel personalization integrating website, branch and call center, providing seamless unique experiences, and an end-to-end vision of digital leads.

This requires the implementation of advanced digital tools such as data management platform (DMP), web analytics, bidding tools, attribution models and partnering with external players in each geography (for affiliation, metasearch, and social media).  But it is still not clear what will differentiate banks from their peers and from marketing giants. We believe that the speed of scaling as well as the ability to care for the client’s privacy will be the differentiators for banks.

Balancing personalization and privacy

Indeed, in the context of the recent GDPR launch, banks, like other businesses, should define the right balance between data driven marketing (to provide an ever-more personalized experience) and the protection of customers’ privacy, as most customers ask for more personalized offers while simultaneously raising more and more concerns about their data privacy.

Neil Costigan, CEO of biometric security firm BehavioSec, thinks there is also a lack of coherence on the part of the consumer. ‘BehavioSec’s report on digital behavior discovered that 21% of respondents have shared their phone password and 10% even admit to sharing online banking details with people they know,’ says Costigan. “It isn’t that the security mechanism is broken – the mechanism is only as secure as consumers’ willingness to protect it.”

To provide a highly personalized offering while respecting data privacy, banks must have a great understanding of their customers’ needs, transactions history and preferences and therefore must collect and analyze extensive nominative and personal data.

Permission marketing is a key concept

Balancing personalization and privacy relates to the concept of permission marketing (theorized in 1999 by Seth Godin, author, speaker and former Yahoo direct marketing manager). Permission marketing is about collecting and using data with transparency and in accordance with customers’ wishes (opt-in), but it is also about using data and interacting with customers so that they see a dedicated and highly relevant offer and not an intrusion into their privacy.

Research has been conducted to identify what motivators drive consumers to grant permission to be contacted via personalized communication. The strong negative influence of privacy concerns on the probability of granting permission can be reduced by two benefit-related factors: 1) message content with entertainment value; and/or 2) personal relevance to the customer.

Consumers respond less positively to communication when it is perceived as irritating, intrusive, or annoying. The higher the perceived intrusiveness caused by the direct communication medium, the lower the probability that consumers will grant permission for interactive marketing activities.

We believe there is a great opportunity for banks to gain permission from customers to use their data, if the usage is “private by nature” and provides a tangible benefit; those clients refusing to provide access may, on the other hand, appreciate offers of services enhancing their data security, such as data vaults.  Banks can rely upon data intelligence and marketing as two great tools for building strong, branded customer experiences in the digital age, but only if they can obtain the customer’s permission to use the needed data.