Being a Marketer for a Mutual Fund or an Asset Management company can be complicated. It’s easy to get into a panic state with ever-changing regulations and constant policing by compliance teams. In short, the life of Mutual Funds Marketers is not as easy and liberated as their peers from Retail or CPG. However, the evolution of Marketing technology has come to the rescue of such Marketers. Be it Data Privacy compliance OR be it the Monthly Recurring Fund update, Technology has taken care of it and brought in some relief.
Interested to know which Technology are we referring to??
This new technology on the block that is making news is nothing but a Customer Data Platform. It is enabling Marketers to automate recurring compliance-led campaigns and tons of other things that they are unable to otherwise do with their existing Campaign tool.
- What is a Customer Data Platform?
- How different is it from a Marketing Automation Platform?
- Is it the same as CRM or a DMP?
What is the strategic importance of a Customer Data Platform to a Mutual Fund Marketer?
It is very natural for you to have these questions if you are new to Customer Data Platforms and thus we have answered all these queries in our blog here.
Customer Data Platform as defined by CDP Institute is packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems. In simpler words, a Customer Data Platform(also known as CDP) helps enterprises achieve a Single Customer View by ingesting every customer interaction that takes place in any form and on any channel. Be it a voice call dialed to a Customer Care, transaction done in a physical store, or a comment on a social media post, all interactions are ingested by CDPs to arrive at Single Customer View. And this Single Customer View helps the brand to know more about the customer and thus engage better with more relevance. Well, the story doesn’t end here…
While most of the CDPs conclude their offerings at Customer Unification, there is a full-stack or a comprehensive CDP like FirstHive that enables Marketers with much more than a Single Customer View. And one of those differentiating features of FirstHive is efficient campaign execution capabilities. What would be your reaction if someone comes and tells you that we will reduce your campaign execution time and effort by 90%?? would you be Happy? Sad? or Excited?… Come, let us introduce you to Hyper-Personalization, a technology that is not just another buzzword but a rescue engine for Marketers.
What is Hyper-Personalization?
Hyper-Personalization is an advanced technology that enables Marketers to personalize campaigns beyond the general ‘Name’ personalization and can also factor in aspects like preferred content (Not just text but also images…Yes, images, you heard it right), preferred time, and preferred channel.
And the reason why Hyper-Personalization is way more critical to Mutual Fund marketers as compared to their peers is because of the potential it carries to reduce their time and effort by 90% which otherwise they would have invested or rather wasted in the execution of recurring campaigns that are more compliance-driven than marketing-driven. And yes, this definitely means that you will be left with more time and resources in hand to think about ways to upsell, cross-sell, acquire customers, retain customers, and everything that would satisfy the marketer in you.
How does Hyper-Personalization reduce the time and effort of a Mutual Fund Marketer?
There are various use cases of Hyper-Personalization for Mutual Fund companies however let us list them in the order of criticality, starting from the most critical one.
Let us understand each one of them in detail.
- Sending FactSheet to all customers every month
- Upselling or Cross-selling basis Fund performance
- Personalized experience to customers on other channels
- Reduce Time to Value via Partner Engagement model
Sending FactSheet to all customers every month
Let’s say you have 12 different funds. Today, are you sending 12 campaigns every month or is it just one?? If you are still sending 12 campaigns, then it is a perfect opportunity for you to learn about how FirstHive CDP can reduce that number to one campaign.
FirstHive allows you to set conditions for content display that too for content in all forms – Be it Text, Numbers, Alphanumeric, Date, Images, or even URL. This process also called ‘Content Mapping’ is a very simple process of setting conditions offline in an Excel format which you then upload in one campaign so that the system derives 12 content drafts from one email draft thereby reducing your effort in creating another 11 drafts of emails.
In short, by executing one campaign, you would be delivering 12 different content email campaigns. Woah!! What are you waiting for??
Upselling or Cross-selling basis Fund performance
As per law, you do send a FactSheet to every customer but in that same email, basis the fund performance, do you communicate something more… For example: If the fund has done well, ask the customer to top-up his investment or if the fund has not done well, showcase other performing funds and widen the customer’s portfolio.
FirstHive enables you to set rules in the content mapping section in a way that different content is pushed to the customer basis the fund performance. This ensures that the customer won’t just receive the Fund Performance details every month but also enough guidance on what to do next.
And as you can imagine, this slight change in approach can bring dual benefits to the brand – One is that the Customer will feel BETTER engaged and not OVER engaged, and the second is that the sales will increase as a result of razor-sharp targeting. I mean, along with sharing the factsheet and telling me that my fund has done great if you are also pushing me to click on a button and invest more, there are higher chances of me clicking that button because the premise is that I would be in a happy state of mind. Wait…isn’t this ‘Marketing in Moments’ as stated by Forrester Analyst Joe Stanhope. Well, not bragging… but it is 🙂
Personalized experience to customers on other channels
CTA of a mutual fund campaign typically is a Click that takes the user to the website or a landing page. But thereon, does the website or landing page show personalized content to every user of that campaign, or does the entire audience of one campaign land on a webpage that showcases the same content to everyone. Hoping it’s not the latter. In case it is, it is.. i.e; all users of one campaign see the same content on the landing page, it’s high time you start practicing Hyper-Personalization. In this era of Netflix where you as well as your customers have got used to seeing personalized recommendations, showing all of them the same content on the page is quite a passe. I bet, you will agree.
Reduce Time to Value via Intermediary/ Partner Engagement
Most of the Mutual Fund companies work around a Distributor model wherein Mutual Funds are sold via IFAs. These IFAs obviously have a strong network of investors, they maintain a good hold on their investments and play a big role in their buying/ selling decisions. Then why not target these investors via IFAs. This is exactly what Partner Engagement is… i.e; communicating in the line of Mutual Fund-Distributor-Investor. In simple words, it is a method in which you are targeting end investors of IFAs via IFAs but without letting the control go out of your hands. By control, we mean, the control from Marketing’s perspective i.e; Branding, content, time of execution.
FirstHive’s Partner Engagement model lets you design the campaign in a manner that the Campaign would be delivered to the end investor via IFA’s branding as well as via the IFA’s email id in a manner that your brand aesthetics are maintained and the content is personalized. Wait, not just this… the icing on the cake is that the IFA would get real-time access to his investor’s response to the campaign. And the response would not be just another generic response like Clicked or Opened but it would be something as crisp as – “Eric John went to the website and explored the XYZ fund that we recommended”. Yes yes, you are reading it right…This means that the Mutual Fund house will share high intent data with the IFA which will not just increase their Sales but also strengthen their bond with the IFA. And that’s precious. Isn’t it??
So here we come to an end with all Hyper-Personalization use cases we thought would be relevant to you as a Mutual Fund marketer. If you are excited about what you just read and are keen to see this in real, please Click Here.
Lastly, an important point to note is that FirstHive is a resilient product backed by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to strengthen its architecture. Besides Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) that offers highly scalable infrastructure, FirstHive also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) that stores billions of row of data with an above industry uptime, AWS Transcribe service to convert voice data of customer interactions into searchable & analyzable digital content and Amazon Sagemaker platform to train machine learning models & generate the intelligent inferences. The Hyper-personalization functions run on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) that is capable of elastically auto-scaling based on the varying business needs, while image recognition capability of Amazon Rekognition is leveraged in different types of sentiment analysis.
P.S: And yes, do read our blog Unmasking differences between Customer Data Platform and Marketing Automation Platform and DMP Vs CDP Vs CRM
