The personalized customer journey reaches banking: the Banco BPM case

Intercepting the customer at each touchpoint with personalized offers and messages is a best practice. How can we bring it to the banking sector? And what tools can banks use to develop this totally innovative, strategic objective? We asked Banco BPM. Its customer journey has shown that it can create a one-to-one relationship to meet customer demands. This yields important results.

With almost 22,000 employees and over 1,700 branches, Banco BPM is the third-largest banking group in Italy.

It serves 4 million customers through an extensive, complementary distribution network and a widespread multi-channel model. Its presence throughout the country makes Banco BPM the national leader in various business sectors with high added value.

Personalizing the customer journey means reaching out to the customer. This is done with targeted content at each stage to meet their actual, exact needs.

There are key steps in creating customized touchpoints. It is important to start from these touchpoints and make sure to not miss any:

• identify and analyze users’ habits, needs, and preferences to understand which content and offers fulfills them;
• segment users into clusters based on the collected data; and
• set up automatic communication flows that intercept the customer at each stage of the funnel:

Marketing Automation makes these best practices come together. Quite possibly, it’s the real pivot of the customer journey. Its automatisms not only self-manage communications but also, and above all, develop data-oriented strategies tailored to the customer. This orients mailings and content based on the individual recipient’s behavior, his/her interests and needs, and the level of the relationship that he/she has established with the company (i.e., the stage of the funnel they are in).

The Deloitte U.S. 2020 Banking and Capital Markets Outlook says that, fundamentally, the way of banking is changing. Besides technology, which is thought of as the driving factor of change, new purchasing habits and growing digital tendencies are transforming this sector. These two trends are pushing banking institutions to rethink their communication and sales strategies: the old one-size-fits-all solutions are now out the window when it comes to meeting the expectations of today’s consumers. Banking customers themselves demonstrate a willingness to accept the use of behavioral data if it results in a better shopping experience.

This means that banking sector innovation must stem not only from integrating new technologies but also from creating a one-to-one relationship that requires personalizing the customer’s journey.

The Banco BPM customer journey was created with the objectives of:

• Promptly detecting insurance needs processed using the check-up required by current legislation and meeting them with solutions offered by Banco BPM;
• Managing the complex, high number of customizations in communications based on the needs and preferences expressed by the individual customer;
• Simply and clearly illustrating the technical aspects and advantages of insurance products to our customers to allow them to approach, with more awareness, a field which is often still unfamiliar in our country;
• Create greater interaction between Banco BPM customers and the Sales Network consultants in the field.

To personalize the users’ journey and manage the high number of personalized communications, Banco BPM has relied on MailUp and the platform’s numerous features. This has led to a successful strategy:

• The most important insurance needs of each individual customer are identified within a few days from the check-up, ordered based on what was expressed and the recipient’s profile;
• The MailUp Conditional Display function allowed us to dynamically compose unique texts and images per message, with links for further information for each part of the offer presented. Through a customer care operator, the customer can request an appointment with their manager to get more information on the offer they are interested in;
• If interest is instead detected through browsing behaviors, communications with further information are sent.

We let Banco BPM’s results speak for themselves on how advantageous it is to personalize the customer journey. This comes from implementing the customer journey:

• 47.2% open rate
• 3.55% click rate
• 10% conversion rate
• 0.06% unsubscribe rate

Banco BPM’s strategy is an excellent example of how personalizing the customer journey may also benefit the banking sector. Indeed, it represents an innovative element for banks to approach the expectations and new purchasing behaviors of today’s consumers.

Find out more about Banco BPM’s objectives, strategy, and best practices to fulfill its customer journey: read the case study!