Financial Services Marketing Archives - Act-On Marketing Automation Software, B2B, B2C, Email Tue, 14 Apr 2026 19:04:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://act-on.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/cropped-AO-logo_Color_Site-Image-32x32.png Financial Services Marketing Archives - Act-On 32 32 Financial Services Advertising Regulations Marketers Need to Know https://act-on.com/learn/blog/financial-services-advertising-regulations/ Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:07:13 +0000 https://act-on.com/?p=503033

TL;DR:Financial services marketers face stricter advertising, privacy, and disclosure rules from regulators like FINRA and the SEC, along with added state and global oversight. That means tighter controls around claims, consent, data use, and approvals across every channel. Centralizing processes, standardizing disclosures, and using helpful tools to manage permissions and audit trails can help teams reduce risk, stay compliant, and scale campaigns with confidence.


Intoduction

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the Securities and Exchange Commission, local regulations, and privacy laws … it’s a lot to contend with, isn’t it? You likely already have enough on your plate, working to prove your marketing’s impact to leadership and helping your team feel less overloaded. But at the same time, you know that when it comes to compliance, you can’t afford any mistakes.

Whether you’re brushing up on financial services advertising regulations for 2026 or you’re new to the industry and figuring out which ones to watch, we’ve broken down the most important ones, along with tips for keeping up at scale when your team is already stretched too thin.


Why Advertising Regulations Matter More for Financial Services

As a financial services marketer, you likely have a long list of goals to hit this year. The challenge is reaching those goals while checking all the important compliance boxes. And this year, advertising regulations matter even more because:

Consumer trust is key

The trust required for financial transactions is significant. People don’t casually try out a new bank the way they might stop by a new restaurant for takeout on the way home from work. And that sets the bar for credibility even higher.

Plus, the stakes are serious. More than half of respondents have considered switching financial institutions in the past two years. So, you don’t want to break trust for any reason, especially not when it comes to financial services advertising regulations. 

Regulatory security continues to tighten

Stricter rules on consumer data collection from the Federal Trade Commission, along with increased oversight of advertising claims and disclosures from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, make it harder for financial marketers to stay compliant and do so at scale.

Risk of noncompliance comes at a great cost

Strict regulations also bring the risk of fines, not to mention the potential for broken trust and reputational damage. As the number of marketing channels has grown over the years, financial marketers now face compliance risks from many directions.

For example, a bank was recently fined $850,000 by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority for sharing social media posts from an influencer that weren’t considered fair or balanced and included exaggerated, unwarranted, promissory, or misleading claims.


Key Financial Services Advertising Regulations to Know in 2026

As a financial marketer, it’s your job to understand which regulations you need to follow and how to stay compliant across all the channels you manage. But which ones matter most? Here are a few financial services advertising regulations to watch in 2026, including:

1. FINRA Advertising and Communications Rules 

FINRA compliance focuses on standards that require your communications with the people you serve to be fair and balanced and not misleading. It covers things like the emails you send, the content on your website, your social media posts, and the brochures your team puts out into the world.

FINRA Rule 2210 is the main rule that governs how you communicate with the public through marketing, advertising, and promotional content. These regulations set expectations around disclosures, substantiated claims, and supervisory oversight across channels.

Graphic showing the marketing channels regulated by FINRA Rule 2210.

2. SEC Marketing and Disclosure Requirements

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission oversees investment adviser marketing standards under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, and its modernized marketing rule clarifies exactly how advisers must present performance data, testimonials, endorsements, and third-party ratings in their promotional content.

For example, regulators recently held nine firms accountable for violating the marketing rule. They were called to account for “disseminating advertising that included untrue or unsubstantiated statements of material fact or testimonials, endorsements or third-party ratings that lacked the required disclosures.” The organizations ended up paying roughly $1.2 million in combined civil penalties.

3. State-Level and Global Oversight Considerations

Beyond federal rules, you’ll also need to account for state regulations and global oversight. U.S. states enforce their own consumer protection laws, which often prohibit unfair or deceptive practices and can be used to challenge misleading marketing. If you operate across borders, international requirements also apply. For example, the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK has specific rules governing financial promotions.

So, you’ll want to track not only the advertising regulations for financial services and federal laws but also any regulations that apply to the specific geographies where your organization operates.


Financial Services Data Privacy Regulations and Marketing

With technology advancing quickly and more tools collecting and using data for all types of purposes, consumers are understandably concerned. They want to know who has their data and how it’s being used. And the laws are working to catch up. Here are a few areas to watch around financial services data privacy regulations:

Before you start collecting data, make sure you collect it lawfully and clearly document your process. Your customers and the people you serve need to actively consent to specific uses of their information. Examples of privacy laws include the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and broader regulations like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Privacy requirements also mean you’ll want to build consent capture into your forms, landing pages, and anywhere else you gather data. Standardize the language and carefully track the purpose and use of each data type. You’ll also want an efficient way to store those records so you can demonstrate compliance, whether you’re using the data for email marketing, segmentation, or something else.

Storage use and considerations

Data privacy in financial services doesn’t only govern what types of data you collect. The regulations also govern how you store and safeguard that data. That means protecting customer data from unauthorized access and using it only for the purposes to which people consent. In practice, this often includes strong access controls, encrypted storage, and clear retention and secure disposal policies.

For marketing teams, that means being intentional about where customer lists and behavioral data live. Disconnected spreadsheets and ad hoc processes can create security and compliance issues, especially when you need audit trails, documentation, and clear oversight.

Impact on targeting and personalization

Financial services data privacy rules often change how you approach segmentation and personalization. When broad consent isn’t possible, you may need to rely more on context-based targeting or aggregated data instead. Rather than using detailed individual profiles to trigger a nurture email, you might structure journeys around life cycle stages or high-level behaviors that don’t require sensitive personal information.

Regulations like the California Consumer Privacy Act and the General Data Protection Regulation make it harder to depend on highly granular personal data without clear permission, which naturally shifts teams toward broader privacy-safe approaches.

Cross-channel personalization can also get more complicated, especially when it involves third-party cookies or external data sharing. Those tactics need careful review against current privacy requirements. Focusing on strong first-party data practices, like opt-in lists, owned analytics, and clear audit trails, helps you execute effective marketing while reducing the risk of crossing regulatory lines.


How Advertising Regulations Affect Different Marketing Channels

Regulations don’t only impact what you can say but also the operations of your different marketing channels. Every channel needs to be easy to review and to show compliance. A few examples include: 

Email marketing and compliance

When crafting email marketing strategies for financial services, you’re often entering regulated territory. Some tools allow you to create templates that lock in those disclosures so your team can’t edit or remove them without the proper permissions.

Digital advertising and content marketing

Paid ads, landing pages, blogs, and social posts are all examples of content that might fall under financial services advertising regulations. But the challenge is often related to the overall scale. For example, you might have dozens of ad variants to manage. Teams can centralize approved claims and disclosures, then build campaigns using that approved content. This speeds up creation and helps reduce risk.

Campaign approvals and recordkeeping

Every new campaign goes through legal review and approval, and you need to document that it happened. Tracking approvals and related communications in one system helps you move faster without missing important oversight steps.


How Marketing Automation Helps Financial Services Stay Compliant

As you build broader marketing strategies for financial services, compliance becomes trickier at scale. The more segments and campaigns you’re running, the higher the chance that something gets overlooked. Manual processes can create additional issues, but marketing automation software can help address them with the following:

Centralized control

When campaigns live across multiple tools and technologies, it’s easy for outdated copy or unapproved claims to slip through. Marketing automation helps you centralize templates and create fixed blocks so all the important compliance pieces stay intact.

For example, teams can lock required risk language into email and landing page templates so it can’t be changed accidentally. Marketers can then build from those approved components rather than starting from scratch with every campaign.

Permission management

Privacy regulations and internal policies often require clear direction about who can contact which customers. Consent, opt-out, and channel preferences all need to be followed, and manual tracking can be risky.

Marketing automation helps fix this by ensuring each contact record and its preferences are enforced. If a customer decides to opt out of a channel, they’re automatically excluded from future sends.

Audit trails and consistency

Regulators often expect proof. You need to show what was sent, when it went out, who received it, and which version of the content was approved.

Built-in audit trails make that possible. Archived messages, version histories, and documented approvals help you run compliant campaigns and confidently defend them during audits.


Financial Services Marketing Automation Strategy Guide

Preparing Your Marketing Team for 2026 and Beyond

Compliance might be a large part of your job, but that doesn’t mean it has to weigh heavily on your team. With the right tools and resources, you can still creatively reach your audience with the content they need at the right time while staying compliant with financial services advertising regulations.

Purpose built tools like Act-On’s marketing automation for financial services help you strike the balance between executing what’s needed to reach your goals and not accidentally stepping into costly compliance violations.

]]> Marketing Strategies for Financial Services That Hit Goals  https://act-on.com/learn/blog/marketing-strategies-for-financial-services/ Mon, 17 Nov 2025 23:50:26 +0000 https://act-on.com/?p=502442

TL;DR: Financial institutions can reach ambitious goals—even with flat budgets—by focusing on high-impact marketing strategies for financial services. These include automated onboarding programs that build early trust, behavioral tracking to personalize outreach, event-based nurture campaigns that keep customers engaged, and automated cross-sell programs that expand customer lifetime value. Together, these strategies help teams deepen relationships, boost applications, and drive growth with fewer resources.



Introduction

Do you have a long list of marketing goals to hit this year? If you’re like many financial marketers, your goals aren’t small, and the pressure to meet them is high. However, oftentimes, your budget and resources don’t exactly match the size of those requests. Studies show that 39% of financial institutions expect their marketing budgets to stay flat in 2026, and another 7% anticipate decreases. And that means your marketing strategies have to give you the largest impact possible, with a workload your team can actually manage. 

The good news is that even with lofty goals, your team can still achieve them when you have solid marketing strategies for financial services behind you. Here are some of our favorites to help you turn whatever your executive team has dreamed up this year into a reality. 


Engage Customers with Automated Onboarding Programs

When a customer joins your financial institution, you’ve reached a pivotal moment. From here, they’ll decide exactly how much of their money they plan to bring to you. Many already have accounts across several institutions, which creates fragmented and shallow relationships. Studies show that Gen Z and younger millennials are the most guilty of this, spreading finances across multiple institutions, with many using more than six financial tools or services, and over half of them residing outside of their primary bank. 


Graphic titled ‘Georgia United Credit Union – Success in Numbers,’ showing an upward growth curve with three metrics: thousands of new products cross-sold through automated marketing programs, a 96% spike in application volume, and a 77% open rate on welcome emails.

A great starting point is email marketing for financial services to build deeper relationships is an automated welcome series.

For example, Georgia United Credit Union created one for new members by partnering with internal teams to better understand the exact challenges newcomers faced. 

The result was a new onboarding program that welcomed members and introduced them to helpful services like the mobile app and direct deposit setup. The automated email achieved a 77% open rate and built trust that paved the way for future automated cross-selling programs.

Track Your Customers’ Behavior 

We’ve all experienced interactions that feel anything but personal. For example, when you already have a savings account at a bank, and they send you a marketing message promoting that exact same account. Doesn’t exactly feel personal, does it? Marketing for financial institutions needs to take this into account.

These misfires take an even harder hit on trust than in the past, with expectations around personalization growing. A recent survey found that 74% of customers want more personalized experiences from their banks, showing a clear opportunity for improvement. 

When planning your digital marketing strategy for financial services, every click, form completion, and website visit tells a story about a customer. This behavioral data gives you information about what matters most to those you serve. Marketing automation for financial services is a tool that can help you understand this information. 

For example, a financial institution might track visitors who view mortgage pages multiple times but don’t take action. Maybe they’re still comparing competitors or aren’t quite ready to move forward. Recognizing those behavioral triggers allows you to automatically send follow-up emails with more details, product comparisons, and helpful information that supports the customer’s decision-making. 

That way, you don’t end up sending a generic savings account offer to someone who’s had that same account for a decade. And by staying top of mind, you can guide them toward choosing you when the time is right.


Trigger Engagement from Events 

When a new customer joins your financial institution, they bring goals, dreams, and financial plans. Your job is to uncover them so you don’t miss opportunities to help. One way many marketers do this is by hosting educational events, such as webinars.

When hosting these events, you can put interested leads into nurture sequences that continue providing value, based on the topic of the event. Then, when your customer is ready for the next step, they’ll turn to you.

For example, imagine hosting a webinar about first-time homebuying programs that includes resources and a clear path to achieving that goal. After the event, you could add attendees (with their permission) to a nurture series tailored to their journey. Throughout the series, you might share guides, resources, and stories that inspire them along the way, building trust and positioning your institution as the clear choice when they’re ready to act.


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Go Deeper to Expand Customer Lifetime Value 

Wouldn’t it be nice if customers brought you 100% of their business? Of course it would, because we all know it’s much easier to retain customers than to attract new ones. One of the best ways to do that is with a “land and expand” strategy, but with an automated twist.

For example, Georgia United Credit Union created a “next-best product” program designed to cross-sell existing members with complementary products to increase customer lifetime value (CLV). Using member profiles, they segmented customers based on details like current products and credit scores. Then they sent a monthly email that automatically delivered personalized offers based on each profile.

With this program, they sold thousands of new products and drove a 96% increase in application volume, which was much easier to achieve than landing brand-new customers.


Moving Forward with Successful Marketing Strategies for Financial Services 

It’s likely that your customers need a solution you already offer. Maybe they don’t know (yet) that you provide it, or perhaps they aren’t quite ready to move forward. Regardless, when you build financial services advertising campaigns that focus on trust and awareness, you can organically reach some of your toughest goals. 

So even if you’re working with stubborn budgets that don’t match what you’re expected to execute, you can still make significant progress toward bringing your marketing goals to life.


Do you feel like you could use a little more guidance getting started?

Our detailed Marketing Automation Strategy Guide breaks down how marketing automation can support successful marketing strategies for financial services. It will help you connect with your customers, deliver real value, and build deeper relationships that earn more of their business.


Financial Services Advertising Regulations Marketers Need to Know

Stay compliant in 2026. Learn key financial services advertising regulations, including FINRA, SEC, and data privacy rules—plus tips to reduce risk at scale.

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]]> Financial Services Email Marketing That Wins Over Customers  https://act-on.com/learn/blog/financial-services-email-marketing/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:49:40 +0000 https://act-on.com/?p=502439

Introduction

When putting together financial services marketing strategies, marketers have many options. And even though it’s been around for decades, email marketing for financial services is still an important part of that strategy, especially considering the huge amount of money getting ready to move into the pockets of younger generations — roughly $124 trillion.

And do you know who gets the biggest cut? 

If you guessed millennials, you’d be right. 

As a bonus, millennials have something in common with other generations when it comes to marketing preferences. An overwhelming number of them report a preference to receive marketing via email (68%). 

And that means if you’re a financial marketer and you create a strong email program, you have a pretty solid advantage. The challenge is that there are many pitfalls when executing an email marketing strategy, starting with making your customers cranky before the first message lands in their inbox.

As a financial marketer, you’re responsible for following a pretty long list of regulations that impact your email marketing. These include broad laws that apply to all marketers, such as the CAN-SPAM Act, CCPA, and GDPR. Then you have to comply with rules specific to financial marketers, like FINRA Rule 2210, SEC advertising and marketing rules, and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

So, before you move ahead with financial services email marketing, it helps to start with a strong foundation, and that begins with consent. Without it, you won’t only have potential compliance issues, but you could also run into email deliverability problems. 

Make sure your forms include advanced features that allow you to add opt-in checkboxes (for example, “Yes, I’d like to receive emails”) when someone fills out a landing page or form. It’s also helpful to give people an easy way to manage their preferences so your email acquisition efforts don’t accidentally result in sending emails to contacts who haven’t actively agreed.

You’ll want a solid way to track these efforts so if compliance issues do come up, you can prove you did everything correctly. For example, Act-On offers marketing automation for financial services that include features such as Global BCC that automatically sends a blind copy of every email to a dedicated archive mailbox for auditing purposes. With it, you’ll always have a record of every email you send.

Capturing Attention in an Inbox Full of “Junk” 

With your compliance boxes firmly checked, your next step is to stand out in your customers’ inboxes. And this isn’t always easy. The simplest way we know is to match your email content to their exact journey. But to do that, you need more than just logical guesses. You’ll need some data and intelligence. 

For example, imagine a prospect visits your refinance rate page. That action shows clear intent to refinance a mortgage. From there, you can launch a nurture email stream that speaks directly to where they’re at in that journey. Maybe they’d benefit from a refinance calculator to see how today’s rates could impact their monthly mortgage payment. Or perhaps they’d like to speak with an advisor to explore potential scenarios and decide if refinancing makes sense right now.

You can nurture them through this process and also sync that activity with your CRM to make the handoff to humans easier. Our favorite tool for this process is marketing automation, which can make the entire process much smoother. 

And if you want some inspiration for exactly what to write in these emails, we love Kelsey Yen’s 420 email examples for financial institutions that are anything but boring. 

Financial Services Advertising Regulations Marketers Need to Know

Stay compliant in 2026. Learn key financial services advertising regulations, including FINRA, SEC, and data privacy rules—plus tips to reduce risk at scale.

Blog
Learn More


Speaking to Multiple People Authentically 

It’s likely your marketing team isn’t sitting around twiddling their thumbs. They’re super busy and need workflows that perform and don’t take a lot of time. As your financial customers move through their journeys, one way to make this possible is with dynamic content.

For example, maybe you have two segments. One includes customers who are looking for a home but have never owned one. The other includes customers who have owned homes in the past and are looking to purchase again. Are they both looking for a similar product? Possibly. But that doesn’t mean you need to talk with them in the same way. And the more personalized you get, the better.

Act-On marketing automation for financial services lets you segment based on lifecycle, product interest, or interaction history. You can then swap out content in a single campaign (called dynamic content) to make it more personalized. One campaign acts as the shell your team builds but can be adjusted to serve multiple audiences while still speaking directly to each.

Then, as you build out email marketing for financial services, you can monitor click-through rates by segment, allowing that data to guide any needed changes. 

Asking for Permission (Again) to Improve Results 

Have you ever signed up for an email list and later stopped reading the company’s emails? We’ve all done it. In most cases, the reason isn’t really that personal. The customer has just moved on and no longer connects with your products or services. But it’s important to plan for this pivot, because it can be an opportunity to either re-engage them or remove them for a healthier email list. This helps prevent deliverability issues that can make it harder for people who still want your emails to receive them.

For example, if someone hasn’t engaged with you for 180 days, you might send an email that basically says, “Hey, do you still want to hear from us?” If they don’t reply, it’s probably a good idea to delete them from your list following a standard email sunset policy.

Try running these campaigns quarterly to keep your list clean and make sure the people on it are still interested in your products and services.

Becoming the Emails Customers Actually Want 

As you press on with financial services email marketing, one thing is clear: Your customers are only going to receive more emails in the future. After all, an estimated 376 billion emails are sent and received every day, a number that has steadily increased each year since 2017.

But when you focus on your customers’ needs and capture the data points that show exactly what they want to see in their inboxes, you can avoid being relegated to the dreaded spam folder. And you can create happier financial customers and reach your marketing goals more easily. 

Do you feel like you could use a little more guidance getting started?

Our detailed Marketing Automation Strategy Guide breaks down how automation can support email marketing for financial services. It will help you connect with your customers, deliver value, and build deeper relationships that earn more of their business.

]]> Building a Bank Marketing Strategy? Here’s What Successful Strategies Get Right  https://act-on.com/learn/blog/bank-marketing-strategy/ Wed, 12 Nov 2025 21:28:35 +0000 https://act-on.com/?p=502390

Introduction

Banking customers have grown more discerning. In 2025, nearly three-quarters maintain a relationship with at least one competing bank, according to Accenture. This signals waning loyalty and a growing openness to switch. What’s more, nearly half of banking customers aren’t sure they’ll stay with their current financial institution in the next year. 

Adding to this challenge is something already keeping bank marketers up at night, which is the great wealth transfer. An estimated $84 trillion is set to change hands over the next 20 years. No pressure, right? 

And that means if you’re creating a bank marketing strategy, it has to be strong. 

The good news for marketers is that you also have tools and strategies that can help you connect the dots between your bank’s business goals, your marketing strategy, and your customers’ needs. These tools can support customers with learning more about what you offer and, most importantly, help you retain them.


Aligning Strategy with What Customers Actually Want 

Banking customers have less and less tolerance for financial institutions that don’t really know them. Those personalized experiences that once felt like a “wow” are now totally expected. One survey found that nearly half of banking customers would consider switching banks if a new one offered more personalized digital experiences.



One of the best ways to deliver these types of experiences is through tapping into your data and keeping current on your audience research. By doing both, you can more easily align your bank marketing strategy with your business goals and customers’ needs. 

For example, let’s say one of your bank’s business goals this year is to grow deposits by 20%. You could start by digging into your customer research to find the intersections between audience needs and your products. Then you can build your bank marketing strategy around targeting those needs.

But let’s back up a minute. What if you don’t have audience research, or you do, but it’s really old? That’s okay – you can still move forward. Here are a few ways to check the pulse of your customers:

  • Talk with your frontline teams. Ask bank staff, relationship managers, and customer service reps what customers are asking about the most in the area of deposits. What do they need right now? What phrasing are they using to describe their problems?

  • Pull recent customer data. Review trends in account openings, product usage, and digital engagement metrics.

  • Send a short pulse survey. Email existing customers to ask targeted questions about their current deposit needs.


After gathering your research, you might learn that many of your customers want higher-yield savings options but don’t really understand the differences between your products. If so, you could focus your bank marketing strategy on education that clarifies product value and helps customers better understand their options.

Then, if you have other business goals to align with your marketing strategy, you can use a similar process to gather insights and make sure your business goals, strategy, and audience’s needs are all in sync. 


Factoring in Journey-Based Marketing

At this point, you’ve tied your bank’s business goals to your marketing strategy and sorted through the data to get clear on customer needs. Now it’s time to think more about customer journeys and integrate personalization.

The people you serve are on many different paths. For example, maybe a customer is renting but would really like to own a home. If so, they would likely want to hear about your first-time homebuyer programs. 

Or a customer with young children might want to learn more about how to save for college. The point is that you can use the data you have to understand where customers are in their journey so you can join them with helpful resources and product recommendations.

But let’s talk a bit more about the data. How do you find it? 

We’ve found one of the easiest ways to capture this type of data is through marketing automation for banks. It can help connect your data, channels, and timing so that customers receive the right information at the right point along their journey.

You could set up the tool to automatically deliver messages based on a customer’s specific behavior. For example, you could send educational content about mortgages when someone explores home loan pages or offer savings insights after a specific type of new account is opened. Having these insights means that you’re no longer guessing who might be interested in specific products; you’re letting the behavior lead the way. 


Expanding Your Strategy into the Best Channels 

We can’t discuss your bank marketing strategy without talking about the channels where your customers hang out. Let’s go back to that audience research we discussed earlier. As you’re checking that pulse, it’s a great time to see where your audience is spending time. 

As you collect audience research, here are a few ideas for learning more about channels: 

  • Ask branch staff or relationship managers, “When customers mention hearing about a deposit product or promotion, where do they say they saw it: social media, email, a web search, or somewhere else?”

  • When you pull recent customer data, check analytics to answer the following: “Which channels are driving the most traffic or inquiries for deposit products: email campaigns, social ads, or organic search?”

  • If you send a short pulse survey, add a customer question such as “Where do you usually hear about our new products or offers: social media, email, our website, or in your local branch?”


A few targeted questions can help you figure out where your audience spends time so you can focus on the best ways to reach them when you’re designing your bank marketing strategy. Also, building consistent touchpoints across the channels people prefer helps you create the familiarity and trust needed to meet your marketing goals. 


Tweaking Your Bank Marketing Strategy for Results 

Marketing is a bit of a science experiment, isn’t it? As you create your strategy and put it into action, it’s important to leave room for a few pivots. Sure, it would be nice if everything worked perfectly the first time, and sometimes it does. But more often, you’ll need to make adjustments along the way.

That new email nurture sequence you just launched? Maybe the open rates are a little low, so you A/B test different subject lines to get more people to open it, and conversions on your CTA go up significantly. Or perhaps your open rate is great but click-throughs are low. So you tweak the CTA to make sure it aligns with customer pain points and delivers better results.

Aligning your bank marketing strategy with your business goals and grounding it in audience research helps you deliver the personalization that keeps your customers happy and grows business through the great wealth transfer. 


Need more guidance getting started?

Our detailed marketing automation strategy guide breaks down how marketing automation can support a successful bank marketing strategy. It will help you connect with your customers, deliver real value, and build deeper relationships that earn more of their business.

]]> Credit Union Marketing Strategies That Drove $10.5M in New Deposits https://act-on.com/learn/blog/credit-union-marketing-strategies/ Fri, 31 Oct 2025 23:23:43 +0000 https://act-on.com/?p=502207

TL;DR: Credit unions face shrinking engagement advantages over banks, making it harder to capture members’ attention in crowded inboxes. Credit union marketing strategies—such as personalized onboarding, cross-selling with “next best product” campaigns, and data-driven segmentation—can drive real results. Unions like Centra and Georgia United have generated millions in new deposits by using marketing automation to deliver relevant, timely messages that strengthen relationships and boost satisfaction.

Introduction

Even if your members love your credit union, it doesn’t mean they’ll open your emails. And it’s not because they don’t want to hear from you or need your financial products. It’s because the volume of emails hitting their inbox is crushing. To get ahead, you need to implement effective credit union marketing strategies.

The number of emails people receive has steadily increased every year since 2017. Globally, people send and receive about 361 billion emails each year, and that number is expected to reach 424 billion by 2026.

Let’s start by going over recent credit union marketing trends.

Recent Gallup research on credit union marketing trends shows that the engagement advantage credit unions once held over banks is shrinking. In 2014, they enjoyed a +21% engagement premium and a +29% higher Net Promoter Score (NPS). By 2021, those numbers had dropped to +11% and +17%, respectively.

Engagement with Credit Unions Compared to Banks. Year 2014 is 21%. 2015 is 19%. 2016 is 16%. 2018 is 11%. 2020 is 12%. 2021 is 11%. Source: The Financial Brand

So if you think it’s tough to capture members’ attention now, just wait. It’s only going to get harder. 

But it’s worth it.

For example, one credit union built an automated email program that captured $10.5 million in new deposits over a seven-week campaign. And that’s just one example of what’s possible with credit union email marketing. We’ve gathered some of our favorite strategies to help you serve your members in new and creative ways.

Three Effective Credit Union Marketing Strategies

So, what makes credit union marketing strategies different from the rest? This isn’t a new question, but it’s one that credit unions have been working really hard to answer for years. Interestingly enough, a 2025 J.D. Power survey shows that credit union satisfaction is 74 points higher than that of banks.

So why are credit union members still keeping parts of their business elsewhere?

In many cases, they just haven’t built a relationship deep enough to get customers to bring everything over. The good news is you can change that, and a solid credit union email marketing program is a great place to start.

Here are a few of the credit union marketing strategies we’re seeing our customers use right now that are getting results:

1. Onboarding and welcoming new members with purpose 

Members come to you through many different channels. Some got a great deal with your credit union at a local dealership when purchasing a new car. Others started a new job and learned from HR that credit union membership is a perk of employment. Either way, their relationship likely isn’t as deep as it could be—at least not yet.

A welcome email series (aka nurturing automation) that educates new members about how to get the most from their membership can help close that gap. 

Georgia Credit Union datagraphic shows results of an effective onboarding strategy.

For example, Georgia United Credit Union automated a new-member onboarding sequence that shares educational content and resources new members are most likely to need. The credit union team partnered with its member experience team to identify pain points, learn what members were calling about, and address those topics in their onboarding emails. The series was well received, earning a 77% open rate on welcome emails, and set the stage for a highly valuable cross-selling program.

2. Cross-selling with “next best product” emails

Imagine that a member rents their home but receives a credit union email marketing message about refinancing programs. They aren’t likely to be excited—that’s a given—but more importantly, they’re probably less likely to open future emails. 

That’s why, in addition to starting the relationship with an automated welcome email series, you can create a personalized “next best product” program. Georgia United did just that, using member profiles and data like current products and credit scores to trigger more personalized email offers.

The emails produced a 96% spike in application volume and thousands of new products sold. Beyond the success metrics, members felt more known and understood by their credit union, leading to deeper and more meaningful relationships. 

3. Turn your data into easy wins 

A credit union marketing plan that includes strategic email marketing can also help you launch new programs that educate members about products that align with their needs. For example, Centra Credit Union audited and cleaned its data to create a more accurate email list and remove unengaged contacts. The team then sorted the remaining contacts into segments based on behavioral history and past email engagement.

As a result, Centra’s marketing team captured a better understanding of members’ existing products and identified the best areas to target for new growth. They found that more than half of its members, over 70,000, didn’t have a certificate of deposit with Centra. As a result, they decided to target this opportunity using demographic and behavioral data for this group.

They sent these recipients a three-email educational series over seven weeks, and the results were significant, generating $10.5 million in new deposits. Even better, the process is repeatable, so the next time the credit union marketing strategy includes driving certificate of deposit growth, it can simply rerun the same campaign.

How to Plan Automated Campaigns and Nurtures 

You likely have many opportunities to grow member relationships within your data, but finding them can be challenging. One of the easiest ways to uncover these opportunities is by implementing marketing automation for credit unions. In fact, for every dollar spent on marketing automation, companies see an average return of $5.44 within the first three years.

When using this approach, here are a few steps to get started with your credit union marketing strategy. 

1. Map your member’s journey

Before building any automation, take a step back and map the journey that your members take. From joining your credit union to applying for a loan or opening a certificate of deposit, each member has their own needs. When you outline these key moments, you can create an email series that meets members where they are, using segmentation to reach the right people.

Also, take time to get familiar with your marketing automation platform and build nurtures around the opportunities it reveals. You can organize your emails in a way that makes it easy to track results later, whether you’re pulling analytics from the software itself or another source.

Data graphic shows the average global daily emails sent per year in billions, which has steady risen since 2018 to a level of 361 billion per day in 2024.

2. Trigger emails based on member behaviors

Automation gives you visibility into member behaviors so you can respond quickly. If a member clicks on mortgage rates but doesn’t apply, you can automatically send a follow-up email with additional homebuying resources. Or if a member stops opening emails, they can be exited from the program. 

Also, as you build your list, think ahead about how you want to segment and personalize future emails. Consider adding extra fields to your sign-up forms to learn more about members, and use that information to personalize your content. Keep a good email list hygiene and stay organized using consistent templates and naming conventions, so managing campaigns stays simple. 

3. Find early wins

You don’t have to automate everything at once. Start with one high-impact sequence, like Centra did when identifying members who didn’t have certificates of deposit. Test it, measure it, and refine it until you’re confident it’s delivering the results you want. Once you experience success, you can expand to other credit union email marketing programs. 

Before you launch broadly, also consider running tests on a small internal segment, such as your marketing team. This helps confirm that everything works correctly, looks great on both mobile and desktop, and that your CRM is tracking campaign data accurately.

As you map these journeys, it’s also important to distinguish between marketing and transactional emails. Marketing emails promote products or services and require opt-in consent, while transactional emails share essential account or service information and are typically sent automatically after a member action. As you grow your marketing email lists, be mindful of email deliverability best practices and make sure members have clearly opted in to receive communications and can easily opt out at any time. 

Boost Your Credit Union Marketing Strategies with Marketing Automation

We’ve broken it all down for you in our marketing automation strategy guide—your roadmap to smarter, more personalized member engagement. Inside, you’ll learn how to use automation to streamline campaigns, identify growth opportunities, and deliver the right messages at the right time.

Whether your goal is to improve onboarding, increase cross-sells, or strengthen long-term loyalty, this guide will help you connect with your members in meaningful ways, provide them with real value, and build deeper relationships that win more of their business.

Summary

As credit unions compete for attention in a saturated digital landscape, marketing automation has become a powerful way to supercharge your Credit Union marketing strategy, deepen member relationships and drive growth. Recent trends show that engagement gaps between credit unions and banks are narrowing, emphasizing the need for smarter, data-driven outreach.

Successful credit unions are using automated email marketing strategies—like personalized onboarding, targeted product recommendations, and data segmentation—to boost engagement and revenue. With thoughtful planning, behavior-based triggers, and clear consent practices, credit unions can deliver timely, relevant content that meets members where they are and turns everyday communications into lasting loyalty.

]]> Marketing Automation Guide for Wealth Managers https://act-on.com/learn/blog/automate-your-wealth-management-marketing-processes/ https://act-on.com/learn/blog/automate-your-wealth-management-marketing-processes/#respond Fri, 08 Sep 2023 23:46:37 +0000 https://act-on.pantheonlocal.com/learn/automate-your-wealth-management-marketing-processes/

TL;DR: Wealth managers can save time, boost client retention, and attract the next generation of investors by automating their marketing. From tracking client behavior to personalizing campaigns and nurturing leads, marketing automation simplifies complex processes and supports long-term growth. It’s the smart way to build stronger relationships, increase assets under management, and future-proof your firm’s success.

Introduction

Marketing automation for wealth managers, can help asset management firms focus on what’s most important: helping clients plan their financial future. Without it, marketing can feel like a distraction from that core function.

Wealth management marketing is all the more difficult by relying on manual approaches to data collection, follow up, and nurturing leads into clients. If you’re not automating your marketing operations, you’re essentially leaving money on the table. And as a wealth management firm, that’s the last thing you want to do.

Fortunately, there’s a solution. Marketing automation software can help you track user behavior and get the data you need for segmentation and personalization. It can also help you develop and launch upsell and cross-sell programs for your current clients. Let’s explore, shall we?

Track Wealth Management Client Behavior

One of the best benefits of using marketing automation for financial advisors is the data. When you’re tracking your efforts correctly, you’ll have data on how people use your website, landing pages, emails, video content, SMS blasts, and social media posts. This added visibility will help you build more knowledge about your clients and what makes them happy.

These insights can help you improve your customer journey and deliver a better client experience. Then, take things a step further by implementing lead scoring based on these behaviors. This process will help you “nurture” the lead as they move through the sales funnel. The best part? This process is fairly easy once you’ve implemented your marketing automation solution.

Financial Industry Use Cases Collection

Retain Clients and Grow Your Assets Under Management

Marketing automation provides the foundation for personalized marketing campaigns that drive growth for your wealth management practice. Your marketing automation platform can help you segment your audiences and make specific offers at just the right time. You can educate and engage new clients with automated nurture sequences. Or win over on-the-fence prospects with client case studies and infographics showing their wealth’s growth potential if they sign up.

That means you don’t have to spend precious hours sending emails to your prospects manually (or spend money hiring someone else to do it). You don’t have that kind of time! With marketing automation, you can group all of your contacts into specific segments based on their demographics, behaviors, financial goals, and interests. Once everyone is segmented, you can deliver more targeted messaging uniquely suited to them. This way, you can get super specific about different investment opportunities or services depending on who you’re speaking to. 

Reach the Next Generation of Investors

According to Forbes, roughly $30 trillion in assets are about to be passed from the Baby Boomers to younger generations in “the great wealth transfer.” Appealing to millennials and Gen Z means speaking to them in their language: digital communications.

According to the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center (GFLEC), “Approximately 80 percent of millennials use their smartphone for transactional purposes like paying bills and depositing checks, and 90 percent use their phones for informational activities like tracking their spending.” However, the GFLEC report also says that smartphone usage for financial services management doesn’t correlate with individuals improving their financial practices. Therefore, it’s up to wealth management firms and financial advisors to help younger investors better understand their opportunities.

Build a Digital First Customer Journey in Wealth Management

Here’s an example of what a digital-first customer journey might look like. 

  1. A young professional receives a promotion at work and begins exploring more advanced financial investment options.
  2. After searching “financial literacy for Gen Z,” she clicks on your website.
  3. She does some light research but doesn’t request any further information or content.
  4. Over the next 30 days, she receives your advertisements as she browses online.
  5. She clicks on an ad. She’s redirected to a landing page with a gated asset titled, “Improve Your Financial Literacy in 5 Easy Steps.”
  6. She submits her details, reads the content, and begins to sharpen her financial knowledge and skills.
  7. Meanwhile, now that you have her contact information, you can place her in a custom segment and begin sending automated email campaigns.
  8. Tracking her behaviors and interactions, you’re alerted when she hits a certain lead score, indicating she’s moved on in the buyer’s process.
  9. At this point, you begin more direct and personal sales outreach with the hopes of securing her as a client early in her career.
  10. Once your new client has begun her investment journey, you continue to provide relevant and regular content and messaging for potential cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

Once you turn on all of the switches, you simply wait for the data to roll in and A/B test and optimize as necessary. Everything is simple, streamlined, and efficient. 

Closeup of an ipad and printed charts showing the performance of an investment portfolio.
Appeal to younger investors with digital deliverables like sample charts showing portfolio growth.

Summary

By streamlining your processes using marketing automation, you and your team will have the time and resources you need to develop and distribute more personalized content. The efficiency you gain helps you get time to refine your brand messaging and external communications, and provide the tailored support your prospective customers and current investors so desperately want and need. Don’t fumble around with a bare-bones email service providers (or worse, sheets in Excel). The sooner you start combining great strategies with great technologies, the sooner you’ll be able to beat out rival firms.

Financial Industry Use Cases Collection
]]> https://act-on.com/learn/blog/automate-your-wealth-management-marketing-processes/feed/ 0 How 3 Insurance Companies are Leveraging Marketing Automation https://act-on.com/learn/blog/how-3-insurance-companies-are-leveraging-marketing-automation/ https://act-on.com/learn/blog/how-3-insurance-companies-are-leveraging-marketing-automation/#respond Tue, 05 Jul 2022 14:00:00 +0000 https://act-on.pantheonlocal.com/learn/how-3-insurance-companies-are-using-marketing-automation-to-stand-out/

TL;DR: Three insurance companies—RSA Insurance, Physicians Insurance, and IAMS—boosted engagement, conversions, and retention by using marketing automation to personalize outreach, segment audiences, and track results. Benefits included higher email open rates, improved customer retention, increased conversions, better compliance, and streamlined marketing operations.

Introduction

There are people out there on a quest to find your insurance products and services, and once you capture their attention, you don’t want to lose it. So how can you win attention and trust, then turn that into revenue? That’s a great question and one that many insurance companies are asking.

One of the most important ways to grab attention and keep it is to personalize your messaging and your offers. 3 out of 4 insurance customers report they were influenced to purchase insurance based on personalized promotions.

So, how, exactly do you go about personalizing marketing on a mass scale? That’s an easy one to answer – it’s insurance marketing automation. This article gives you three real-life examples of how to leverage marketing automation solutions for insurance agencies to capture more interest, convert leads and grow business longterm. 

Benefits of Insurance Marketing Automation 

As an insurance marketer, you likely segment customers into groups. And this is a good strategy, it helps you to deliver more relevant content to people. But your customers don’t want to feel like they’re one of many, they want to feel like an individual. Talking to a customer in a way that makes her feel known is a matter of segmentation and personalization. Doing so at scale is a matter of having the right data, strategy and tools. 

Using marketing automation software makes it much easier to talk to people about what they want in a way that feels more personal. A few benefits include: 

Delivering the Right Content at the Right Time

Marketing automation allows you to segment your audiences by creating content triggers, and personalized nurturing campaigns. Connect with your audience at the right time with the right offer, and sometimes before they even realize they have a new need. 

Boost Cross-Sell Business and Retain Customers 

You already know that retaining existing customers is far cheaper than acquiring new ones. But here’s something else to consider: current customers spend on average 67% more than those new to your business. Automation helps you to cross-sell existing customers based on the products and services they most likely need because you can access the right insights at the right moment. 

Let Your Prospects Convert Themselves

Research from PricewaterhouseCoopers found that 71% of people surveyed report they do some kind of digital research before buying insurance. Insurance industry marketing automation helps you to view prospect behavior in real-time, allowing you to provide relevant content and build trust.

Help Your Insurance Marketing Team Do More With Less 

There’s one more important benefit of insurance marketing automation to consider – marketing efficiency. If you have a large department and many resources, you still need ways to create more efficiency in processes. If you have a smaller marketing department, your team might be downright overloaded. Marketing automation helps to get rid of time-consuming manual tasks so that your team can make a bigger impact. 

Ready for your examples? Let’s take a look at how 3 insurance companies are using marketing automation and experiencing these benefits. 

How RSA Insurance Pumped Up Email Deliverability 

RSA Insurance is one of the oldest and most well-known insurance providers in the world, serving individuals, small businesses, and larger companies. Even though the company was well known, it struggled to get the attention of its audience. The company targets brokers and risk managers, and these people get a lot of emails. As a result, standing out in the inbox is hard. 

Before implementing marketing automation, understanding marketing results was also difficult. RSA couldn’t see who opened their emails and who did not. Without this data, the company didn’t really know if its audience was engaged. It also made measuring ROI more challenging. 

RSA leveraged Act-On’s marketing automation platform to get visibility into open rates, engagement, automated campaigns, and A/B tests to understand and improve results.

The RSA Insurance success story had some exciting results: 

  • Increases open rates to 18-20 percent above the industry average. 
  • Designed emails faster and more easily connected with their target audiences. 
  • Improved ROI since they could measure how well marketing efforts worked. 
  • Facilitated easier compliance with GDPR. 

How Physicians Insurance Implemented Automated Segmentation

Driven by a trend of doctors leaving private practices to work for larger clinics and hospitals, Physicians Insurance was navigating a decrease in demand. Many larger medical organizations have self-insurance plans, which eliminates the need to buy individual policies. Physicians Insurance wanted to expand its business model to reach different types of buyers, like hospital administrators and executives, but was stuck in figuring out how to do so. 

They used an email service provider (ESP) to stay in touch with prospects and customers, but the system was rife with problems. For starters, the ESP solution didn’t integrate well with internal systems and lacked advanced segmentation abilities. Without the ability to deeply segment audiences, Physicians Insurance couldn’t provide the level of personalization that today’s buyers expect. 

In addition to attracting a new clientele, Physicians Insurance needed to continue improving cross-selling activities to maintain its most important source of revenue. Email marketing was still important, but Physicians Insurance wanted to take nurturing a step further to improve customer retention and growth. Marketing automation allowed the firm to create more personalized interactions that were more meaningful and relevant to each customer.

Using Act-On’s marketing automation software, Physicians Insurance could segment based on job title, specialty, geographic region, and more, helping the company to get more personal with communications. 

Creating campaigns was also much easier, with a drag and drop editor that made it faster to create existing and future messages. Reporting helped the company to better understand and assess how buyers interacted with messages. Were prospects and customers responding positively? And if not, what changes could they make to do better? Greater visibility gave them the data to make changes. 

For example, the company learned that doctors read their emails very early in the morning and on holidays and their days off. This information allowed them to strategize how and when to best engage. 

Using automation provided several positive results, including: 

  • Email open rates as high as 30% for existing clients. 
  • Customer retention rate above 95%. 
  • Connected MarTech stack to create programs that do a better job at reaching customers. 
  • Access to the right insights, at the right time to make better decisions about who to reach, and when. 

How IAMS Increased Conversion Rates 

A customer with an inbox full of unread emails is looking for ways to clear it out fast. Hitting the select button and moving an email to the trash happens in seconds, and if you want to save your marketing from the trash, you need people to see value in what you deliver. 

Insurance Agency Marketing Services (IAMS) is a company that helps thousands of agents across the United States with developing leads. The agency struggled to help clients stand out in a competitive market and needed to improve marketing intelligence and lead tracking. 

Without personalized interactions, emails from IAMS clients were constantly overlooked by prospects and customers. Webinar registration was low, and according to the metrics, people were disinterested in receiving and opening marketing messages. The agency needed to transform a disengaged audience into one that was excited to receive emails, and willing to register for events, like webinars.

Using marketing automation, the company: 

  • Delivered personalized content that increased webinar registrations by 470% opening the floodgates to new, fresh leads. 
  • Grew website traffic by 300% with click-through rates that tripled to 6% far exceeding industry email marketing campaign benchmarks. 
  • Improved email reputation and deliverability rates, so that more customers and prospects received emails. 

List segmentation allowed IAMS to talk to the right people at the right time, and better insights helped to understand what types of content customers liked the most. With a better marketing automation tool, the organization can now view campaign performance, and make quick decisions about how to improve results. 

Improve Your Insurance Marketing Results with Act-On

You’re trying to reach customers at a time when the digital noise has never been louder. If you hope to capture their attention, you need them to feel excited every time they see your emails and open your content. And this can only happen when every experience feels personal. 

Of course, you can’t personally understand every customer at every moment, which is why you need insurance marketing automation to help you use data, implement segmented programs, and scale. Marketing automation for insurance agencies delivers the right content to people along their buyer journey and gives you the insights required to continue to improve. Do this well, and you can retain more customers, cross-sell more products and improve prospect conversion rates.

Summary

Learn how insurance companies can use marketing automation to personalize communications, improve targeting, and enhance results at scale.

  • RSA Insurance improved email deliverability, engagement, and ROI through data-driven campaigns.
  • Physicians Insurance used advanced segmentation to tailor outreach by role, specialty, and location, resulting in high open rates and a 95% retention rate.
  • IAMS transformed disengaged audiences into active participants by delivering relevant content, increasing webinar registrations by 470% and website traffic by 300%. Across all cases, marketing automation helped teams work more efficiently, connect with customers at the right time, and achieve measurable growth.
]]> https://act-on.com/learn/blog/how-3-insurance-companies-are-leveraging-marketing-automation/feed/ 0 3 of the Best Financial Services Advertising Campaigns https://act-on.com/learn/blog/best-financial-services-marketing-campaigns/ Tue, 21 Jun 2022 13:16:00 +0000 https://act-on.com/?p=487712

TL;DR: Financial services marketing works best when it’s targeted, compliant, and automated. Three of the most effective campaigns right now are: onboarding campaigns to welcome and educate new customers, upselling/cross-selling campaigns to boost product adoption, and engagement campaigns to re-activate inactive members or leads. Using automation ensures these campaigns are personalized, scalable, and data-driven for better results.

Introduction

Marketing financial products and services can be a challenging task. You need to find the right approach to reach your target audience. You also need to make sure that your campaigns are compliant with regulations like FINRA.

That’s why we’ve created a list of three of the best financial services advertising campaigns that you can implement into your financial services marketing strategy right now. Read on for tips on creating successful campaigns using different marketing channels, such as email and social media, all with the efficiency of automation.

What to Know About Financial Services Advertising Campaigns

Financial services marketing campaigns come in all shapes and sizes. But before you launch your next big campaign, you should keep a few things in mind.

  • Your campaigns must be compliant with financial marketing and advertising regulations. This includes adhering to rules set by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Along with other state or local laws that may apply to your business.
  • Your campaigns should be focused on a specific goal. Examples: acquiring new customers, increasing product adoption, or reactivating inactive customers.
  • You’ll need to use data from your marketing campaigns to inform your strategy. This includes tracking metrics such as leads generated, conversion rates, and ROI.

Let’s get into the 3 best financial services advertising campaigns to run now. 

Onboarding Campaigns

An effective onboarding campaign is designed to welcome new customers and help them get started with your product or service. It’s important because it helps define the path for a new customer, encouraging them to interact with and get the most out of the product or service they signed up for — empowering them to eventually become invested in future offerings as well.

Onboarding campaigns can be vastly improved using email automation for a more personalized approach. This allows you to reach a large number of people directly without having to manually send each message yourself.

For example, you can create an email campaign that automatically sends new bank customers a series of welcome messages once they have signed up for a checking account. These emails can include information on what they can expect, important contact information, how to use features like direct deposit and auto-pay, and links to resources they may find helpful. These emails help to form a relationship between your financial institution and the customer, and build brand trust and loyalty.

Upselling and Cross-Selling Campaigns

If you’re looking to increase product sales, an upselling or cross-selling campaign can be a great way to achieve your goals. For this reason, these types of campaigns frequently rank among the best financial services advertising campaigns.

Upselling campaigns focus on convincing existing customers to upgrade to a more expensive product or service. On the other hand, cross-selling campaigns focus on selling complementary products to your existing customer base.

Both types of campaigns can be highly effective in increasing product sales. Before you launch either type of campaign, there are some things to be aware of.

  • You’ll need to create targeted content that speaks to the needs of your audience. This content should be designed to convince your customers that they need to upgrade or add to your product or service.
  • You’ll also want to consider which marketing channels will be most effective for reaching your target customers. Email, social media, and paid ads are a few ways to reach your customers who want to upgrade and/or engage with additional products.

For example, you can create an automated email campaign that talks specifically to a segment of checking customers about a high-yield savings account. Or, upgrade your investment client to a more hands-on, individual coaching package. 

Social media automation is a great way to reach your audience with upsells and cross-sells as well. Create an ad campaign that targets customers who have expressed interest in similar products or services. Let’s say you’ve got a mortgage customer who may be interested in an auto-loan, according to behavioral data. Start serving up some targeted ads about your great auto-loan rates. 

Another effective way to easily reach customers who have opted in to be contacted is through SMS marketing. You can easily offer promo codes or limited offers to customers through their mobile devices.

Inactive Member Engagement Campaigns 

Engagement campaigns are designed to re-engage inactive members and get them interested in your products or services again. They typically involve sending targeted content to your inactive customers like a survey about their experience, a ‘were sorry to see you go’ type of email, or even a special offer to entice re-engagement. Best of all, such messages can easily be automated for a more efficient and effective approach.

For example, if an investor hasn’t signed on to his online account for 6 months, you may want to send an encouraging message with an offer of a free consult call to find out where that investor might be stuck and offer advice that energizes him about his investments again.

But what makes a customer inactive? Typically if there’s been no transactions for 12 months, a customer is considered inactive. It’s important to be aware of this disengagement before the 12-month mark. Using a CRM can help create reports showing customer activity, highlighting those that are on their way to becoming inactive. From there, you can determine triggers for sending automated emails to entice them to use their accounts or services. This is when you can decide whether to offer a special rate, promotion, or simply reach out and see why they haven’t been using their account. 

Reengagement campaigns can also be used for non-customers, like those who initially signed up showing interest, but never committed to any services. For example, if someone signed up for marketing emails but hasn’t opened one in six month, you can create an email campaign o entice them. Create a catchy and clickable subject line with a special deal for a first-time sign up or offer a bundle of products or services created especially for their segment. If you know someone is reaching retirement age, offering them account services to handle their retirement funds and make the most of their savings can be a great way to pique their interest.

Make Your Financial Marketing More Effective With Automation

Implementing your best financial services marketing campaigns relies on using effective digital marketing automation. The data you get from marketing automation allows you to gain insight into what is working for your customers and potential customers, and get more effective with your campaigns in the future. So, if you are not currently running an onboarding campaign, upsells and cross-sells, as well as an engagement campaign for both customer and leads who have slowed down on their opens or visits, this is your sign to go and build them today. 

Summary

Finding the best financial services advertising campaigns requires balancing compliance with creativity and strategic targeting. This article highlights three high-impact, automation-friendly campaigns to strengthen customer relationships and increase revenue: onboarding campaigns that guide new customers through products and services, upselling and cross-selling campaigns that offer upgrades or complementary products, and engagement campaigns designed to win back inactive customers or unconverted leads.

By leveraging automation across email, social media, SMS, and CRM systems, financial institutions can deliver personalized, timely messages at scale, track performance, and continuously optimize their approach.

]]> 4 Massively Important Financial Services Marketing Statistics https://act-on.com/learn/blog/financial-services-marketing-statistics/ Tue, 07 Jun 2022 13:55:00 +0000 https://act-on.com/?p=487634 Are you wondering if you’re on the right track with your approach to financial services marketing? Maybe you’re curious what other people in the industry are focusing on, or want to make sure you’re aligning with current trends like marketing automation.

We’ve gathered sources on 4 financial services marketing statistics to watch, with examples of how institutions like banks and wealth management firms are addressing the issues they represent.

4 Statistics on Financial Marketing and What They Mean for Your Business

1. 72% of Customers Say Personalization is “Highly Important”

Your financial services customers receive far more personalized interactions than ever before. They can jump on their phones, receive personalized shopping recommendations, and have those items delivered to their doorstep within a couple of days or sometimes a couple of hours. Curated clothing recommendations? No problem. Suggestions for that special holiday dinner with a pre-populated grocery list? Done. But these expectations don’t stop at shopping experiences, as they flow into all business interactions, including those with financial institutions. 

A recent McKinsey report found “[t]he biggest reason companies fail to capture the full benefits of their digital improvement efforts is that they concentrate on optimizing individual touch points rather than first tackling the customer experience as customers actually experience it – the complete journey that cuts across multiple functions and channels.”

A banking customer survey found that 72% of respondents said personalization was “highly important” and only 8% reported that it’s not important at all. This sentiment holds true across all demographics, including Millennials (79%), Gen Z (75%), and Gen X (74%), with a slight decrease for baby boomers (58%).

The solution is to create a customer journey-driven strategy to meet rising demands around personalization. A strong plan for customer segmentation that leverages automation helps you tailor specific messages to specific audiences based on behaviors and interests. 

For example, Centra Credit Union leveraged segmentation and automation to get super focused on members with an educational campaign targeted at the benefits of opening a new certificate of deposit. The campaign led to 35% email open rates, 470 new certifications, and over $10 million in new deposits over several short weeks.

2. Customer Experience is the “Top Priority” for 73% of Financial Services Marketers 

Financial services marketers are responding to meet the demand for better customer experiences. In fact, three out of four financial services marketers say that improving the customer experience is a top priority. And most customers don’t just want a better experience – they demand it.

The majority of U.S. banking customers under the age of 55 say they have no problem switching banks, and seven out of 10 say they would change banks to improve their experience. 

Financial services marketers can no longer deliver weakly–personalized content, because people expect much more. Every time a prospect or customer receives an email, product recommendation, or phone call, they want to feel truly known and understood. Marketing automation helps you achieve this level of personalization.

3. Organic Search Drives 64% of Calls to Financial Services Providers 

Creating high-quality and specifically-researched content is essential, since organic search drives 64% of calls to financial services providers. If you want to stand out against the competition, you need to publish SEO-optimized content that draws in that high-intent organic traffic, then convert and nurture that traffic with marketing automation. 

Research shows that less than one-fifth of companies say their content marketing is “very successful.” If you want to get more traction from your content, you need to get more personal. Create high-quality content that ranks well with search engines, but then capitalize on the power of data to capture leads with the right offer. 

Tools such as lead scoring allow you to further understand what prospects are most likely to buy and help you get salespeople involved with the right prospect at the right moment. 

4. Less Than One-Fourth of Marketers Say They’re Using Marketing Automation to its Ultimate Potential

Do you use automation? And if so, could that automation perform better? Act-On recently teamed up with Ascend2 and published a survey of 162 marketers. We wanted to learn more about how marketers use automation since it’s such a critical tool to provide the personalization and the customer experience that customers demand. 

The survey revealed that only 22% of respondents said they are “successful” at using marketing automation to achieve their most important priorities. 62% of marketers said they are only “somewhat successful,” and surprisingly, 16% say they “aren’t successful at all.”

So, even if you’re using marketing automation, there may be room for improvement. When used well, it can help increase efficiency, align sales and marketing, increase conversion rates, and create more personalized marketing experiences for your customers.. And whatever is working well, you can identify and then scale. Without comprehensive marketing data, you can’t really do that. 

With the right solution, you can easily set up and expand marketing automation and reach more prospects and customers through personalization. 

The Statistics Are Clear – Use Them to Inspire Your Next Move

Financial services marketing must focus first on the customer. And, if you didn’t believe that when you opened this article, you should now. The statistics are clear that personalization and segmentation are 100% expected by your best customers, and that organizations just like yours are placing a huge focus on customer service because of that expectation. You’ve got to provide the information and support your customers need and answer the questions they are searching. When you do, you’ll have a much better chance of capturing some of that sweet, sweet organic traffic. According to the stats, there is so much more potential for all of these efforts with better use of financial services marketing automation.

Want a Simple Guide to Marketing Automation for Wealth Managers?

Download eBook
]]> Digital Revolution in Insurance Marketing (Infographic) https://act-on.com/learn/blog/digital-revolution-in-insurance-marketing-infographic/ Fri, 13 Dec 2019 17:50:00 +0000 https://act-on.com/?p=495123

5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokerages

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