Give value to you clients: collect the data, not buy them!
Who doesn’t find their mailbox clogged with unrequested (and often unwelcomed) promotional emails and newsletters? Whether we are talking about services that we have voluntarily subscribed to over the years, or mailing lists that we have been included in without our consent through more or less legitimate company tricks, the instinctive reaction is typically one of annoyance: all that unwanted mail that bypasses spam filters only creates confusion, as well as wasting our time in tedious ‘cleaning’ activities.
In short, if the intention of those who send all this untargeted content is to attract the attention of potential customers, the goal seems far from being achieved.
After all, those on the other side of the fence – i.e. companies and service providers – are perfectly aware of how difficult it is to make the difference by capturing the fragile attention of customers who are constantly bombarded by a myriad of promotional initiatives.
When it comes to promoting financial products, the issue becomes even more complicated. Financial and insurance products appear to be standardised and typically boring to users’ point of view – it is difficult to capture the imagination with an insurance policy or to tickle the emotions by offering an investment fund. In other words, too often the storytelling that supports the advertising campaigns of these instruments ends up being as ‘exciting’ as a dental visit on August bank holiday.
Not all data is equal
According to a survey conducted by the Yes Marketing company, the right recipe indicated by more than half of those interviewed (52%) is to be able to personalize more all the messages, calibrating them to the actual needs of customers and prospects, and possibly avoiding “shooting in the heap”.
Easier to say than to do, it is true. However, it has to be said that today’s companies are helped by the technological evolution that, in recent years, has made available an unprecedented amount of data. In the age of big data, information abounds: it’s all about organizing, decoding and aggregating it. Marketing experts divide consumer data into four categories:
- Zero-km data is data collected at the origin through surveys, interviews, any kind of forms. In this way, consumers share their interests, habits and objectives directly with companies;
- First-part data are data collected by the company itself that reveal something about consumers, for example by analysing transaction history, traffic data, newsletter opening rates or website accesses;
- Second-part data is data collected and owned by a third-part company that shares it with the concerned company. In practice: the data of a Facebook page is owned by Facebook, but is shared with the company and, if desired, reconciled with the first-part data through a CRM system.
- Third-part data is data that is purchased for specific purposes by the company, from external companies that have no direct relationship with the company customers that buy it.
So how do they become relevant?
The Virtual B solution
Virtual B has been working for years in the financial sector, in close contact with data and its analysis. Our experience has resulted in numerous solutions that generate value and solve problems for financial and insurance intermediaries.
If you are curious about this topic, contact us at the link below and find out how to increase the value of your data.