5 Ways Marigold Engage+ Helps A World-Renowned High-Street Bank Prove Efficiency

The financial sector is one hallmarked for its passive journey to a fully-fledged digital transformation. It is a vertical where vast swathes of the population prefer to conduct affairs in branch rather than online, and as with all regulated industries, customers are fraud-wary, resulting in them often being reticent to click call-to-actions in emails or respond to SMS. This presents a unique challenge for the industry, notwithstanding when an unprecedented crisis like Covid-19 strikes and institutions that may have previously been cautious in its response need to react with haste.

Marigold Engage+ works with the retail arm of a world-leading high-street bank to quickly and efficiently deliver contextually relevant messages at the right time to its customers. Keep reading to learn how our Messaging solution is driving efficiency across the retail division and supporting the wider business objectives at a time its customers need them most.

Set up crisis communication within 24 hours of the COVID lockdown announcement

Increased email open rates through personalized email & SMS communication

Email content creation time reduced from 2 weeks to just 1 hour

One of the First Banks to Communicate with Customers During Covid-19 Lockdown

The lockdown measures that were implemented throughout much of the globe to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic presented a seismic shift for all verticals, and was disconcerting for businesses and consumers alike. In much of Europe, the measures included the curtailing of gatherings and the closure of schools, and all non-essential businesses. The scaling back of public transport as well as shielding workers would also mean reduced hours for essential services like banks, supermarkets, and pharmacies.

When the “lockdown” was announced, Marigold Engage+ supported the bank, empowering it to be one of the first banks to communicate with its customers — during the live announcement itself. Not only that, it set up crisis communication, available in email and SMS within the crucial first 24 hours.

Marigold Engage+’s simple and intuitive content creation tools meant the bank’s team could focus on the essential information in the email, and not be held up by the traditionally time-consuming tasks such as HTML, creative, optimizing for different devices, assigning audiences, and segments. With Marigold Engage+, these undertakings were all rapidly configured from either reusable assets or bespoke content, without the need for a degree from coding college.

Where most banks were pedestrian in their efforts to communicate with their customers because of legacy technology platforms, this bank was able to reassure uneasy customers in the moment and reducing bombardment to call-centers.

Marigold Engage+ Contributing To Overall Business Objectives By Hitting Key KPIs

The bank’s retail team is tasked with two core goals that aid the overarching business objectives:

1. Increase audience

The calling of the team is not to add net new names to the database, but to increase the amount of existing customers that engage with the bank digitally.

Not all customers have an email address in the database, but by using Marigold Engage+, those customers are sent an SMS with a dynamic link to a web page containing the same pertinent information an email would. This two-pronged approach has seen it hit its goal of increasing its audience and driving digital initiatives.

2. Increase open rates

There’s more to increasing open rates than the science of subject line length and send time optimization. Of course the team constantly monitors and improves these, but by using personalized content, in the form of the customer’s local branch, a message from their branch manager or added-value content, the team has seen an increase in the amount of customers opening and subsequently engaging (clicking-through) emails and SMS.

Previously content would be attached in the form of a pdf, which fell short of providing an excellent customer experience. By links to mobile responsive web pages, customers could access content using whatever device they were on.

Easy Migration to Marigold Engage+ To Replace Antiquated Cloud Solution

In 2019, the bank migrated from an antiquated and expensive cloud solution to Marigold Engage+ to empower its team to deliver real-time, enterprise-scale, cross-channel messaging. It was able to keep their existing data flows, however previously where it was in batch mode and required manually updating once a day, it now updates in real-time. The actionable benefit of this is that the bank can send multiple communications per day, with customer insights available in real-time where previously they would have had to wait for batch data flows to be processed overnight.

By using Marigold Engage+ instead of managing different communications using the cloud, it has just one workflow for many channels. Pulling together all of customer information in one easy-to-use dashboard giving you the ability to create personalized communications.

Moving to Marigold Engage+ was quick and easy. The IT migration lasted only 3 months.

4. Marigold Engage+ Saved Weeks of Labor from Email Marketing Processes

All responsible marketing departments are looking for ways to reduce unnecessary tasks and drive productivity. The team is no different, constantly searching for new and innovative approaches to do just that.

The bank has various customer segments that they need to contact. Previously its teams would have to painstakingly create individual emails to send to each one of these segments — a laborious and time-consuming process.

With Marigold Engage+, it was able to create a single email, and using its dynamic content functionality import personalized content to each customer segment email. The content intuitively adapts to the device, whether desktop, table or smartphone.

Using Marigold Engage+’s simple drag-and-drop editors, the team can design great looking emails that fully comply with its brand guidelines. A task that previously took two weeks to create one message has been slashed to a solitary hour.

5. Deliver Best-in-Class Customer Service

The age where customers were on a first name basis with a dedicated bank manager seems like a bygone era, but by leveraging Marigold Engage+’s personalization functionality, it’s possible once more. The bank’s retail team is able to deliver tailored-content and communications to customers from their local branch manager.

This strategy served the bank particularly well in the ever-changing Covid-19 situation, where government guidelines could change daily. The challenge was not only responding internally, but keeping customers in the loop of which branches were open and when.

The bank could speedily create emails, and using dynamic content, each customer would receive information on the opening times specifically of their local branch. What’s more, with real-time data flows, if the customer didn’t open the email, it could follow up with an SMS. It was vitally important to be able to rapidly create web pages to support SMS (as these only contain 160 characters), and the bank could expeditiously create these unique web pages within Marigold Engage+ — if this had been done through the business website, it would have taken a long time.