Marketers struggle to personalise campaigns, despite intentions

Financial promoters are struggling to provide personalised digital marketing to clients and prospects, despite executives insisting that they need to do so.

Boston Consulting Group’s 2023 report entitled How bank CMOs can do more with less found that 70% of financial institutions are now prioritising personalisation and data driven marketing. However, just 15% of respondents rated their capabilities as “above basic”.

The report found that marketing teams within financial institutions typically take 14 weeks to launch new digital marketing campaigns and struggle to experiment with new digital approaches to marketing activation.

When financial institutions, including banks, credit card issuers, payments companies, and fintechs, were asked how often their organisation launches marketing experiments, the majority of respondents (40%) said it was an annual event, while 37% said they did so quarterly.

Only 7% of those surveyed with said experimentation was continuous while 5% said it was a monthly exercise.

When asked what “capabilities” marketing teams had to run experimentation exercises at scale, 47% said they had a campaign activation platform, 45% said they used a decisioning and analytics engine and 44% said they used formal measurement and reporting. Just one in five said they used a dedicated experimentation platform.

Report author, Steve Thogmartin, managing director and senior partner at BCG, said financial institutions need to equip marketers with the right capabilities to automate and measure experiments at scale.

“Our experience shows that substantial revenue lifts can be gained even from long-standing, mature campaigns,” he said. “Overall, the critical first step is to embed rapid test-and-learn experimentation at the heart of the new execution process.”

BCG confirmed that 101 individuals responded to this survey, with participants deliberately targeted to ensure they passed the qualification criteria, based around their level of seniority and size of their organizations.