A Marketing Strategy for B2B Financial Companies to Retain Customers

By Daniel Newman, Product Marketing Manager, Salesforce 

If you’re in the financial business, then you’re in the relationship business.

While it’s true that all business is based on relationships between brands and consumers, strong customer relationships are especially important for financial brands to maintain. After all, managing money is a significant responsibility, requiring high levels of trust and personal investment from customers.

This rings just as true for B2B financial companies as it does for B2C brands, if not more so, as the security and success of entire companies may depend on your effective management of their financial situations.

In need of a customer relationship management tool? Read this. 

It Takes Two

Your customers want to feel that they are valued and that their needs are understood in all of their interactions with you — their financial service provider. There’s a lot at stake if they don’t feel that way.

According to Salesforce’s 4th annual State of Marketing report, 65% of business buyers are likely to switch brands if their vendor or service provider fails to personalise communications to their company.

The good news is, there’s a lot to gain from investing in strong customer relationships, as an engaged customer base can significantly boost your business’s revenue over time as your relationships continue to grow.

It’s clear that strong relationships are key to retaining customers. It’s also clear that your brand’s established customer base is of substantial value, and should be considered one of your organisation’s greatest assets.

For B2B financial companies, these buyers trust in the quality of the services you provide, and are likely to be interested in expanded product offerings based on their existing relationship with your brand.

They feel valued by your brand, and they feel that your brand has generated value for them. Put simply, these established customers are sort of like your partners — and to begin making the most of this relationship, your brand can take steps to make sure its partners know they’re each appreciated on an individual level.

Let’s Get Personal

The road to stronger customer relationships (and, ultimately, an engaged and retained customer base) is paved with increasingly personalised customer experiences. While the customer experience for B2B financial clients has always been relatively personal, technological advancements have unveiled new opportunities for adding personal touches to customers’ interactions with your brand.

In particular, automation of your brand’s external messaging can streamline your marketing processes and give you access to analytics which you can use to generate relevant, personalised content for consumers.

When customers sign up for new financial products, automation allows you to seamlessly start their new onboarding journey. When analytics show that customers have become less engaged, you can re-engage them through targeted education campaigns. And, when analytics indicate that customers already own your entry-level financial products, you can personalise marketing to them, highlighting expanded financial products from your suite.

Seamless Customer Journeys

Information about clients’ engagement with your B2B financial company gathered by analytics software can give you hints about their organisation’s financial services needs, which you can use to further individualise their customer experience.

With marketing automation, your sales team could be equipped with knowledge of branded content customers have previously accessed, so conversations could start with policies that clients have already shown interest in.

For example, let’s say a customer currently owns only one insurance policy from you. Your sales team would see all of that customer’s interactions with your website and digital marketing content as they read about any of your other offered insurance policies. Instead of waiting for that customer’s bi-annual account review, your sales team could proactively reach out, in real time, to see if the customer needed any help with these other insurance policies.

Related: What Would Insurance Companies Need Marketing Automation For?

With personalised customer care powered by marketing automation, the value your B2B financial brand adds as the consumer’s partner increases tremendously — as does your chance of earning their future business. Crafting seamless customer journeys is now easier than ever, letting you and your customers focus on what matters most: your company’s successful management of their company’s finances.

Your Retention Strategy

To implement your B2B financial brand’s own retention marketing strategy, start by analysing the ways in which your brand interacts with its customers and identify major touchpoints where there may be room for automation of certain processes to create a more personalised client experience. Even something as simple as automating a happy birthday greeting to a valued customer can open up new conversations and free up your time to work on important client projects.

Once you’ve decided which customer interaction touchpoints to focus on, choose the personalisation tactics that would work best for your brand’s unique clients, based on your team’s knowledge of the established customer base you aim to retain.

Better Together

An account-based, retention-focused approach to marketing financial B2B brands is best for both sides of the business-customer relationship. It helps ensure that your clients are provided with the friendliest, most personal, and highest-quality service — which is, in turn, the greatest long-term revenue generation investment your company can make.

Customer research consistently shows that increased personalisation drives customer loyalty and business revenue. Automation and analytics tools are valuable assets to B2B financial brand marketers seeking new ways to boost creating robustly customized experiences for their customers.

To learn more about using technology to build meaningful customer relationships, watch this video on how Pardot by Salesforce can help you to automate marketing tasks and increase sales. 

Article first appeared on the Salesforce Pardot blog.

Lava is an authorised Salesforce Partner in Malaysia and has more than a decade of experience in cloud solutions which includes marketing automation, CRM implementation, change management, and consultation. We pride ourselves in not just being a CRM partner but in also understanding the needs of our customers and taking their business to the next level.