How AI-Driven Personalization in Financial Services Helps Marketers Build Relationships

Financial services institutions have always focused on building and managing trusted customer relationships. When customers, whether an individual or a business, entrust an organization with their finances, they expect tailored advice and solutions catered to their unique financial needs and goals.

Many companies are now discovering that AI-driven personalization in financial services is a powerful tool to build connections. And we are now heading into a new age in which AI agents will help take these customer relationships to another level.

Today, more than 50% of financial services customers want their financial institutions to use their individual preferences to personalize their experiences. Banks and other financial services organizations must build a robust first-party data foundation so they can deliver more meaningful customer interactions. Survey data shows that customers will abandon a brand that doesn’t personalize their experience in favor of doing business with a company that does.

Let’s take a look at how AI driven personalization in financial services is making these connections better and how you can incorporate AI in your marketing.

The benefits of AI-driven personalization in financial services

Using first-party data about customers’ behavior and preferences, institutions can create more targeted marketing strategies while ensuring privacy and compliance. This includes tailoring communications and offerings to individual customer needs, such as personalized recommendations or next steps to get customers where they need to go. This approach not only improves the customer experience but also drives more meaningful interactions, ultimately leading to higher conversion rates and sustained customer satisfaction. Salesforce Personalization customers see a 200% increase or more in conversions from their efforts.

Digital personalization also allows financial services companies to diversify their marketing channels, reducing over-reliance on traditional methods like email. By including other digital channels such as websites and mobile, marketers can create dynamic and relevant interactions with their customers at every touchpoint. This includes personalized customer-facing dashboards, real-time financial insights, and targeted product recommendations.

Websites in particular serve as central hubs for most paid, owned, and earned channels, playing a crucial role in converting unknown visitors into known prospects and customers. They’re effectively the front door to your business, so they need to be a big part of your personalization strategy.

However, personalizing across all of these touchpoints at the exact moment that it matters is impossible for humans alone. AI is revolutionizing customer-centric marketing by enabling real-time personalization at scale.

Right now, companies can do this by gathering a data profile of their customers and using predictive AI to decide in milliseconds what products, offers, and content to present to the customer in the moments that matter. That decisioning is informed by what the customer did two years ago (opened a retirement savings account) or what they browsed two seconds ago (life insurance policies).

These capabilities are great, but there’s another level that marketers can reach.

The rise of marketing agents in AI-driven personalization

Soon, predictive AI will be augmented by AI agents that will act as personal guides for every customer along their journey.

AI agents are driven by large language models (LLMs) and use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to drive outcomes autonomously (or assisted). In the world of personalization, this means that agents can access all available customer data to provide real-time, interactive, and tailored experiences for every customer throughout their journey.

Agents will also simplify the business user experience by allowing users to interact with the software using natural language interfaces. For instance, instead of having to know how to set up a campaign that meets specific goals, the user might just use a natural language prompt like, “Hey, can you please ensure that this campaign hits these metrics and personalizes around these particular outcomes?”

Getting started for many financial services companies can feel daunting. Yet the promise of scaling personalized relationships across your customer base is encouraging companies to make the transition from one-to-many messaging to true individualized experiences. Here’s Nationwide, a major financial services company, personalization journey.

How Nationwide uses AI-driven marketing personalization 

Let’s show an example of AI-driven personalization in financial services with one of our customers. Nationwide is a leading financial services company that offers solutions and products to a range of audiences, including B2B, B2C, and B2B2C markets.

Nationwide’s marketing organization serves various customer segments, including auto insurance policyholders, financial advisors, and retirement plan participants. Their goal is to build and nurture relationships across these segments through personalized digital experiences.

Nationwide was striving to meet consumers’ rising expectations for frictionless experiences while addressing the trust gap and need for authenticity. To overcome this challenge, Nationwide started building a first-party data foundation to facilitate meaningful conversations across channels.

“We are currently in year four of our journey,” says Zach Mason, who leads the MarTech team at Nationwide. “The last three years, we’ve focused our resources on establishing a foundation of personalization across a number of our key B2B and B2C audiences and websites.

With the foundation set, Nationwide is now focusing on more sophisticated personalization use cases, using AI and integrating with digital asset management and customer data platforms. These integrations will enhance their ability to deliver tailored and orchestrated experiences, including more targeted campaigns and personalized web experiences.

Nationwide’s personalization efforts have reached nearly 14 million prospects and customers, converting more than 1.3 million of them into known customers. Their targeted approach in paid search campaigns is driving significant increases in engagement and key actions on their website, including longer time spent on site and faster time to conversion.

Mason recommends these three things to get started:

Bring your teams together

“Collaboration across marketing and technology teams is critical for successful personalization,” says Mason. “Clearly defining roles, responsibilities, and processes ensures seamless handoffs and efficient execution.”

Standardize

Personalization relies on standard website structures, metadata, business processes, and customer data. Establishing a foundation of standardization is essential for unlocking the full potential of personalization capabilities. “Personalization is not magic,” says Mason. “It requires standardization.”

Prioritize use cases

“Not all use cases are of equal value,” says Mason. Nationwide established a backlog to evaluate and prioritize opportunities based on reach, potential benefit, and effort required. This approach ensures continuous progress and maximizes the impact of personalization efforts.

Nationwide’s journey with digital personalization highlights the transformative power of tailored customer experiences in the financial services sector. They’ve achieved improved engagement, conversion, and customer satisfaction. And their journey is ongoing. “Last year, we completed the foundation. This year, we’re pivoting to more sophisticated and targeted use cases, and starting to do more with AI”, says Mason.