Ben speaks with David Hixon, Executive Director, Consumer Business and Lending Marketing Strategy and Execution at Ally, a leading digital financial services company. They discuss the ways in which Ally engages with their customers, from the first introductory communication, to why they build relationships before selling on products, to the hyper-personalized experiences they provide on their website and app. They also talk about the challenges to consumer marketing today, especially in the financial services space, how Ally collects and utilizes zero-party data, the importance of retaining your loyal customers, and why success is building relationships with the people around you.
Topics discussed:
- How Ally centers their marketing efforts on building relationships and trust through conversational communication, and why it's important to them to wait two months before trying to sell on a new product.
- The challenges to consumer marketing, especially in the financial services industry, when customer behavior and sentiments are changing daily.
- How the marketing team is structured, and how it sits traditional marketers alongside analysts and statisticians to have the "trifecta of what you would want for a good marketing strategy."
- Why Ally has retention rates in the high 90%, and why customers of multiple business lines have lower attrition, higher balance growth, and more engagement.
- The challenges to consumer marketing, including finding the right product for the right people, and the “conversational choreography” needed to make sure the right customer is getting the right message at the right time.
- A behind-the-scenes look at how Ally leverages the data they have about customers to drive its hundreds of trigger campaigns and to create 6,000 unique variations of Ally.com to highly personalize their customers' experiences.
- The excitement around using zero-party data to drive better customer experiences through hyper-personalization, and how Ally gathers that data through, for example, their online savings account buckets.
- Advice for young marketers, including understanding how important data is to marketing efforts, and how success is about building relationships with the people you work with.