Emails from banks achieve click-through rates on a whole different level! Financial Product Marketing: Driven by Data and Hypotheses

Marketing for financial products like investment trusts and card loans is conducted after considering various factors: product features, customer demographics, commonly used devices, and more. Data analysis is indispensable for understanding these conditions.

We spoke with Takaaki Takishita of Dentsu Inc. International Information Services (ISID) about the "unexpected data" only a financial marketing pro could reveal.

The "Unexpected Reality" of Investment Trusts Revealed Through Hypotheses and Data

――Last time, we discussed the challenges financial institutions face and their efforts to address them. This time, let's take a more micro view and talk about the marketing of individual financial products.

Takashita: One financial product handled by institutions is the investment trust. Simply put, it's a financial product where funds are entrusted to professionals like asset managers for investment. It often involves lump sums like savings deposits or retirement funds, which is why it overwhelmingly features a large senior customer base.

For the vast majority of seniors, before the internet became widespread, they conducted financial transactions by visiting branches or communicating with relationship managers. Sometimes they would ask bank staff about market conditions or seek advice on asset management... It was also common practice to visit the bank for consultations on suitable financial products during life events like marriage or childbirth. Having experienced this close interaction, seniors hold a very strong sense of trust in banks. Many support their local bank specifically because it's "been around for ages" or "has served their family for generations."

Perhaps because of this foundation, the click-through rate on emails from banks to seniors is surprisingly high—unlike anything seen in other industries. It's on a completely different level. Thinking "if that's the case," we included information likely to be useful for seniors investing in mutual funds in our emails. This led to an increase in senior customers using the information in the emails to buy more mutual fund products online. Conversely, when we surveyed bank tellers, we discovered that "while seniors often make additional purchases online, many still visit the branch when they're unsure or want to learn about new products." This led us to formulate a clear strategy: "For seniors investing in mutual funds, we should approach them through both physical branches and online channels."

Grasping product and customer characteristics, formulating hypotheses while collecting behavioral data and sometimes attitudinal data, and then creating plans and customer journeys. This is the financial product marketing work we do. Carefully designing communication for product-centric projects eventually leads to significant branding.

Card loan searches are overwhelmingly done on smartphones!

――Besides investment trusts, are there any other distinctive financial products showing notable movement lately?

Takishita: Card loans, I'd say. Previously, many financial institutions focused heavily on corporate customers, but they've realized there are limits to relying solely on that segment. Over the last three years or so, there's been a significant push to focus on individuals and grow this into a profitable area.

With card loans, the device used shows a huge difference, not age. Between smartphones and PCs, smartphones are overwhelmingly more common. In fact, searches for card loans on smartphones are twice as frequent as on PCs. Moreover, the keywords searched on smartphones are very specific terms like "screening" and "repayment period." This clearly indicates that searches are coming from people who need a card loan right now. On PCs, such strong terms don't appear as prominently in the top searches. Therefore, when marketing card loans, you must develop completely different strategies depending on whether the target is smartphone or PC users.

To simplify: for investment trusts, think by age group; for card loans, think by device. The very segmentation changes depending on the product being handled. When marketing financial products, it's crucial to first clearly define what product you're handling and how you'll categorize it. From there, you can develop the user journey design and communication scenarios.

User Behavior Data and Underlying Mindset

――I believe "ad tech" is inextricably linked to marketing. How do you view the relationship between financial products and ad tech?

Takishita: Ad technology evolves at a rapid pace. Today, we can not only capture website access data but also integrate access from multiple sites, aggregate and analyze it, and deliver ads extremely efficiently through real-time bidding mechanisms. Ultimately, the goal boils down to how much we can reduce the acquisition cost per action, such as an application or purchase.

While financial product selection is fundamentally driven by life events, even people who haven't experienced events like marriage or home purchases may change their behavior due to shifts in their living situation or mindset. For example, some people might not think about money on weekends, but then consider options on their smartphone during their commute or on their work computer come Monday morning.

Website access data is behavioral data, so it doesn't reveal users' psychological states. However, by accumulating behavioral data from various sites, we can infer psychological states and determine which financial product ads are effective under what circumstances. I believe the entire digital advertising industry is currently in the phase of accumulating behavioral data. I think psychology and behavior should be evaluated as a unified whole, and I'm currently working on identifying users' psychological states using behavioral data alongside survey responses and internet banking logs.

Financial products often share similarities, making it difficult to differentiate them based on easily understandable features. This leads to ambiguity for users regarding the criteria for choosing "which bank's product" and "why." For example, when multiple display ads for card loans appear on the same webpage, users may want to choose but lack a decisive factor. In such cases, brand awareness, including from mass advertising, becomes a significant factor influencing product selection. Quantitative research also shows that card loans have high affinity with both TV and web advertising. Therefore, for each financial product, we design user pathways by combining high-affinity media while also considering competitors' ads.

(Continued in Part 6)