Marketing automation in banking is about more than just streamlining repetitive tasks—it's about using technology to make smarter decisions, personalize customer experiences, and achieve better results across all marketing channels. With marketing automation, your community bank can stay ahead of the competition by leveraging data insights to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time. In fact, the most recent results from the January 2024 ABA Marketing Technology and AI Survey, which collected feedback from 93 bank marketers, show that 35 percent of respondents currently use marketing automation platforms.1
“Marketing departments can automate repetitive tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns - not just for the sake of efficiency, but also to provide a more personalized experience for their customers.”2
-- HubSpot, “What is Marketing Automation?”
Let’s take a quick look at some of the key features and benefits of marketing automation for community banks and how it can transform the marketer’s approach to customer engagement and campaign management.
Lead Management: From tracking to nurturing: Managing leads effectively is crucial, and marketing automation tools make it easier. They allow banks to automatically collect and track leads while segmenting them by factors like demographics, behavior, or engagement. This segmentation means that you can now send highly targeted and behavior-driven messages, ensuring that you’re meeting your customer with a message that is creative, compelling, and convincing.
Multi-channel campaign management: Gone are the days of running disconnected campaigns across platforms. With marketing automation, you can coordinate your marketing campaigns across email, social media, and other touchpoints, creating a seamless customer journey. And guess what? Of those respondents to the ABA Marketing Technology and AI Survey currently using marketing automation platforms, 92 percent utilize them for email marketing. For instance, imagine sending a tailored email promoting a new savings account, followed by a social media ad that reinforces the message. Marketing automation ensures these campaigns work together, engaging customers wherever they are and guiding them through the buyer's journey strategically.
Efficient automated workflows: Bank marketers often juggle numerous tasks, from customer onboarding to cross-selling. Automation takes these tasks off their plate, allowing for the creation of visual workflows that handle processes end-to-end. Whether it’s a welcome email for new customers or a cross-sell recommendation based on recent account activity, automated workflows ensure communications are timely, relevant, and consistent.
Personalization at scale: One of the standout benefits of marketing automation is its ability to deliver personalized messages on a large scale. In a nutshell, ratcheting up your ability to provide a superior customer experience. According to a 2022 Statista survey, “43 percent of respondents said that improving customer experience was the most important advantage gained from marketing automation.”3
Using customer data, the marketing team can tailor messages to individual preferences and behaviors. Personalized offers—like a special mortgage rate for a customer researching home loans—are more likely to resonate and convert; leading to higher engagement, customer satisfaction and ideally, increased conversion.
Proactive customer engagement: Automated systems allow banks to engage proactively throughout the customer lifecycle. From sending reminders about upcoming payments to offering timely investment advice, automation ensures customers feel supported at every stage. This kind of thoughtful, timely communication builds trust and strengthens relationships.
Better-informed decision making: In short, make smarter marketing decisions. With marketing automation, you gain access to comprehensive data and analytics that provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your campaigns. Measure key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and customer engagement levels. These insights enable bank marketers to fine-tune campaigns, optimizing strategies for better results and a higher return on investment. Think of it this way: Every campaign becomes a learning experience, with data guiding decisions that continually improve performance.
Cross-Selling and Upselling Opportunities: With access to comprehensive customer data—like transaction history and behavior patterns — marketing automation helps you identify opportunities for cross-selling and upselling. For instance, a customer with a steady deposit history might be offered a premium credit card, while one nearing the end of a loan term could be introduced to refinancing options.
Compliance simplified: Stay in compliance with both brand standard and industry regulations. By automating compliance checks across your organization, ensuring that all the necessary stakeholders are involved, you can quickly validate your marketing content and rest assured that your marketing campaigns adhere to legal and brand requirements.
Scalability and consistency: Marketing automation provides scalability, allowing your bank to communicate effectively with a large customer base. By automating campaigns, banks can ensure consistent messaging across all channels and touchpoints, maintaining brand integrity and delivering a seamless experience.
Customer feedback and support: Gathering feedback is easier with automated surveys and feedback loops. Banks can use these tools to understand customer satisfaction and identify areas for improvement. Automated responses and self-service options further enhance customer support, making help readily available.
Customer journey mapping and personalization: Marketing automation tools help banks better understand and map the customer journey. Do a better job of identifying and mapping your customer’s “purchase path,” then creating personalized experiences across the customer buyer journey and lifecycle. By understanding each customer’s unique journey, your marketing team can identify opportunities to engage and delight customers in a meaningful way at every touchpoint.
How BMC automates bank marketing
1. Digital Asset Management
Why is a DAM (Digital Asset Management) solution important? Your content team creates myriad files and file types every day; print ads, social media content, radio spots, brochures, videos, and much more. And without a doubt, everyone can relate to spending too much time looking for a digital file. Here at BMC, our digital asset management solution gives your team the greater control over digital assets:
Compliance, security, and consistency: Maintaining and communicating a consistent brand identity is easier when you have a DAM platform. So is protecting your data and meeting compliance standards. A DAM can restrict access to legacy files — ensuring that only the most up-to-date assets are accessible — with the result that only those assets that meet brand and compliance standards can be accessed and shared. Speaking of compliance, when it comes to regulators, a DAM solution is exactly what you need when they decide to pay you a visit.
Time and dollars saved: Without a DAM solution, digital assets are rarely managed properly. In many cases, the wrong people are using the wrong assets at the wrong time. A DAM system establishes workflows, manages access, and streamlines the approval process so the right files get into the right hands. Plus, in a highly competitive, ever-changing marketing landscape, the importance of quick and easy access to approved assets cannot be overemphasized.
Free your team for other critical functions: Lastly and probably most importantly, a DAM system frees marketing team members to perform other critical functions; to focus less, for instance, on managing messaging assets and more time taking a hard look at performance and learning from it. By doing so, they better understand current and potential customers, and can apply that learning to future campaigns.
2. Social Media Management
When it comes to marketing, community banks face unique challenges. For starters, they operate with limited resources and, as a result, must be “lean and mean” with their social marketing. Every automation helps and here are just a few that a social media management solution, like BMC's Social+ can bring:
With our Social+ automations, community banks are better equipped to stay competitive in an increasingly digital world. What does Social+ bring to a bank’s marketing team?
- A user-friendly content creation tool: Easily create, schedule, and publish content across multiple social media platforms from a single dashboard.
- Compliance management: Maintain a strong, cohesive brand presence and compelling social marketing messaging with features that ensure compliance not only with brand standards, but FFIEC, FDIC and FINRA regs, as well.
- Automated social media scheduling: Schedule posts weeks, months, even years in advance, which ensures a consistent posting frequency.
- Intuitive analytics dashboard: In-depth analytics and performance-tracking tools help community bank marketers understand which types of content resonate best with their audience, as well as which platforms are performing best.
- Seamless collaboration: Many community banks operate with small marketing teams that wear multiple hats. Social+ makes collaboration more seamless.
- Engagement monitoring: Tracking and analyzing mentions of your bank across your social platforms is essential to understanding public sentiment and addressing concerns. Social+ tracks all of your social media channels in one intuitive dashboard, automatically alerting your marketing team to every mention of your bank on every platform. This enhances your team's ability to promptly respond to customer comments and feedback.
Why it matters. And believe me, it does!
Marketing automation isn’t just a tool—it’s a strategy that drives efficiency, enhances customer engagement, and improves ROI. By adopting marketing automation, the marketers at your bank can focus on what they do best: building strong relationships with customers while driving business growth.
Bank Marketing Center
We’re bankmarketingcenter.com, the leading, subscription-based provider of automated marketing services to community banks. Our goal is to help bank marketers with that topical, compelling communication with customers that builds trust, relationships, and revenue. And we do this through automating critical bank marketing functions, such as content creation, social media management and digital asset management, as well as regulatory and brand compliance.
We also want to share what we know – and learn along the way – with all our community banking friends. Whether it’s the latest on AI technology, suggestions on how to attract and retain top talent, or the importance of data protection, we’re here to make bank marketing the best that it can be.
Want to learn more about what we can do for your community bank and your marketing efforts? You can start by visiting bankmarketingcenter.com. Then, feel free to contact me directly by phone at 678-528-6688 or via email at nreynolds@bankmarketingcenter.com. As always, I welcome your thoughts.
1ABA Journal. “Unlocking the Power of Marketing Automation.” April 30, 2024.
2HubSpot. “What is Marketing Automation?”
3Statista. “Leading benefits of using marketing automation according to marketers worldwide.”