In a constantly evolving and competitive industry, client retention should be a priority for all finance brands. Content marketing can support your client retention strategies and improve brand loyalty. While retaining clients for the long term can be a challenge, the investment is worth it. So, how can financial marketers create a content marketing strategy that improves client retention?
What’s the deal with client retention?
While generating leads and onboarding new clients is an essential aspect of financial marketing, something that’s overlooked is client retention. Retaining clients is an important investment for finance brands and is critical for growth. According to a study by Bain and Company, a 5% increase in customer retention produces a 25% increase in profits.
“ According to a study by Bain and Company, a 5% increase in customer retention produces a 25% increase in profits. ”
According to research, the average customer attrition rate among retail financial institutions per year is 15%. While not as high of an attrition rate as other industries, the more clients you retain the greater your bottom line.
How content marketing has helped MoneyMe succeed
According to Richard Bray, Chief Marketing Officer at MoneyMe, content marketing has been an effective strategy to retain clients. For Richard, “MoneyMe’s customers are youthfully ambitious and digitally-savvy, meaning they want to be equipped with the right tools, knowledge and decision-making power to make smart financial decisions.”
“To us, content is king as it provides our customers with the knowledge to understand things like credit score and how this impacts their borrowing capacity and even their interest rates,” Richard says.
A core tenet of MoneyMe’s content strategy is assuming their clients aren’t financially savvy and always prefer the long approach to clearly explaining the process and financial terminology. While the financial advisers dealing with HNWIs may consider their clients more financially literate, Richard explains, “Making things easy, intuitive, informative and giving the customer a sense of knowledge empowerment is critical to our overall approach.”
An important way to retain clients through content marketing is by ensuring communication channels remain open and your finance brand focuses on delivering useful content to clients.
Richard says this approach to content marketing has been extremely effective. “We have seen amazing results with free tools such as our credit score tool which helps people understand their financial position.
“We currently see around 10,000 people checking their score each month which is a mix of both new and existing clients.”
When asked whether content marketing has helped MoneyMe retain clients Richard confirms, “Yes, it makes MoneyMe a trusted adviser and brand they can rely on as a go-to source for information.”
He explains that MoneyMe began a customer newsletter specific to real estate agents that offers three to four relevant articles. “We started a customer newsletter around 6 months ago and continually see open rates above 21% and opt-out rates below 0.3%.”
“After getting feedback from the real estate agents, they find value in these conversation starter topics and broader knowledge on global and national real estate topics that are outside their local real estate knowledge is valuable.”
By creating content that’s relevant, informative and value-driven MoneyMe has found that clients continue to keep their brand front of mind and remain working with them long-term.
Three ways content can help retain clients
When it comes to creating a content strategy that retains clients, there are three questions you should ask yourself:
- Is your content educational?
- Are you utilising an omnichannel approach?
- Is your content personalised and providing value to your current clients?
At the end of the day, educational and personalised content is king. If your content’s not providing value or offering information on relevant issues, then clients will no longer feel seen by your finance brand.
According to Richard, the content that performs best for MoneyMe is content that is useful and provides them with tips, tricks and hacks.
“The world of finance can be seen as somewhat boring so keeping it short and sweet is best,“ Richard says.
Often, the key to effective financial content marketing is not to try and sell your brand to clients but instead inform, educate and entertain them in order to build brand trust and awareness. By providing your clients with useful information you continue to serve them and cater to their needs.
Another important aspect of effective content marketing is ensuring you adopt an omnichannel approach. Not every client will be receiving your content on one channel. Rather, clients are spread across various communication channels, whether that’s social media, email or website. Owing to this, it’s important you cater to your clients wherever they find you.
Tailoring your content to the platform it’s being presented on is an important aspect of omnichannel marketing and one that will make or break your content strategy. Consider who your target audience is on each platform. Often, those who view your X may be different from your audience on Instagram and so on.
For Richard, MoneyMe utilises a variety of platforms to present its content.
“80% of our D2C users use our app, so we are now putting more content there so they can click and read in that environment rather than having them leave to a blog environment.
“We have recently invested in Braze, a marketing automation marketing platform. This allows us to send communications via emails, SMS, push notification, webhooks and more. We are still using a lot of email and SMS marketing, too.”
Final words
If your goal is to retain clients (and it should be), your content marketing needs to support this. Remember to provide value-driven content that’s educational, informative and catered to your audience.
A word of advice from Richard on what finance brands should remember: “Relevance, relatability and writing from personal experiences are ways in which to nail your content marketing strategy.”
When done right, content marketing is an important tool that can be used to support client retention.
