Here at Movable Ink, we’re dedicated to helping our clients reach their business goals, automate away the drudgery, and elevate their user experience all with the use of our platform. We decided to build a growing team of marketers who have a wealth of knowledge within the key verticals we serve. We sat down with Elle Kross, a recent hire, Associate Director of Client Strategy, and financial services expert, to learn more about the team and how Movable Ink is helping our clients embrace innovation.
What’s your role on the Client Strategy team, and how did your background prepare you?
Our team works with some of our largest clients to understand their biggest priorities and empower them to create sophisticated programs with transformational business impact. I focus on working with financial services clients to address their biggest pain points and help develop forward-thinking strategies that leverage Movable Ink’s technology to reach their executive goals.
I’ve most recently worked at one of the top banks in the US focusing on customer communications across lines of business. I worked closely with senior leadership to develop strategies that were focused on the c-level goals that were reported to shareholders and the public through quarterly meetings and reports. In addition to developing the strategies, I worked with my team and partners to develop and execute on those plans. During my time there I worked on overhauling the organizations servicing communications and driving digital behavior through omnichannel marketing.
What do you find most exciting about joining this new-ish and quickly growing team?
I am so excited to be working for a company that sees the value of bringing in vertical-specific people, the fact that Movable Ink is investing in our team, and continuing to grow the team, speaks volumes about our client-centric mindset.
I think the benefit to the customer is incredible. As someone who’s been on the client-side, I really understand how helpful it is to have someone come in and understand the industry that we’re talking about. Financial services is a highly regulated and nuanced industry. I’ve had partners come in and present new strategies that we would never be able to implement. They just didn’t understand our limitations–in this role, I’ll be able to partner with clients to develop strategies that work for them because I’ve been in their shoes.
I am also very excited to share my vertical-specific knowledge with the rest of the Movable Ink team. The organization puts a great focus on development and learning and we’ll become a stronger and more powerful team by ensuring vertical-specific knowledge across departments.
When it comes to personalization and marketing in general, what challenges are unique to financial services?
Financial service brands have a lot of data on their consumers, but it’s often fairly difficult to access that data, turn into an individualized experience, ensure it doesn’t feel invasive, and not create a longer go-to-market situation. Customers definitely want highly personalized experiences and know that their financial institutions know a lot about them. They want the individualized experience that is custom to their needs, but they don’t want to feel as though a brand is intruding. So, creating campaigns that tap into the data banks have to create an individualized email while being respectful of boundaries and hitting executive goals is striking a fine balance.
Why are personalized marketing experiences so important for financial services marketers?
There’s a highly complex engagement matrix for FI – from branches, apps, payment channels, websites, call centers, alerts, bots, and more – being able to communicate and individualize messages based on the customers’ behavior and the company’s goals is imperative. For example, if your organization is focused on driving App usage, you could leverage Movable Ink to showcase a personalized message at the moment of open based on the actions the customer did or did not take.
If you have a customer whose late on a payment, you could send a late payment message highlighting immediate payments in the App but before they open the email they’ve already made a payment, making your touchpoint outdated and possibly confusing for the customer–instead, you could leverage the open time technology to serve that customer with a message about using the App for custom Push payment reminders or enrolling in AutoPay. You’re promoting the mobile app in both, but you’re actually hitting the heartstrings of what it means to somebody at that moment and helping them manage their accounts confidently based on their behavior.
How do you think financial services brands can stay innovative in 2020?
Financial Services brands have been planning for 2020 for a while now, they should think about how they can quickly innovate to stay up-to-date with their competition in 2020 and how they’ll continue to innovate. What’s the plan for 2021 and 2022 and what needs to be done in 2020 to achieve what they want in future years?
The first step is to get that individualization, personalization, and data in place. The data exists, but they need to be able to leverage it. From there, you can continue to innovate and optimize.
About the author
Prior to joining Movable Ink, Elle worked in ECM marketing, B2B marketing, and communication strategy. She joins Movable Ink from Citi, where she led the overhaul of the Credit Card businesses servicing communications. Most recently, Elle ran a team focusing on Citi’s ongoing initiative to drive digital as SVP of Drive-to-Paperless Strategy.