Here at Movable Ink, we’re dedicated to helping our clients create with scalable, world-class visual experiences. So, we sat down with Jackie Mattia, Associate Director of our Client Strategy Team with a focus in financial services, to learn more about our new team and how Movable Ink is helping our clients embrace innovation.
What’s your role on the Client Strategy team?
Our Client Strategy team’s mission is to gain a thorough understanding of our clients’ business goals and to help them achieve those goals by designing highly impactful solutions leveraging Movable Ink’s technology. In addition to this, we are focused on enabling our teammates at Movable Ink with training and tools to better understand the nuances of their clients’ respective verticals and business models.
As the lead strategist for our financial services vertical, I draw on my background in the email and database marketing sides of financial services to help a selection of clients bring sophisticated applications of Movable Ink’s technology to market in accelerated timeframes. I partner with clients to understand how Movable Ink can help unlock value from integrations within their tech stack, provide industry insights and benchmarks, lead creative ideation and prototyping sessions, and define testing and measurement frameworks for the solutions that we put into market.
What do you find most exciting about joining this new team?
I’ve seen first-hand seen how easy it can be to get excited about a new technology that your company has adopted, leverage the technology for a few quick wins but then as organizational focuses shift and the bandwidth of marketing and IT teams becomes constrained, there may not be enough time or resources to continuously strategize on how to maximize use of the technology. I’m excited to be able to provide our clients with an additional team of tenured resources, with direct experience in their vertical, who will partner with them to make sure they’re getting the most out of their investment in our technology.
In addition to this, I’m incredibly excited to empower other teams at Movable Ink to better serve our clients by providing them with an in-depth understanding of the business models, dynamics and forces within the financial services space. We have incredibly dedicated and intelligent Client Experience and Product teams at Movable Ink, and equipping these teams with deeper, vertical-specific knowledge will make them even more effective.
When it comes to personalization and marketing in general, what challenges are unique to financial services?
Financial services institutions have vast amounts of customer data that can be used to deliver personalized experiences, however, it’s common, especially within large, long-serving financial institutions, for this data to live in siloed, legacy systems. Customer data is often productionalized for marketing campaigns using batch processes versus real-time APIs. This can be very restrictive when it comes to delivering personalized marketing quickly and at scale. Additionally, there are extensive compliance and control processes in many financial institutions that make the marketing execution and testing processes very labor intensive.
At the same time, financial services marketers are increasingly tasked with C-level objectives of delivering hyper-personalized digital experiences while migrating customers away from analog channels. Labor-intensive production processes are major barriers to meeting these objectives and to being able to compete with the more nimble big-tech players who are encroaching on the financial services space.
What recommendations would you make for a client who wants to use data to develop sophisticated creative?
Unlocking customer data more easily and rapidly, as well as automating the content creation process to deliver better visual experiences are top of mind for financial institutions. In recent years, financial institutions have invested heavily in providing customers with all types of data visualization tools and dashboards on their sites and within mobile apps.
To carry this same experience into email, I suggest taking stock of what APIs and real-time data sources exist today. Chances are that the same sources that are powering your institutions’ site and mobile app, or that reside within your vendors’ platforms can be used to power personalized content in email. I also suggest performing a regular mapping of the integrations within your tech stack and vendor ecosystem.
By gaining a better understanding of what real-time data sources, APIs and integrations are already at your disposal, versus creating net new APIs, you may discover a quicker and more cost-effective way to access the data needed to deliver personalized, visually compelling email experiences.
What types of campaigns or brands do you think have stand-out visual experiences?
I’m a huge fan of including data visualizations within email because I think that increasingly, people (including myself) like to monitor their activities, habits and accomplishments. In the financial services vertical, data visualizations that show customers their spending habits and benefits, can be really powerful tools to support their financial well-being and to build trust with their financial institution. Using data visualizations is also very effective in building customer loyalty in the travel, retail and fitness spaces, where it can serve to highlight a customer’s milestones and accomplishments.
How do you think financial services institutions can stay innovative in 2019?
Email volume is up year-over-year across industries and financial services institutions are competing for customer attention in the inbox not only with other players in the vertical, but with retailers, travel and tech companies, and numerous others. In order to capture and retain customers’ attention, financial services institutions need to be able to offer the same level of sophisticated personalization and visual storytelling that companies across all of these industries do.
The good news is that financial services institutions have access to some of the richest customer data across industries. As mentioned, a first step to leveraging that rich customer data for email personalization is to take inventory of what’s already available in your current digital ecosystem and working with vendors that are able to easily integrate those sources into marketing campaigns. It is also key that financial services institutions encourage more rapid prototyping of solutions both internally and with their vendors in order to increase speed-to-market and glean user feedback.
About the author
Prior to joining Movable Ink, Jackie has worked in marketing, client success, and financial services. She joins Movable Ink from Citi’s Global Consumer Banking group, whereas SVP, Analytics and Information Management, she led a team that oversaw the data production and platforms behind Citi’s marketing strategy. Prior to Citi, Jackie was an Account Director in Cheetah Digital’s Client Success group. Jackie now leads the financial service practice for Movable Ink’s Client Strategy team.