Financial sites can confuse readers with technical terms and complicated products; rich internet applications offer a solution to this problem that companies such as Fidelity Investment are pursuing.
A note from iMedia & ad:tech Chief Content Officer Brad Berens: If you like this article about interactive marketing in the financial services sector, then you also might want to know about next week's one-day Financial Marketing Summit in New York, October 18 at the Metropolitan Club.
Banks, insurance providers, investment firms, and any number of other financial services companies share a common objective: to engage consumers with their products online. Relying on the web to educate and prequalify current and prospective customers can save a company time and money, and deliver the convenience today's busy consumers seek.
There's a problem with this approach. Offerings like retirement plans, mortgages, and investment opportunities can be complex and easily confounding. To make matters worse, they must be customized to each individual customer's needs. This requires an exchange of information and a level of interaction that can be difficult to achieve through standard HTML forms. Forget about differentiating yourself from your competitors and creating a lasting relationship between client and brand. There's little about a static form that's particularly engaging.
As a solution, the financial services sector is looking to rich internet applications (RIAs) to inject some life into the way their products are represented on the web. Built with technologies such as Flash and incorporating audio, video, and convenience-based features like the ability to print, these apps can turn a simple linear questionnaire or application form into a memorable branded interactive experience.
Let's say you're a company that offers personal retirement plans. Your consumer site offers information available options, but falls short of relaying their benefits in a relatable fashion. With the help of an RIA retirement income mapping tool, your customers can take the first steps toward planning their retirement income by creating a customized overview of their individual situation.
This highly engaging tool would factor income and savings, spending habits, age at retirement, years in retirement, and the same information about the user's spouse. It would then generate the estimated yearly income the customer would need to live his desired lifestyle, all with an eye toward determining the most appropriate financial plan, and ultimately connecting the user with a broker who can help implement it.
At the heart of a good financial service site RIA is the amount of value it delivers to the user. Not only must it help the user identify a suitable financial solution, but it should also reveal something about the user's lifestyle and financial situation that can be perceived as useful beyond retirement plans and investments.
One enhancement that can be incorporated into a product advisor tool is a longevity calculator, designed to divulge the likelihood that a consumer will live to be a certain age based on factors like current health and lifestyle. These types of tools are being popularized by social sites catering to the 50-plus set, such as Eons.com. For consumers, they're useful in providing a more complete view of their current situation. For financial companies, they produce more profound customer profile data that can help them to better service their clientele.
Various iterations of product advisor tools exist on financial services sites, ready and waiting to assist current and potential customers. Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company offers a RetirAbility Check tool on its site that promises to help consumers determine if they're on track for retirement. The process, which takes just eight minutes, incorporates video and sound, and an avatar (or bot) guide who makes determining one's "R-Score" easy. To keep things interesting during the questionnaire portion of the process, there's even a "Surprise Me" button that prompts the avatar to do something completely off-the-wall, like imitate a robot or play air-guitar to the Nationwide theme song.
Fidelity Investments' myPlan retirement planning tool also incorporates humor, prompting the user with such lines as, "This is not a dating service, so try to be honest." An audio guide helps users through a series of questions about the user's age, income, savings to date, and investment style, and delivers the resulting data in a chart form, along with a call-to-action to develop an action plan.
On the Bank of America site, consumers interested in the company's No Fee Mortgage Plus can learn more by completing an online quiz, also guided by a helpful bot. This product advisor tool helps consumers navigate the process of buying a home, supplying information on the types of mortgages available, directing users to articles with more information, and ultimately encouraging them to prequalify themselves online.
A well-executed RIA on a financial services site can drastically affect numerous aspects of a company's business. More engaging questionnaires can translate into fewer abandoned online applications. A more dynamic presentation of product data can boost product enrollment and ROI. An RIA spiked with humor can foster a deeper and more lasting relationship with your brand.
After infiltrating webmail clients, photo sharing services, personal information management, and even the automotive sector, RIAs are finally finding their niche in the financial services industry. Gives a new meaning to the phrase "get rich," doesn't it?
Steve Glauberman is the CEO of Enlighten. Read full bio.