How banks can optimize offer management to drive growth

In brief

• In a complex, evolving competitive landscape, offers are essential to building the personalized engagement and customer loyalty needed to fuel long-term growth.
• Banks devote up to 45% of their marketing budgets to offers, but many struggle to convert customers due to lengthy timelines, product-bundling challenges and poor feedback on offer effectiveness.
• Banks that upgrade legacy processes and technologies to speed offer timelines and create personalized offers that span channels and business lines can drive long-term growth.

In a hyper-competitive digital environment, banks that can leverage the power of personalization to drive customer loyalty and engagement have the pole position on growth. Turning data-driven insights into value propositions that meet individual customers’ needs and lifestyles is half the battle; delivering those targeted offers when and where customers need them is the critical last mile.

Banks understand the dynamic, but they struggle to deliver personalized offers at scale.

The average institution spends about 45% of its marketing budget on offers and associated campaigns yet gets customers to convert at just a 4.5% rate. In contrast, top performing banks achieve conversion rates near 8%.

Forty-nine percent of institutions surveyed for Capgemini’s World Retail Banking Report 2022 cited lags in delivering personalized content through the right channel as a significant pain point in their customer lifecycle processes. Primary roadblocks include:

• Slow time to market. Offer management processes for launching campaigns often take up to 180 days from ideation to fulfillment.
• Limited offer types: Banks frequently struggle to execute different offer types due to rigid data models.
• Poor offer insights. Legacy offer management systems typically lack effective feedback loops for tracking offer performance, leading to poor offer attribution.

For many growth-minded banks, modernizing offer management systems to boost speed to market, optimize offer outcomes, and grow customer relationships across business lines and delivery channels has become a strategic priority. It’s a big transformation, involving people, processes and technology, but the potential payoffs in terms of customer loyalty and growth can make the effort worthwhile.

Current state: Today’s offer management challenges

Offer management solutions help banks and other financial services firms manage the entire offer lifecycle. The solutions are comprehensive and revolve around four key stages—strategy and ideation, design, delivery and fulfillment—which are illustrated in the diagram below.

The goal is to improve customer acquisition and retention by delivering the right offer to the right customer via the right channel at the right time. Yet most solutions fail to achieve their potential.

For example, while banks that are best at offer management retain more than 95% of customers, the industry’s average retention rate is just 87%.

For many, speed to market is a core challenge. Targeted offer rollouts at the average bank move through 12 to 14 touchpoints and can take up to 180 days to get from ideation to fulfillment—much too slow to meet the rapidly changing expectations of today’s customers.

Roadblocks and questions

Often, the speed and quality of offers—and how they’re delivered and fulfilled—are hindered by legacy technologies and practices. Roadblocks populate every stage of the process:

• Many banks rely on manual, disconnected processes and siloed teams during strategy and ideation and often don’t receive quality, actionable customer insights based on past performance to guide decisioning.
• Legacy systems often lack the flexibility and scalability to support multiple data-driven offers in the design stage, while manual handoffs limit real-time offer redemptions.
• Delivery efficiency is hindered by inefficient decisioning systems, and manual disclosures management content creation.
• At fulfillment, disparate systems and manual processes reduce customer service efficiency, while a lack of performance reports or dashboards limit accurate reporting. Many homegrown solutions don’t provide effective feedback to the ideation team to inform future offers.

In short, the entire offer management system needs an upgrade. Recently, we have seen chief marketing officers (CMOs) asking tough questions about their offer management transformation journeys:

• How can I accelerate my offers to compete?
• How can I continuously scale the number of offer-driven campaigns?
• How can I extend my offer system to support all lines of business?
• How can I deliver real-time offer recommendations across channels?

Target state: growth, efficiency, and effectiveness

Bankers can answer those questions by leveraging new processes and technologies to make their offer management systems faster and more agile. The goal is to build a robust solution that can quickly and effortlessly create, track and manage offer bundles across multiple business lines and channels, without manual intervention.

Key target state priorities for offer management include:

Growth

Leveraging double-play and triple-play offers that combine products from multiple business lines across digital and social media channels is critical to driving customer acquisition and retention. Digital and social media channels where customers are most comfortable can be used to deliver bundled offers. Average banks have retention rates of 87% while top performers’ rates exceed 95%.

Efficiency

Accelerating the speed to market of offers is a must. Simplifying and systematizing processes can help a bank reduce offer launch times from ideation to market, a key measure of institutional agility, from as many as 60 days to as few as five days. Reviews and approvals, which average about 10 days for most institutions, can be reduced to one day. Adopting a scalable global operating model can enhance coordination among different teams, speeding the process more.

Effectiveness

Focusing on the offer value chain can improve outcomes. Specifics include shifting to multi-touch attribution for channels and leveraging on-time eligibility and audience management instead of batch-based audience selection. Using system-driven orchestration and model-driven arbitration and leveraging APIs to provide a choice of offers can create better omnichannel experiences. Leaders are leveraging new technologies to build near-real-time inquiry response capabilities—an advantage when the average industry response time is 10 days.

A roadmap for achieving target state priorities

Overhauling an offer management system to achieve strategic growth goals is a big task. Banks that are successful often make changes at each stage of the process. Initiatives that can provide the best returns include:

• Strategy and ideation. Leveraging centralized workflow management solutions and automation can drive more-efficient collaboration and accelerate disclosure and budget approval. Setting product definitions and pricing at the enterprise level can unify the message.
• Design. Automating offer code generation and centralizing offer workflows, product and pricing can boost the efficiency of the process. Streamlining target group generation and handoffs and crafting decision engines to assign a next-best offer can help offers keep pace with product innovation.
• Delivery. Centralizing content creation, offer decisioning and arbitration can lead to easier, more engaging customer relationships. Defining inclusion and suppression rules, and improving offer ranking scoring and prioritization, can accelerate the timeline.
• Fulfillment. Automating communications, rules updates and enhanced provisioning flexibility and integrating the fulfillment cycle with channels can power better customer experiences. Improving performance and compliance reporting can speed the customer-facing last mile of the journey.

Key considerations for the transformation journey

Achieving a target state offer management system that enhances efficiency and effectiveness is a journey that can require changes in people, processes and technology. Key actions to consider include:

• Fine-tune strategy. Shifting from so-called “spray-and-pray” mass marketing efforts to targeted campaigns often requires embracing one-to-one real-time offers and integrating behavioral data with transactional data. Leveraging model-driven arbitration and enhanced journey analytics across channels can help craft more personalized interactions.
• Empower teams. Creating offers that leverage data to meet individual customer needs across business lines and channels can involve changing the nature and purpose of in-house teams. Successful banks create enablement teams that focus on leveraging platforms to achieve specified outcomes, multi-skilled teams to execute operations and technology support teams to empower product and operations efforts.
• Automate processes. Systematizing the offer-development process from ideation to fulfillment can dramatically improve efficiency. Unified workflow systems can accelerate reviews and approvals, while systematizing offer change management can drive rapid turnarounds on so-called rinse-and-repeat offers.
• Optimize technology. Effective personalization involves leveraging behavioral data, real-time decisioning, journey analytics and other optimization tools. Consolidating software and hardware solutions that perform similar tasks and automating handoffs between upstream and downstream systems can enhance efficiencies.

In conclusion

Banks that upgrade offer management strategies, processes and technologies can accelerate offer timelines and facilitate personalized campaigns to drive growth, efficiency and effectiveness.