Your marketing team face an uphill struggle as customers become more cynical to their strategies. However, as they attempt to outmanoeuvre this challenge, new compliance risks could surface.
Increasingly, customers expect more from brands. Research from Mention-Me shows that 67% of consumers would prefer to discover a financial services brand or product themselves (through research or recommendation), compared to 33% via traditional marketing channels.
To combat this, more marketing departments are including personalisation in their campaigns. According to marketing content management system HubSpot, personalised messages have been proven to deliver 202% better conversion with SalesForce also revealing that 57% of online shoppers are willing to share data in exchange for personalised offers and discounts.
However, there are risks here and it comes down to the issue of suitability.
You already know that, in accordance with financial promotion regulations, all information and language displayed to customers has to be appropriate to their circumstances.
Blogs and other content may be drafted for a specific type of customer (i.e. retail investor, in their fifties and with a relatively low risk appetite), but the products and information this links to has to match – as in, for the example investor case given any marketing campaigns or messaging can't lead to risky products more suited to sophisticated investors.
Ask yourself, are your marketing team using strategies with personalisation and if so is there a risk that suitability standards around content and the messaging being used are being compromised? How can marketing teams be sure the content they create is being seen and used by the intended targets?
There are other risks too.
GDPR needs to be satisfied in this context. What if a website visitor has to submit personal information?
Imagine a loan company’s website that includes a calculator for visitors to input various pieces of information (age, income, occupation etc) in order to provide a service. As you know, the receiving, processing and storing of this data is now highly regulated under GDPR.
Are you sure your marketing team, in their pursuit of personalisation, are still meeting all the necessary requirements?
It's time for compliance and marketing to come together
Website archiving has emerged as a popular digital tool for both marketing and compliance teams to use (and our can read more about it in our essential guide right here.
In a nutshell, web archiving uses innovative crawl technology to quickly scour entire webpages to create tamperproof and time-stamped records. Unlike static screenshots, archives can be interacted with and are fully ISO-compliant. This allows website archiving to become a powerful compliance tool in ensuring marketing personalisation hasn't left a company at risk.
Here are some other ways web archiving can be used when it comes to compliantly marketing with personalisation:
1. Allows for retrospective testing
Sometimes, the worst compliance risks are the ones that slip through approval processes and are left lurking on your website.
Even if content is no longer ‘live’, it could still be the source of a potential complaint or dispute. Therefore, having fully interactive archives that you can return to in times of dispute (or even during regular audits) can be invaluable.
2. Fully map out your customers journeys
It's important to understand the extensive journeys that are possible via a website with visitors continually offered various options and sections to click through to. However, what content are they offered by way of personalisation? And are these journeys structured in a responsible and compliant way?
Fully interactive archives can be extremely helpful in understanding how such journeys pan out for visitors.
3. Create a reference for future campaigns
With your business growing and so much content being continually created, it's crucial to ensure compliance is still met. Here, a reference point for how compliance looks in reality can be extremely helpful for your marketing team when they are branching out into new markets and tapping fresh audiences.
4. Enhance customer interactions
These archives can also form a valuable part of market research, giving participants a fully interactive way of testing out a website so they can offer feedback on the standard of personalisation and usefulness of journeys currently on offer. Ultimately, customer experience can benefit from this too.
Want to learn more about personalisation and compliance? Grab our latest eGuide: The Compliant Marketer's Ultimate Guide to Personalisation
5. Used as a valuable training tool
When it comes to ensuring personalisation, being able to go through website visitor journeys in an archive can be extremely useful - especially in reviewing how you've met the rules behind financial promotions. Therefore, this is a great training tool for new team members.
Demonstrating how these regulations should be implemented during internal training means archives can be extremely useful.
6. Shows you're serious about compliance
Whenever a breach occurs, the regulator will take many factors into account before deciding how to act. Damage caused, severity, extent… but when it comes to arguing for mitigation, the FCA will be interested in the thoroughness of internal processes and systems.
If the worst was to happen, and a breach accidentally slipped through the cracks, being able to show investigators that a website archiving system is in place would not go unnoticed. By using an archiving system, this shows a compliance team is serious about internal records, meeting financial promotion rules and generally taking things beyond the bare minimum of compliance.
Leading financial services firms (including large asset managers, insurers and banks) are using the MirrorWeb Archiving Platform to help remain accountable online, archiving their entire digital presence for the purposes of compliance. The platform enables you to capture, archive and monitor electronic communications to meet the compliance requirements of MiFID II, FCA, GDPR and FINRA.
Keen to find out what MirrorWeb are all about? Request a demo of the platform by clicking the above link!
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