In today’s modern banking world, banks understand that they need to move beyond merely having a transactional relationship with their customers. To accomplish this, they need to increase customer loyalty and retention. And a key way to do this is by improving the customer experience: by personalizing the delivery of content and products to each customer across multiple banking and communications touchpoints.
Delivering customized experiences and personalized content to each customer is a lofty goal, and certainly one that financial organizations should strive for. But the reality is that actually “doing” personalization is a massive undertaking.
To successfully personalize customer experiences, banks ultimately need a customer data storage system that feeds into a decision engine which delivers relevant information at the right time to each customer, enhancing loyalty and increasing their participation across a bank's products.
But, many banks struggle with siloed data, and legacy technology infrastructure isn’t always compatible with newer systems. So building this technology can be expensive, resource-intensive, and time-consuming, leaving it mostly out of reach.
However, there is one bit of good news for financial institutions considering a customer loyalty program and custom content as a means to improve retention. There's a way to do it without a whole personalization engine in place: by offering customers cashback rewards that really feel personalized.
Cashback Rewards Are Important to Customers
In numerous surveys, cashback rewards are frequently cited by consumers as something they simply expect from their bank, credit cards, and debit cards. As rewards turn up almost everywhere, customers have just become accustomed to earning rewards whenever they shop.
And with increased price sensitivity in this time of high inflation, customers are looking for any way to save money on their shopping that they can get. In times of rising prices, customers tend to be more interested in getting discounts and earning cashback for shopping.
When offered as part of a bank’s customer rewards program, customers can earn cashback rewards for online shopping simply by using a cashback-enabling browser extension offered by that bank. As the customer visits e-commerce sites, the browser extension notifies them of cashback opportunities.
All the customer has to do is activate that cashback, then after they complete their purchase, the cashback will be paid out to them through the bank’s rewards program.
Browser-Based Cashback Rewards Programs are Effectively “Reverse Personalization”
With white-labeled cashback rewards programs, the hard work to create a personalization engine has already been done!
For example, with the white-label cashback rewards platform that Wildfire created, we’ve already built out a massive merchant network: it now includes over 50,000 different merchant programs.
And, we've also handled all the anonymized order data and tracking on the backend to correctly attribute purchases to shoppers who activate cashback in our browser extensions, and to manage the payouts of any cashback earned.
Banking customers shopping with a Wildfire powered white-label cashback browser extension will simply see relevant cashback rewards offers in-the-moment, as they are browsing and visiting their favorite e-commerce sites across the internet. They’re seeing what amounts to personalized offers based on their own, normal shopping actions.
Think of it like reverse personalization. The customer doesn’t have to change their behavior by first visiting an offer directory, activating a cashback offer, then remembering to visit that merchant, and use a certain credit card, by a certain date... in general, changing up how they naturally shop.
Instead, they install the browser extension one time, then it displays cashback opportunities as the shopper travels around the internet - with their bank prominently featured as the one facilitating the rewards each time an alert displays.
And in turn, the bank doesn’t have to rely on a giant personalization engine to anticipate what store the customer might visit in order to personalize an offer for them.
In essence, a cashback rewards program like those enabled by Wildfire’s rewards platform “just works” because of our technology and our extensive merchant network.
Cashback Rewards Programs are Faster & Easier
Offering a cashback rewards program to its customers is one way a financial institution can build a more personalized digital experience, without the labor and expense of a full personalization effort. These customer loyalty-building rewards programs can be deployed relatively quickly, without taking the time to retrofit legacy systems or figuring out how to tie data silos together.
Partnering with a company like Wildfire to deploy a cashback rewards program means a faster time to market for banks wanting to deliver individualized experiences, without the overhead and challenges of "true personalization."
Even after organizational personalization has been achieved, a cashback rewards program continues providing customers the benefit of personalized-feeling cashback on e-commerce purchases, while also benefiting the bank. Customers’ participation with offers and merchants in the program become another point of data to feed into the bank’s personalization engine and further deepen a bank’s understanding of each customer.
