Too often, the cloud is seen as a technology play. But, in fact, it is a critical component in delivering customer experiences that help wealth managers and insurers win in a dynamic marketplace. Cloud technologies such as Amazon Web Services feature the tools and data capabilities that are helping companies become more agile, more relevant, and more personalized in the marketing and customer experiences that they deliver. 

Let’s see how the cloud is powering modern customer experiences and unlocking marketers’ time —so they can spend less time dealing with technology and more time making great business decisions:

Let’s see how the cloud is powering modern customer experiences and unlocking marketers’ time —so they can spend less time dealing with technology and more time making great business decisions:

Three key benefits of the cloud

For insurers and wealth managers, the cloud is delivering more agility for their marketing operations, better scale for their data needs, and more control over their data environments. In each case, it’s helping them better connect with customers in a dynamic marketplace. 

Increased agility

Insurance and wealth management CMOs work in a dynamic marketplace where they need to be agile in adjusting their marketing messages and channels based on what is happening in the marketplace and what their customers need in that moment. The cloud enables insurance and wealth management companies to ingest and process their marketing data in near real time to deliver personalized customer experiences, instead of worrying about complex and expensive infrastructure.

For example, consider the competitive auto insurance marketplace. Based on markets, rate changes, and competitive factors, carriers need the agility to enter, enhance, or exit a particular state at any time. That means their digital, email, and direct mail marketing efforts need to be able to stop and start on a dime. If a carrier is worried about pulling and accessing data, it can miss the boat on capitalizing on a new marketplace opportunity. Here, the cloud delivers the flexibility that traditional on-premises solutions can’t.

Similarly, wealth management companies need the agility to respond to market trends. Many of these companies analyze how the marketplace is changing by examining data from thousands of websites each day. To be relevant to customers, these companies need to take advantage of the latest trends. The data tools of cloud technology, like AWS, enable companies to focus more on content and insights, and less on infrastructure on cloud-based architecture.

Unlimited scale

Insurers and wealth managers often need to support multi-channel marketing environments that generate millions of customer data points per hour. With the cloud, they can achieve one-to-one experiences, and do so at scale, far beyond what traditional legacy systems can manage.

This scalability is key for life insurers, for example, who need to analyze incredible amounts of data to make decisions about the value of potential customers. To create the best targeting and predictive models for customer profitability, life insurers need to effectively use copious amounts of data — such as contact information, demographics, payment data, and site behavior and add new sources for analysis. Traditional, on-premises approaches to this challenge are often quickly overwhelmed, and if not, they are likely overbuilt and too expensive for the value they deliver. The cloud, on the other hand, enables companies to scale data capabilities up and down to meet their needs as they grow and change at different points in time. The same is also true in the auto insurance industry. Increasingly, location-based data and granular-level market data are becoming hugely important. Due to the vastness of this data, it simply doesn’t make sense to manage it on traditional systems.

More marketer control over data

Agility and scale are great, but companies also need to effectively organize, structure, and connect all their data from marketing channels in order to bring it to market. Making use of prospect and customer data means being able to consume and interact with data from marketing channels and derive insights from these channels. Trying to do this in an ad-hoc way on traditional infrastructure proves to be very cumbersome. By standardizing data on the cloud, with predefined tools like AWS, companies can reduce their investment in time and leverage connectors to move data from raw capture to insights and then to execution.

Three use cases for unlocking value

Now that we’ve explored the benefits of moving to the cloud, let’s look at three important use cases that are enabling more personalization, more lifetime value, and better campaign performance.

The right view of the customer, at the right time

In the insurance and wealth management industry, companies don’t necessarily need to have a data solution that meets all of their marketing needs at all times. What’s important is having “just-in-time delivery of data at times you need it.” Because of the dynamism of the market, only a subset of data is needed at any particular time. This allows marketers to spend time creating an environment where they can source data for any moment in time. In auto insurance, for example, when a customer raises their hand to express an insurance need, they will quickly get an influx of information and offers from insurance companies. Insurers who are able to understand that customer’s unique history can create more relevance at that time, earn more attention, and provide more information to further customize and connect with that customer.

Lifetime value

Lifetime value has become an increasingly important metric for insurance and wealth management companies. Few industries have the length of customer relationships that these companies do, which makes it very important to use data to calculate the value of new accounts. Organizations that can bring in people with higher lifetime value upfront have a huge advantage. Lifetime value requires incredible amounts of data to be processed instantaneously, which makes the power, scale, and availability of data on the cloud a key enabler in winning the market’s most valuable customers.

Campaign performance

Performance is the most important metric in the marketplace. It’s what drives profitability and stock prices. Each cloud benefit and use case discussed in this article have been about driving this performance. It is the result of better customer experiences, better attribution, better decisions, and ultimately, it’s what the cloud can enable with the right vision and deployment approach.

Exploring the future with the cloud

It’s time that the cloud played a more central role in driving customer experiences in wealth management and insurance. Migrating to the cloud is a journey and it can, and should, provide new value at every stage of evolution. To learn more about the value that the cloud is unlocking and the components of a successful migration, read our report “Migrating Your Marketing Data to the Cloud.” See what the cloud can do for your business.