It's RRSP Season. Do You Know Who Your Investors Are?
There’s no better time to engage consumers as the imminent RRSP deadline tends to focus minds on the tax advantages of retirement savings plans. In the pursuit of increased wallet and market share, financial services organizations that embrace data-driven analytics will better understand the needs of their customers, develop insights into their fiscal health and be positioned best to serve them. To that end, we offer some data-driven tips to maximize your efforts and capture more RRSP investment dollars.
Tip #1 –Locate and Target the Right Investors Efficiently
Given that its mid-January, banks and investment organizations are already working diligently to capture their share of the retirement planning business. To maximize their returns, leading organizations are leveraging data that specifically identifies promising markets and informs business strategies to drive sales and customer engagement. For example, RRSP data from the WealthScapes database produced by Environics Analytics provides the total demand for RRSPs across Canada. Want to know how many RRSP dollars are invested by market today? Which postal codes in a city have the highest annual contributions? What’s the average RRSP value per household or per product holder? Answers to these questions will help you define the market potential, identify sales opportunities and enable efficient targeting of the best opportunities—all critical actions during RRSP season.
Maps like this illustrate the Toronto neighbourhoods where residents contribute the most to their RRSP accounts—the better to help financial organizations target their marketing efforts. (click the map to enlarge)
Tip #2 – Maximize the Message Impact
Craft and distribute personalized and relevant messages to investors. Not all investors have the same financial goals and objectives. Your communications need to deliver targeted messages and creative that resonate with the specific RRSP audience and compel action. Clearly imaging the target audience with personas—understanding who they are, how they behave and what their motivations are—makes all the difference when creating product offers that address customer needs. A better understanding of RRSP prospects will maximize the impact of your marketing communications and improve the response.
Tip #3 – Optimize Your Digital Marketing Spend
Make your marketing campaigns more efficient and effective by embracing personas and sharing them across the enterprise—including your ad agency partners. Personas will help the entire business better understand, prioritize and target RRSP investors based on overall opportunity, value and channel. What are your best prospects’ preferred digital marketing channels—social media, email, mobile? Where do they get their financial information? What online sources do they use for RRSP product information, research and reviews? Knowing the answers to these questions will ensure your marketing dollars are optimized and content strategy delivers the right message using the right channel.
Tip #4 – Measure and Learn
Measure the impact of your RRSP marketing investment. Make the commitment to establish relevant metrics from the start and leverage real-time data to track RRSP campaigns and quantify success. Through regular response monitoring, you can learn, test, adapt and enhance your RRSP campaigns—and ensure better and more profitable results with each campaign.
As the RRSP season swings into high gear, marketers need a structured methodology to apply data so they can capture their fair share of investment dollars. A data-driven marketing approach will help transform marketing from a cost centre to a revenue generator. Using these guidelines, marketers can propel their organization forward, maximize their RRSP campaign ROI and establish a successful culture based on data and analytics.
Should you have any questions about maximizing your efforts to capture more RRSP dollars this season, contact Environics Analytics and we would be happy to be of assistance.