Education based marketing is a win win – better regulatory compliance and more sales
Better Regulatory Compliance
“Our industry faces an environment of increasing regulatory scrutiny, especially when it comes to sales process,” says Casey Roberts, Senior Vice President and Director of Retail Investments at Sovereign Bank. “We all need to put tremendous focus on regulatory compliance,” says Roberts. “Regulators want to ensure suitability, and they endorse customer education as a way of getting there. We want to be the ones to provide that education under our name, not send our customers to someone else’s website.”
Sovereign uses an education based marketing system from Truebridge that enables them to provide their customers with simple and easy-to-understand answers on literally hundreds of financial topics right from the Sovereign website. This information can be downloaded and printed on-demand as a library of Quick Guides that can be accessed directly by customers, employees, and sales people. “It helps ensure that people understand a product before a sale is made,” says Roberts. “Consider FINRA’s rule 2821 governing the sale of variable annuities for example. I can’t think of a better method to demonstrate that a rep is meeting the recommended requirements to make certain that a customer has been informed, in general terms, of the material features of a deferred variable annuity.”
More Sales
“Using this approach also makes it much easier for frontline branch employees to make referrals,” says Roberts. Marketing materials offer on-demand educational Quick Guides, and each guide has the picture and contact information of the person that can help with that topic embedded into it. According to Roberts, “When a customer requests information, our frontline employee simply steers them to the person who can help.” The Truebridge education based marketing system enables branch staff to make and confirm appointments before a customer leaves the branch.
“When it comes to email marketing, our campaigns are more effective because they can link to educational content and downloadable guides right on our website, and they can link directly to a page that showcases the person that can help them with that particular topic. Offering these educational guides has also given a real boost to our direct mail response.”
“We think that the education based marketing system provided by Truebridge is a real value for us and lets us provide a real value to our customers,” says Roberts.
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