Customer data platforms (CDP) are now a staple for many financial institutions. Their ability to aggregate customer data is essential for overcoming data silos and setting a foundation for delivering exceptional customer experiences.
However, many financial services teams who decide to invest in a CDP face two common challenges:
- Complex setup process and slow implementation. This makes it difficult to see a quick return on investment (ROI) and slows down the overall time-to-value.
- Lack of built-in data activation channels and capabilities. This forces teams to use a combination of different point solutions (each with different credentials, pricing plans, and UIs) to activate their data, leading to complex workflows and expensive martech stacks.
In this guide, we’ll show you how Insider — our industry-leading CDP and cross-channel personalization solution — can help you unify your customer data while overcoming both issues and driving conversions, revenue, and retention as quickly as possible.
Organizations in financial services (Allianz, Garanti BBVA, Etiqa), telecommunications (Vodafone, Inea, Circles.life), beauty and cosmetics (Avon, Mac Cosmetics, Clarins), and many other industries use Insider for centralized customer data management, audience segmentation, behavioral analytics, and data activation across 12+ channels.
To learn more about Insider, book a demo with our team or try the platform yourself.
Fast and guided implementation process
Implementing a CDP can be a difficult task, especially in the financial services sector. From identifying all relevant data sources and stakeholders to setting up the platform and ensuring it’s working correctly, the process often takes tons of effort and engineering time.
We’ve seen many clients struggle during the process, which leads to slow time-to-value and ROI. That’s why we’ve strived to eliminate as many of these setbacks as possible.
First, our Integration Hub lets you easily connect to 100+ tools across 20+ categories with minimal reliance on technical teams. Some of these solutions include:
- CRMs like Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zoho, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
- Email marketing platforms like Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, and Constant Contact.
- Analytics and attribution platforms like Mixpanel, Amplitude, and AppsFlyer.
- Marketing automation tools like Pardot, Keap, and Marketo.
- Other CDPs like Segment, mParticle, and Tealium.
- Live chat software like Drift and Intercom.
- And many other popular SaaS solutions.
You can also connect to any other online or offline source (e.g., legacy systems) using our flexible API. Put simply, Insider’s versatility lets you seamlessly plug it into your existing data sources, tech ecosystem, and workflows.
During the process, our experienced global support team:
- Helps you set up Insider with no extra setup charge. Our team ensures you’re by involving the right stakeholders in the process, bringing together the right data points (, integrating with all key solutions, and much more.
- Shows you how the platform works based on your needs. They also analyze your current analytics data to give you ideas for implementing marketing strategies right away, which helps you generate ROI as fast as possible.
- Migrates customer journeys to our platform. If you have any automated campaigns or journeys in other platforms — e.g., email welcome flows, SMS alerts, or cross-channel survey campaigns — our team will migrate them to our customer journey builder for you.
- Answers and resolves questions quickly. As a global company with 26 offices on six continents, we can provide fast support to businesses all over the world. Plus, our teams are all trained and working in-house, so you can be sure that your queries will be handled by people with the necessary know-how and experience.
Thanks to the versatile setup options and best-in-class support team, customers consistently rank Insider as the best CDP in terms of ease of setup, ease of use, and quality of support.
Detailed 360-degree customer profiles
Once set up, our CDP automatically creates 360-degree profiles of all your customers. These profiles can aggregate essential first-, second-, and third-party data, including:
- Names, demographics, and contact info.
- Predictive characteristics, like likelihood to purchase or engage.
- Behavioral data, like interactions with your website or messaging channels.
- Last purchased, visited, and abandoned products.
- Survey responses and other first-party data.
We store this unified information for five years but that period can be extended depending on your business needs. Plus, our platform automatically updates these profiles in real-time as customers continue to interact with your brand online (e.g., via your site, mobile app, or emails) and offline (e.g., at your branch offices).
Our CDP even creates unified profiles for all anonymous visitors who browse your site. This enables you to employ anonymous visitor personalization — the process of tailoring the on-site experience to people who haven’t shared contact information with you yet.
By doing that, you can drastically reduce the time and money it takes to convert new visitors into leads and customers.
Powerful segmentation and behavioral analytics
With your data unified, you can start segmenting your audiences to find the right customers to target with your marketing efforts. Insider helps you do this with 120+ attributes, including traits, behaviors, and preferences across three different audience types:
- Standard, which include characteristics like locations, demographics, devices, operating systems, and more.
- Predefined, which include leads, cart and browser abandoners, mobile app users, customers who’ve interacted with your brand on a specific channel, and more.
- Predictive (powered by our AI algorithms), like customers with a discount affinity, with a high likelihood of buying or engaging on a specific channel, and more. For more details, check out our in-depth guide to predictive marketing.
Insider also makes it possible to use your unified data to perform detailed analyses of your audiences and come up with granular, actionable insights for your campaigns.
For example, using our behavioral analytics capabilities, you can:
- Build funnels around goals, such as lead collection, survey responses, loan and card applications, and other key conversions. Our funnels will show you where most drop-offs occur, so you can focus on the areas that need attention.
- Analyze message frequency for different types of customers (e.g., inactive, loyal, VIPs, and more). This can help you determine the optimal messaging frequency per channel.
- Analyze channel reachability for different segments. This can help you plan your campaigns around the touchpoints customers are actually using, so you can maximize every interaction.
In short, Insider’s segmentation and behavioral analytics enable you to power your decision-making, customer targeting, and overall business strategy with reliable insights.
Built-in channel access, personalization capabilities, and marketing automation
Up to this point, we’ve covered the more classic CDP use cases — data unification, segmentation, and analytics. While important, these activities don’t cover the process of data activation, i.e., actually using your unified data to create personalized campaigns that drive revenue.
This is an area where traditional CDPs struggle as they don’t have built-in activation channels and personalization capabilities. Instead, they rely on passing their data to third-party systems, like email platforms, push notification tools, personalization software, and so on.
As a result, marketers must constantly navigate between different solutions in order to build, manage, and analyze their campaigns. This overcomplicates their workflows and increases the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the entire martech stack.
Insider avoids that issue by bringing together 12+ activation channels, advanced personalization capabilities, and a customer journey builder under the same umbrella as our enterprise CDP.
In fact, Insider is also a leader in various categories based on reviews from customers and industry experts, including:
- Mobile marketing software by G2.
- Personalization engines by Gartner.
- Omnichannel marketing platforms by IDC.
Versatile channel access
Insider enables you to reach your customers where they’re at by supporting a variety of channels, including:
- Websites and mobile apps.
- Email.
- SMS.
- WhatsApp.
- Push notifications.
- Online ads (e.g., on Google, Facebook, and TikTok).
- And more.
This means you can drastically reduce the number of point solutions you’re using in favor of a truly unified marketing platform. We’ve seen plenty of companies do this to reduce their martech stack’s complexity and TCO.
At the same time, you don’t have to use all of Insider’s channels and capabilities right away.
For example, one of our biggest clients in the financial services industry (Allianz) started by using Insider’s CDP to unify their data and our push notifications to increase opt-in rates. They saw the fantastic ROI our solution delivered, so they’re planning to expand to other channels (like WhatsApp) and use cases (like journey orchestration).
Advanced personalization
While the ability to reach customers on different channels is important, being able to personalize the experience across all touchpoints is what can skyrocket your ROI.
Insider was built specifically for the personalization era, so it enables you to individualize every touchpoint, including your:
