Personalized Marketing Messages in an Online Banking Context: Does Anybody Notice?

In the 21 century the amount of research in personalization has grown exponentially. Much of this increased interest is linked with the Internet and other information technologies that enable efficient servicing of customers even on one-to-one basis. This paper reports on a research project, the first part of which studied via focus groups the perceptions of a Nordic bank’s customers towards various personalized marketing messages in their online bank. We employed the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) of persuasion as a theoretical framework. In the second part, a 9-week field experiment at an online bank was conducted. In this experiment, customers were shown personalized banner advertisements when they logged in to their online bank service. Three different types of financial products were promoted to three groups of customers. We compared the effectiveness of the personalized banners vs. default banners via click-stream analyses. Moreover, these online promotions were compared with traditional direct-mail promotions. Our results are encouraging. The lifts of personalized banners compared to a default banner varied between 12 and 120. The pullpercentages, which measure the actual sales, were also higher than in the direct-mail promotions in two of the experiment’s three product cases.