Benefits and Challenges of using Customer Data for Marketing

Revolut has excelled at using customer data to drive growth and convenience. However, their success in the banking sector has not come without challenges.

Benefits:

Revolut enjoys many prosperous advantages of using their customer data so effectively. To name a few, it can help inform how marketing strategies are performing to ensure they are delivering the best possible service to their customers. 

It allows for personalisation for customer communications to establish a connection with them. The more emotionally connected customers are to your business, the more engaged they are with your brand. This can be seen with Revolut’s email marketing strategy that uses the customers name, delivers weekly reports on expenditure and saving as well as prompting customers to review their recent brand discounts in the app. The encouragement and regular communication ensures they are regularly reaching their customers in a meaningful way. 

Similarly, Revolut can present customers with promotions that directly interest them such as with their promotions on branded products. With this, they can better understand their customer needs, to ensure they are constantly progressing and improving their service. This direct marketing means the customer is seeing advertising which Revolut knows is highly relevant based on purchase history which in turn indicates more uptake on offers. 

First person data is readily available to Revolut. Examples include cookies and insights gathered from customers who click on Revolut associated links, cookies and insights gathered from the in-app customer service chat. This can inform change required to improve processes or offer powerful insight to their customer’s behaviour.

Challenges

The most pressing challenge for any marketing team today is the management of customer data. Following the GDPR bill in 2018, customers have the right to request any personal information hosted by organisations. Given the extent of the data gathered, Revolut must carefully monitor the data they are gathering and ensure it is used ethically. Transparency is key to retain customer trust. Revolut has made the path to request such data as seamless as possible for customers. As noted in Silicon Republic (Short, 2019), customers can manage how their data is used by Revolut within a three-click process on the app.

Another difficulty of collecting customer data is the process of combining all data gathered across different departments to prevent silos. It is a multi department effort to ensure transparency within organisations. Communication is key to drive growth and success and this is especially true for Revolut.  For example, IT, Sales and Marketing data should be readily available across relevant departments to ensure the organisation understands the challenges faced by customers and propel improvements where required.  

It is interesting to see articles by RTE (Finn, 2021) using Revolut metrics on customer spending to give an indication of which sectors have the most popular customer expenditure and how this impacts the economy. This can be a powerful tool by Revolut to inform changes in consumer behaviour and pinpoint the sectors in which expenditure is popular, especially during the current economy. 

To conclude, Revolut is maintaining a competitive footing as a fintech pioneer. Their services place the customer at the heart of the business to ensure services are easily attainable through their app. Whilst they collect deeper insights about their customers through advertising and cookies compared to traditional banks, they have ensured the customer still has clear oversight of this and an accessible route in-app to manage their preferences. 

References:

Finn, B. (2021) ‘Revolut sees 14% drop in consumer spending in January’. RTE. Available at:https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2021/0208/1195687-revolut-sees-14-drop-in-consumer-spending-in-january/ [Accessed: 14 February 2021]

Mogaji, E., Olaleye, S. and Ukpabi, D., 2020. Using AI to personalise emotionally appealing advertisement. In Digital and Social Media Marketing (pp. 137-150). Springer, Cham. 

Revolut (2020) Customer Privacy Policy. Available at: https://www.revolut.com/en-IE/legal/privacy [Accessed 14 February 2021].

Short, E. (2019) ‘Revolut Privacy Policy Credit Bureaus Targeted Advertising’. Available at: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/revolut-privacy-policy-credit-bureaus-targeted-advertising [Accessed: 14 February 2021]