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Two years of COVID-19 has taught most businesses that people are interested in online service and are comfortable making many of their transactions from their couches. But consumers are not interested in financial service website content. Those are the findings from Contentsquare's "The Fate of Finance" report, which shows that nearly half (47%) of visitors to financial service websites leave after seeing only one page of content. Also, more than a third (39%) of customer-facing content goes unseen. People who are using mobile devices are even less interested with 51% of them only visiting one page of content.
The report says that companies spent about $23 million in content marketing over the past few years. "While financial services brands recognize the importance of digital, there's still work to do in ensuring the experience and the information customers receive remains consistent across every channel," said Lucie Buisson, Chief Product Officer at Contentsquare. "Banking online increased at an unprecedented rate over the last few years, and as financial institutions invest in making these channels seamless, it's also important for them to understand the friction points that are causing customers frustration."
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Interestingly, visitors to financial service websites who don't leave right away view an average of four pages per session, with an average of 53 seconds per page.
The Fate of Finance report advises financial services to consider the following:
1. Look the part – Ensure websites and mobile apps provide a good first impression about the brand, messaging, and even aesthetics.
2. Invest in the user's experience – The user experience (UX) is the content that keeps the consumer engaged. Things like slower load times, broken links and poor password retrieval can be enough to frustrate consumers and push them away for good. Investing in UX might include these three things:
- Decluttering the homepage with a "no-nonsense" approach
- Adding tool tips to forms where visitors may have trouble
- Show the length of forms to keep customers on track and inform them how many steps there are to go. This will make it more likely they complete the forms.
3. Help customers find what they need – Make it easier for consumers, who may not even know what they need/want, to find the most engaging and helpful content. Diagnostic quizzes, calculators, live online consultation; blogs and engaging content about products can help with discoverability.
4. Make site accessible to all customers – Having a clear, concise, well structured website can help people with disabilities. Fonts, colors and text size are also important to provide high contrast and make things as readable as possible. The report says this helps challenged customers and may also move your site up the search engine rankings.
5. Create consistency – Whether a customer walks into a physical location or is looking online, the brand and messaging should remain consistent. Consistency inspires trust and reduces frustration.
Contentsquare also reports that having a mobile-first mentality is a key to keeping customers engaged. Why? Forty percent of traffic to financial services sites comes from mobile devices.
"Users are speaking with their visits – they want to interact with your brand on their smartphones," says the report. "It's up to you to build mobile experiences that help them achieve their goals easily."
Just because many customers are often using their mobile devices to engage with their financial service provider doesn't mean the offline experience should be ignored. In fact, the lines are blurred as walking into a physical location still allows customers to use things like ATMs or self-service kiosks. In-branch technology should complement the experience of working with people face-to-face, giving customers choice.
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