In this Research NXT interview, Sweta Aggarwall, the Chief Marketing Officer at State Bank of India, takes us through her journey towards becoming a marketer. She shares her enriching experience while working for different industries with some of the key takeaways. She also talks about her current role at SBI and highlights the focus on the enhancement of customer experience and the simultaneous upskilling of her team to take the market hands-on.
Key highlights
What this conversation covers
- Evolution of marketing technologyHow marketers leveraged it over the last two decades to completely overhaul marketing as it is done today.
- SBI's YONO appAn integrated digital banking platform, evolving as a financial planning tool beyond just being a transactional interface.
- SBI's mobile-first approachHow marketing teams within the bank are joining forces to develop performance-based marketing metrics while customer-centricity remains the central point of all marketing activities.
The genesis of personalisation is the ability to create meaningful user segments and an apparent outreach strategy.
You have worked across industries as a marketer, and now you are leading marketing at India's largest bank, SBI. So, what has been your journey so far? What have you observed with respect to the shift in marketing technology over your career?
In my career spanning 15 years, I have worked across industries starting from marketing agencies to airlines, digital payments, and banking. My career took off with a marketing agency where I learned different facets of one-to-one marketing, that is, personalisation. I realised how imperative it is for a marketer, with substantial data sets, to carry out customer segmentation for targeted campaigns. Nowadays, with AI and marketing automation, creating customer clusters and cohorts has not only been simplified but has also led to the possibility of driving hyper-personalisation and multi-level customisation. This has helped in further refining the customer journey, achieving higher conversion and maximising customer lifetime values.
Even though today TV, print and out-of-home continue to play the mass medium reach role, personalisation and customer interactivity still hold high affinity. Direct mailers like postcards and inland letters of the past are presently digitised in the form of email, social chats, and SMS marketing, while feedback and product reviews have been informalised with the advent of social media. Over the years, the evolution has been fast-paced, from the world of dotcom to search engines, online ticket booking, social networking, Google Maps, and to a whole new era of AI, ML, chatbots, IoT and robots. As a result, every stage of customer interaction is enhanced, providing an enriching customised experience with the help of evolving technologies.
Things have leapt forward in terms of how things have evolved on the marketing technology front. If you could share some more details on your current role as the CMO of SBI, and what are the key projects that you are leading at this point?
SBI, as an organisation, has already embarked on its journey towards digital transformation, and my job is to carry the baton forward from here on. SBI has digitised most of its banking services for accessibility through a mobile-first approach. To that end, all aspects of marketing are transforming to become digitally advanced, making the core of all marketing activities mostly performance-based and customer-centric.
SBI has the most extensive subscriber base accessing both offline and online channels, not only in India but I think across the globe. So, the customer persona would range from a rural man to urban youths to pensioners. How are you ensuring personalisation at that scale? What kind of technology usage is going on, and what kind of stack have you built up at your end?
SBI has an established integrated digital banking platform, YONO, primarily meant for the youth. The platform offers convenience, simplicity, and quick access to a variety of financial and other transactional services. We gain customer insights through our campaigns, customer meets, their interactions on the app and at branches, feedback captured at various customer touchpoints, and how they transact with the bank. We create omnichannel marketing campaigns substantiated by research-based findings, customer lifetime values and behavioural patterns, current market trends, and feedback from business teams.
iProspect India has won the digital mandate for SBI recently. In a recent interview with The Economic Times, you mentioned that you want to ride the digital wave and delight not just existing but potential new customers as well. We would like to know how this will change marketing at SBI.
The digitally saturated marketplace poses a challenge of cutting through the clutter and connecting with consumers, which can be attained only by means of relevance, collaborations, and hyper-targeting. We want to enhance the customer journey, whether it is an existing or a potential new customer, by providing excellent content and a unique visual experience through all channels and mediums where they connect with the brand. Hence, we believe in offering the right digital experience to the right audience through the right medium with the right tonality to meet our marketing objectives at SBI.
SBI YONO is one of the most downloaded BFSI apps, with 20 million downloads across Google and Apple stores. How are you leveraging SBI YONO for cross-selling and upselling SBI products?
The endeavour of the bank in launching YONO was to give customers a one-stop solution for all their banking and lifestyle needs. More than cross-selling, we wanted to increase engagement with our customers and enhance their banking experience. We have more than 100 partners, which gives our customers a chance to fulfil all their needs in one place with much better offers. Customers can also avail loans and buy other financial services products of our group companies. The app continues to evolve, as we are also ensuring that YONO is adopted as a financial planning app more than just being a transactional interface.
