To succeed on Amazon, it’s crucial that you have a sound business model, cater to your consumers, and market your product effectively. However, other key areas could help you increase revenue, avoid extra costs, and ultimately boost your bottom line.
From new seller incentives to bonus programs, Amazon offers plenty of opportunities to increase cash flow.
But don’t forget about possible overcharges, discrepancies, and costly shipping issues. With some knowledge, diligence, and expert partnerships, you can get reimbursed for hidden costs and fees related to inbound shipments, lost or damaged units, weight and dimension fees, and more.
So what specific steps should you take to boost profits and minimize costs? We spoke with an expert from GETIDA to dig into the details.
Whether you’re just starting your Amazon journey or are a seasoned seller, the platform has a few bonus incentives to push your brand forward.
New Seller Incentives
If you register your brand on Amazon and open a new account, they’ll reward you with a 5% bonus. This bonus is capped at $1 million, but this incentive program could put an extra $50,000 back in your pocket. This program not only applies to new brands but is also available to existing sellers who are expanding their brands into other countries.
Brand Referral Bonus Program
In addition to Amazon’s new seller incentives is a brand referral bonus program. If your brand is registered on Amazon, you can opt into this initiative and make the most of your non-Amazon marketing. If you use a special Amazon link to drive outside traffic into Amazon’s marketplace, they’ll give you a 10% bonus — with no cap. This program can be used for email campaigns, TikTok, Twitter, and other strategies.
Between FBA fees and Amazon seller fees, your brand could lose a significant chunk of revenue. What can you do about it?
Yoni Mazor, Chief Growth Officer and Co-founder of GETIDA, offers a simple solution: package smaller, lighter, and smarter when selling online.
If you’re a potato chip brand on grocery store shelves, you want to avoid deflated packaging that takes up as little space as possible. You want inflated chip bags that stand out on the shelves. But for Amazon sellers, consumers are already sold on your product from their online browse — you don’t need fancy, expensive packaging that will reduce your profit.
Shipping costs are often higher than necessary because products are big and bulky. Whether it’s deflating a soccer ball or rolling up a pair of jeans, if there’s a way to pack more efficiently, do it. You’ll have fewer fees and more revenue.
For many third-party Amazon sellers, reconciliation for inbound shipments, lost or damaged goods, and overcharges can be a headache. The team at GETIDA has some strategies to protect your costs.
Inbound Shipments
When a vendor packs items for shipment, it can be difficult to analyze where any issues took place. GETIDA suggests this solution: when logging into seller central, you can click the icon that says “manage FBA shipments.” From there, you can look at the FBA details, research missing units, and present proof of delivery and proof of purchase for reimbursement.
Lost or Damaged Units
Like inbound shipment issues, lost or damaged units can affect your bottom line. To reconcile lost or damaged products, you need two reports: your inventory ledger for the past 18 months and a reimbursement report. Amazon has its own reconciliation tool to help you in the process, or you can use an expert partner like GETIDA.
Whether your products were lost, damaged, overcharged, or not delivered to the correct location, the key is to take action as early as possible. Amazon has specific timeframes for reconciliation cases, and you want to ensure that you stick to the guidelines and meet those deadlines for maximum reimbursement.
“Selling on Amazon is like being on a battlefield in a warzone,” Yoni says. Bullets are flying at you constantly in the form of sourcing, launching, marketing, advertising, customer support, and logistics, to name a few. But Yoni goes on to say, “You don't want to stop everything [and say] ‘hey, let's look back [and] see what happened the past 18 months,’ because it’s very difficult over time as you scale.”
Yoni suggests developing a responsible team dedicated to FBA auditing, reconciling discrepancies on time, and replying to already-open cases instead of opening new ones. He also emphasizes the value of hiring a team of experts when needed and maintaining professionalism throughout the process. You don’t want to be pushy or dishonest with Amazon — in the end, upholding a professional and honest profile will help you reap the platform’s rewards.
As AI becomes progressively sophisticated, industries are employing machine learning, natural language programming (NLP), and generative AI to reduce human input in data analytics. Aside from displaying precise, actionable data insights and predicting outcomes, AI can advance sustainability initiatives by mitigating the environmental impacts of material production and business operations, among additional capabilities. However, this technology can make mistakes and has its limitations, so it’s crucial to assess use cases before implementing a strategy.
So how do AI models impact sustainability, and how can you capitalize on their unique potential?
AI’s initial emergence introduced ethical implications surrounding usage, prompting two distinct stages of morality. AI models’ subsequent evolution and widespread adoption have led to a third phase of ethics focused on sustainable development. This coincides with a greater movement that pioneers AI technology for practical applications.
How are corporations implementing AI to advance global sustainability in various sectors?
To comply with ESG (environmental, social, and governance) regulations, companies must reduce their impact on the ecosystem by adapting their products to the circular economy. In response, businesses are leveraging machine learning to recycle raw materials damaged in the supply chain process and regenerate them into alternative products. Similarly, the agriculture industry has implemented AI to transform production and manage environmental waste to reduce the use of harmful fertilizers and pesticides and to enhance crop growth and vigor.
Energy consumption is a primary focus of sustainability, and renewable sources are becoming a coveted commodity to mitigate utilization. AI can decrease energy transmission by recommending alternative sources and facilitating the shift from geographical to micro power grids.
Despite AI’s significant strides in reducing corporations’ environmental impacts, training these models emits considerable carbon due to extensive data computation. For instance, the healthcare industry utilizes NLP to assist in consumer research development. Training this model to interpret a medical term with multiple meanings and contexts uses countless data and storage, depleting power and other resources in the process.
So how can you alleviate the environmental ramifications of training AI models?
Sustainability is a global issue that necessitates companies taking calculated actions to promote comprehensive change. True global transformation happens when AI advances beyond its environmental applications to incorporate sustainable practices into its lifecycle. This involves building and training AI models with sustainability at the forefront by intentionally structuring and powering the hardware, developing ecological training methods for information gathering, and generating functional ideas for implementation.
ETT World’s Chief Technology Officer and Interim COO, David Smith, provides a pragmatic example of how AI-powered edge computing can minimize power consumption from data processing, “What we're seeing as we look at processing at the edge of the cloud, that's where many microgrids have come in. Things like sustainable power generation from taking the leftover crops on a field or cow manure and putting those into a bio plant to generate the power to feed that computation is a green process.”
Businesses must address AI’s social, ethical, and ergonomic implications to meet ESG requirements and facilitate sustainable operations.
ESG investments flood the stock market as the criteria demand increases in business processes. 78% of investors believe companies should invest in ESG, but only 55% of businesses do, planning for short-term profitability instead. Nevertheless, ESG is a necessity and must be sufficiently supported and funded. AI models can be trained to display partiality to ESG investment allocations.
Historically, AI used for sustainability investments has addressed general and superficial forecasts. However, given investors’ sophistication, AI models must be transparent and consistent when allocating investments. Yet ESG data is difficult to assess, with multiple variables impacting profitability, so AI is not always equipped to handle the demand. Therefore, implementing AI in ESG investments requires reducing inherent errors to maximize efficiency.
AI has variable potential for addressing sustainability and ESG concerns, so it’s imperative to consider its biases and limitations. A sound course of action is to develop a structured AI data strategy that can be implemented into next-generation models to predict obstacles and achieve favorable results.
Traditional Amazon advertising approaches involve assessing performance by measuring KPIs such as last-touch attributions, ACOS (advertising cost of sales), and ROAS. But as more brands leverage the platform’s advertising network, Amazon has increased costs, rendering these metrics inadequate for quantifying long-term growth in multiple business sectors.
Conversely, incremental advertising methods leverage precise data that you can use to drive cumulative sales and maximize growth on Amazon. How can you apply incrementality to your marketing strategy and use actionable insights to execute a targeted advertising approach?
Many brands limit their growth potential by analyzing exclusively attributed sales and structuring their ad spend around advertising methods with low incrementality rates. For instance, while investing in branded searches and keywords boosts attributed sales, this action is too granular and inhibits organic sales growth. Conversely, focusing on genetic keywords and your brand’s organic ranking elevates overall sales continually.
The most reliable way to analyze sales growth is to experiment with both ads and organic rankings. You can conduct systematic, controlled testing by launching various ad campaigns during specific events like holidays or through promotional deals and evaluate organic rankings separately. By dissecting your insights, you can structure your ad spend budget accordingly.
One of Amazon’s most beneficial ad types is top-of-search placements, which position organically ranked and sponsored products on the first page of search results. Ellie Edwards, Perpetua’s Product Designer, reveals that “Top-of-search ad placements generate around 49% of conversions…from only 2% of impressions on sponsored products overall.” This visibility makes top-of-search the leading driver of sales, so it’s crucial to employ incrementality. However, since both sponsored and organic products exist on the first page, top-of-search mirroring can occur, compromising incremental sales and making it difficult for shoppers to distinguish between two identical products.
How can you reduce top-of-search mirroring to augment incremental sales growth?
Identifying mirroring involves pinpointing instances where your product ranks within the top six organic placements. This allows you to take calculated measures to optimize product position. For instance, you can mitigate sales cannibalization on mirrored products by limiting your keyword bidding to reduce sponsored ad rankings, encouraging shoppers to purchase products by clicking on the top organic placement. Alternatively, exchanging sponsored items for higher-profiting products relevant to your target search terms enhances organic sales.
To promote your products to the top-of-search position, it’s imperative to analyze and select relevant keywords. Joe Rideout, the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Perpetua, lists and explains the three criteria for distinguishing search terms, “One would be search volume, so this is a search term that gets a lot of traffic on Amazon. Two is the top-of-search click share. So this is a signal of how much people tend to click on the top few search results versus scrolling around and exploring a lot. And finally, the click-through rate of your products, which is a proxy measure for the relevance of the search term to your products or brand.”
Once you’ve determined ideal keywords and search terms, you must strategically market your products to the top-of-search page. Assessing product incrementality for specific terms requires considering its relevance, competitiveness, and organic rankings. Each ad you test should target shoppers and their most frequently used keywords, and your product reviews, ratings, and prices should match or outperform the competition. Incremental sales increase with organic ratings, so optimizing this rank elevates your products to top-of-search status.
Incrementality plays a crucial role in your advertising approach and can improve product ratings and optimize your ad spend to drive sales growth consistently.
Online marketplaces, particularly Amazon, are becoming third-party sellers' primary retail sales mode. The retail industry has experienced significant growth in this sector, as marketplaces are projected to represent 60% of overall sales, with 70% emerging from third-party sellers.
This rapid expansion elicits channel disruption as unauthorized vendors monopolize the Amazon Buy Box. Consequently, merchants must analyze market dynamics to develop a brand protection and control strategy. So what tools can you leverage to optimize channel performance and minimize disruptions?
With multiple unauthorized sellers entering Amazon’s landscape, brands' platforms can become overburdened and difficult to regulate. Channel control generates growth opportunities for new investments, products, and innovation. You can implement this solution to optimize three main business areas: pricing, authorized sales, and marketing.
Price disruptions can occur within a marketplace, your seller network, or across multiple channels. Apart from unauthorized sellers impacting optimal pricing, these disruptions may arise from inconsistent customer experiences or low-quality products. Pricing is contingent upon market fluctuations and competition across various channels, so developing a dynamic control strategy is imperative to reduce erosion.
According to Precision eControl’s CEO Blake Burrus, “On average, a brand experiences over 60 unauthorized seller listings on their products. But not all sellers are created equal. There’s a very high degree of concentration in that…three or four [unauthorized] sellers account for almost 70% of revenue destruction.” Addressing and mitigating these resellers requires acute precision and control to determine the vendor's identity and location — and to estimate lost revenue by product. A marketplace control approach helps you focus on the sellers contributing to the majority of the destruction.
Unauthorized seller interference also impacts brands’ opportunities to secure the Buy Box, limiting advertising efforts and decreasing ROAS on Amazon and other platforms. With brand protection, you can create compelling and consistent content across collective channels to enhance the customer experience.
Data science techniques are crucial in quantifying profit loss and resolving channel disruption. These strategies address the inquiries that Jay Radley, Precision eControl’s Head of Sales, proposes, “How do we create actionable, targeted plans…that can drive towards business outcomes? How do we measure that? How can we have the systems in place and the tools to know that when you take an action, you can see the corresponding benefit to your business and your overall trends across online marketplaces.”
Since disturbances and the corresponding outcomes are multifaceted and vary across channels, you must prioritize approaches and decisions to suit your business goals. This involves examining marketplace revenue trends to view both micro and macro business impacts. For instance, you can utilize data analytics to view various sales on different storefronts or obtain a more detailed perspective of product sales. From there, you can determine the appropriate action for addressing specific unauthorized activities.
Although platform control and monitoring are often used interchangeably, these methods differ in their granularity. Typical channel monitoring tools detect superficial disruptions and categorize them together. Conversely, control methods address the interruptions’ sources and possible execution methods to manage them effectively. Case in point, when complying with MAP (minimum advertised price) policies during seller disputes, it’s mandatory to employ a brand-led approach to manage workflows, communication, and data. In contrast, addressing unauthorized resellers necessitates a market-focused process to measure KPIs and outline data.
Brand disruption is a prevailing issue with nuanced protection methods entailing data analytics and market awareness. Brands should employ available tools and develop a brand protection and control strategy to minimize these disturbances and maximize profitability.
Prospering on Amazon can be arduous, especially when programs, strategies, and platforms constantly change.
Fortunately, companies like ProductWind have been testing and learning to figure out the secret sauce to succeed on Amazon. Their findings? Influencer advertising might just be the way to go.
In sharpening its approach to influencer advertising, ProductWind has mastered its strategy to help other brands train Amazon’s algorithm and drive KPIs. So what’s the formula behind influencer advertising, and why is it so lucrative?
Influencer advertising has become an increasingly popular technique to drive consumers to specific brands or products. But influencers create more than just testimonials for your brand — they craft keyword-driven content and help drive traffic, sales, ratings, and reviews.
Influencer advertising benefits your brand on multiple platforms. For example, on Amazon, influencers subliminally send signals to the platform through external traffic generated by their efforts. Over time, influencer-based traffic helps train the Amazon algorithm to love your product.
For ProductWind, influencer success isn’t measured by likes or followers. “For most companies, when you say ‘influencers’ or ‘influencer marketing,’ their mind goes to some form of public relations and talking about likes and comments,” CRO Tim Wilson explains, “That’s not what we do…if we have a choice to optimize a campaign towards driving eCommerce metrics and KPIs…that’s the path we go down.”
Influencer advertising success isn’t dependent on how many “likes” your brand gets on socials. It’s about driving metrics that are connected to sales — you can see the whole journey from influencer to Amazon to brand revenue.
Another common concern brands have is how to vet influencers. To reiterate, you shouldn’t choose your influencer partnerships based on their following. You should look for people who cater to your audience’s demographics, develop beautiful content, and drive traffic, click-through rates, and sales.
“We're looking at to what degree this person [helps] drive each one of these KPIs that you need to be successful,” Tim says. “Then we assemble a team of people with the idea that there's no one influencer who can do all these things — it takes a village.”
Like many other brands, Bose was finding it difficult to win on Amazon due to program changes and expenses. However, their partnership with ProductWind helped them use influencer advertising to get back on track, launch products quickly, and take hold of Amazon’s algorithm.
Described as “an insurance policy for product launches,” ProductWind helped Bose find the right influencers and create campaigns that drove traffic to its products. Todd Weagant, Bose’s Global Head of Sales for Amazon, has high praise for his experience. “As soon as the campaign launched,” he says, “we could see traffic going up. We could see all of our standard metrics going up. And there was nothing else to attribute it to, except for the ProductWind activity.”
There are plenty of aspects on Amazon’s platform that are out of a brand’s control. But companies like ProductWind help you train the algorithm to your brand’s advantage. ProductWind offers transparency, influencer advertising insight, and strategies to help you succeed on Amazon — and beyond.
With Amazon as the leading digital marketplace, brands are looking to optimize sales on its platform. Historically, sellers have developed separate budgets, goals, and advertising strategies for Amazon and DTC, creating silos and cementing the reputed digital divide between channels.
However, “Over the last six months…36% of the Amazon users going to product detail pages actually come from offline sources,” says Blue Wheel’s VP of Sales and Marketing, Nicole Reich. This indicates that consumers are either directed to Amazon by influencers or start their searches on other websites.
So how can you integrate your Amazon and DTC efforts to develop an omnichannel strategy that enhances the customer journey?
Merging Amazon and DTC channels helps establish comprehensive marketing tactics that maximize visibility on both sites. Segregated advertising limits your efforts to one channel, hindering sales and compromising storage and revenue. Tayler Carpenter, Blue Wheel’s VP of Advertising, speaks to the significance of combining strategies: “By having one large macro marketing calendar and one large macro budget and marketing initiatives, we can start putting together the pieces that will make up the larger plan that allows you, as the brand, to have more control and an understanding of what’s going on in…your marketing, business, and omni-commerce.”
Customer lifecycle data is a valuable DTC marketing tool for cross-promoting Amazon products. For instance, when DTC customers sign up for your email list, and you capture their mobile numbers, you can send text messages to promote new product launches, deals, and inventory restocks on your Amazon site. One in three shoppers prefer receiving texts to emails, and 73% have made a purchase after obtaining one; leveraging DTC communication helps grow your Amazon brand.
TikTok is dominating the social media landscape, and many younger consumers begin their searches on this platform, making it a fundamental advertising tool. Maximizing product discovery requires regularly appearing on numerous “for you” pages — a user’s curated algorithm — by including the hashtag Amazon on each video. When you optimize videos with appropriate hashtags, TikTok categorizes them to display relevant content related to individual searches.
The ultimate goal when advertising on TikTok is to become viral, boosting conversions and sales on your Amazon site. Yet this can lead to inventory shortages, so it’s crucial to incorporate DTC with your Amazon store as an alternative for fulfilling product demands.
Amazon’s Buy with Prime option is evolving to accommodate omnichannel capabilities. When employing this program on your DTC website, consumers can purchase products using their Amazon information and receive two-day shipping, creating a familiar and seamless customer experience. Additionally, Buy with Prime enables brands to leverage Amazon fulfillment centers to fulfill both DTC and Amazon orders, thereby consolidating multiple channels. A Buy with Prime strategy may increase conversions by 25% and drive additional traffic to your website.
By recognizing and forming a correlation between DTC and Amazon operations, you can acquire additional customers and boost sales to expand your business.
As Amazon continues to dominate the digital landscape, advertising is becoming increasingly competitive, and strategies to influence customers are progressing across multiple channels. But many brands still develop ad objectives, measure performance, and make costly decisions through business-specific sales, customer, and profit data.
This finite approach lacks consideration for the larger market that includes competitors, industry trends, and consumer shopping habits.
So how can you develop a market-aware advertising method to optimize your strategies and improve brand performance?
When making industry-informed decisions, identifying your ideal market is fundamental to your strategy. Traditional methods of pinpointing an audience involve positioning products into categories. Yet this approach may be either too broad or too narrow since Amazon has over 16,000 dynamic subcategories, and brands often misclassify their products.
A more effective model is to determine a specific set of product ASINs (Amazon Standard Identification Number) that generate sales volume and address shopper needs. Customers express their intentions through search terms; two similar products may rank with the same keyword if consumers purchase both products after their search. Your established ASINs must reflect Amazon’s overall competition and consumer trends, so referencing the Amazon Search Terms report is crucial to ensure a comprehensive collection. This report displays Amazon’s top-ranked keywords by frequency and popularity. You can also search for your ASINs to determine bestselling items and correlating terms and compare those against trending words and products.
By gathering and analogizing keywords and similar-ranking products, you can compile ASINs that help you create small, precise markets for tactical decision-making.
Once you’ve defined a profitable market for your ads, it’s essential to implement a strategy to extract value from your efforts. Competitive intelligence drives sales and consumers away from competitors to your Amazon storefront. The optimal way to expropriate sales from adversaries is to create targeted ad campaigns like sponsored displays that allow you to advertise on another brand’s product detail pages. It’s recommended to optimize this strategy by targeting the top-selling item in a brand’s category.
Another technique is to employ Amazon DSP to entice customers who viewed a competitor's product detail page without making a purchase. You should retarget shoppers after they’ve left the page to compare your ad or product with the rival. The third competitive approach involves leveraging your competition’s top-ranking keywords through an aggressive top-of-search campaign. After confirming these search terms, compare your organic rankings with a contender and place bids on the top-of-search placements to outrank them.
Quantifying your advertisements’ impacts on sales and revenue is crucial for business development. The conventional approach to measuring performance involves developing a target ROAS (return on ad spend) to structure your advertising methods. But to compare sales and profits with your competitors, you must consider your company’s market share.
Analyzing market trends and developments helps you determine the seasonal factors — namely Prime Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday — impacting your sales volume. You can also utilize these measurements to assemble an ideal ad budget consistent with your target market. For instance, Franz Jordan, Perpetua’s VP and General Manager, says, “If your market is growing by 20% on average, then your budget should also grow by 20%.”
Ultimately, a competitive advertising landscape should implement intentional solutions that drive sales and maximize profit for long-term prosperity.
Every industry comes to a point where it has to adapt and change its model.
For example, healthcare is amid unprecedented challenges; since the pandemic’s staffing problems and the Great Resignation, healthcare organizations are struggling to stabilize the workforce. On top of this, inflation, high medication costs, and other financial headwinds are hitting healthcare companies, making it even more difficult to secure a solid team.
But these issues aren’t unique to the healthcare space. We’ve seen this in the automotive, airline, and banking industries, and there’s no telling which will be next.
So what can you do about it? How do you mitigate staffing problems proactively?
The answer to labor challenges lies in your HR and marketing departments.
Typically, HR recruiting and marketing departments are separate from each other. HR is often focused on traditional forms of outreach, such as job boards, agencies, and career websites. On the other hand, marketing departments are utilizing tools to craft messaging and engage consumers.
“I think marketing has a great seat at the table where we can really help solve this [staffing] problem with our colleagues across the enterprise,” says Tom Hileman of Global Prairie.
When you combine HR’s precise targeting with the marketing team’s tools and tactics, you can attract potential candidates early on without having to scramble for a strong workforce. Instead of posting to job boards and hoping you come across the ideal candidate at the perfect time, using marketing strategies in tandem with recruitment techniques can help you develop a pool of top candidates who are on-brand and ready to join your team long-term.
Technology is often seen as a big expense, but shifting your perspective is crucial.
Technology shouldn’t just be a nice-to-have — it’s a necessity that can help you find suitable candidates for your firm.
“Treat technology as your friend,” Ashmer Aslam of Cured reminds us, “In many cases, you might have already invested in something like a marketing automation platform in your organization. This is an opportunity to find another avenue to use that [technology] to your advantage.”
Technology is a massive enabler for staffing and recruiting. When you combine technology, marketing strategy, and recruiting efforts, you can more efficiently discover candidates, reach out to them, and ease the hiring process.
One of the core drivers of connection is storytelling. When you tell a story through marketing efforts, you tug at the heartstrings of individuals (whether consumers or candidates), moving them to engage with your brand.
Stuart Dill of Vanderbilt University Medical Center breaks it down, “Marketing is nothing more than connecting. I believe the oldest and greatest tool in the tool belt to connect is through storytelling. Use current innovative marketing techniques, innovation, and tactics to tell those stories, but at the end of the day, you're just trying to connect through storytelling.”
Storytelling is more than just crafting a narrative, tossing it out on a few platforms, and hoping it resonates. You need authentic, organic storytelling on the appropriate channels.
Think about it this way: if you’re looking for an electrician to service your home, you’ll likely choose a company that a friend recommends rather than a company whose ad you saw online. The same goes for staffing. If potential candidates hear an authentic story from people within their network or industry, they’re much more likely to connect as opposed to viewing a corporate-driven ad.
Combining authentic storytelling with state-of-the-art marketing techniques creates a win-win for you and your potential employees. It allows you to shift the paradigm in your industry and prepare for future staffing and recruiting challenges.
ChatGPT’s release has revolutionized AI, and industries have created innovative ways to deploy this tool and other models to enhance customer communication. Most recently, AI use cases have emerged in the banking, financial services, and investment (BFSI) industries that extend far beyond language processing capabilities.
How are financial institutions pioneering various AI tools for data generation, predictive analytics, and more?
NVIDIA conducted a survey demonstrating key opportunities for AI’s application in financial services. The survey revealed significant growth in use cases for natural language processing (NLP), large language models (LLM), and recommendation systems.
Practical applications for NLP and LLM exist within the context of contextual banking, where organizations have utilized tools like ChatGPT to gather insights on individual transactions and maximize the customer experience. Similarly, capital markets have leveraged these language models to predict stock market trends to manage assets and optimize investment portfolios. The final use case observed for this AI form involves fraud detection and identity verification related to banking and transactions.
Recommendation systems generate and analyze data to help consumers make informed financial decisions. These engines also assist organizations and internal stakeholders in recommending resources to their consumers. Spiralem’s Managing Partner, Bruno Diniz, cites an example of recommendation systems, stating that they can provide “financial information on a [case-by-case] basis that really reads information on the client, understands the problem they have, and makes an explanation specifically for a situation that perhaps the client has not even been able to assess themself.”
Many financial companies face challenges generating conversions, customer satisfaction, and retention. Recommendation systems and generative AI models provide opportunities for personalized content. Case in point, Capital One wanted to optimize conversions through a relevant homepage banner placement. Kevin Levitt, NVIDIA’s leader of Global Business Development for Financial Services, describes Capital One’s efforts: “They leveraged deep learning and NVIDIA’s application framework for recommendation systems…to understand and identify the optimal placement to give any consumer after they’ve logged in.” As a result, Capital One increased conversion rates by 60%.
Another company based in Brazil has deployed a generative AI tool to create customized content for asset management, business proposals, and hyper-personalization to meet individual needs and banking preferences. You can also use these models to develop optimized marketing and advertising copy.
Before piloting any AI model, it’s crucial to test its potential value for an organization by conducting proof of concept. Two sectors of BFSI have begun deploying testing for these models: compliance as a service (CaaS) providers and capital markets.
One CaaS organization has integrated ChatGPT to help banks comply with complex data-sharing regulations existing within federal and state privacy laws. Independent fintech advisor Efi Pylarinou explains how this company has executed PoC: “They are training and getting meaningful answers in terms of the risk that the financial services organization is running due to the complexity of these [regulations]. This highlights how important it is in terms of what prompts you’re asking these models and how you’re training them.” This business has successfully determined the value of ChatGPT in risk assessment and management.
Fintech companies are training LLMs to digitize documentation such as earnings reports, providing valuable insights into investment share prices for capital markets. Yet LLMs like ChatGPT supply general, nonspecific insights, so experimenting with multiple models is paramount.
Multiple institutions in various sectors have demonstrated the emerging potential for AI in BFSI and the value it can deliver to consumers.
Digital transformation has become mainstream, and healthcare industry trends, including increased costs, member demands for customized services, and the need for efficient workflows, have prompted health plans to capitalize on this movement. Yet digital adoption is not a universal approach since health plans must consider members’ unique needs and their familiarity with these technologies.
So how can you streamline digital adoption and educate both staff and members about the value of digital healthcare tools?
With so many applications and software on the market, selecting the one that fits your needs can be challenging. Since digital engagement should benefit the entire industry, factoring patients and staff into the decision is paramount. So how can you choose the right tool to facilitate your adoption strategy?
While members want to engage with their health plans and manage their care, they don’t want to be given too many digital tool options. Instead, you should adopt one comprehensive app that provides members access to their personal information, relevant healthcare resources, and plan details. This tool should also automate staff workflows and enhance internal data collection so you can deliver personalized experiences and maintain an ongoing relationship with your members.
Positioning digital tools to members and staff remains complicated due to an organization’s competing needs. Some health plans market their tools solely based on member demands without considering their business objectives. Developing a careful adoption strategy that can scale with the business allows you to align patient needs with organizational goals.
Executing this strategy requires educating staff about your organization’s purpose for digital engagement. As Wellframe’s Senior Customer Partner Michele Gabron observes, “We tend to see really positive member engagement when we have staff that has been really culturally impacted from a top-down approach.” When employees understand the company-wide benefits of digital engagement, they’re more likely to communicate the value proposition throughout the healthcare industry.
Digital transformation is an ongoing process that involves consistently refining your strategies and objectives and improving member support. So it’s critical to develop KPIs that can assess the value and effectiveness of your digital tools. This should begin immediately following the initial adoption phase. As Jessie Schiller, Senior Director of Digital Adoption at Wellframe, emphasizes, “I think the first thing is really thinking about…that [adoption] piece of it, lining that up with the goals, and then developing a process for accountability…making sure that you’re able to see progress, see where there’s gaps, and bring together best practices.”
Once you’ve acclimated to the implementation, you can set benchmarks and develop metrics to evaluate periodically. These measurements should demonstrate engagement, adoption, and retention rates so you can scale and meet monthly goals.
The key to successful digitization is to collect and analyze data points that give you actionable insights and allow you to refine your processes to meet member and industry demands.
