Donna Doleman Dickerson on Delivering Transformational Experiences
Donna Doleman Dickerson is the Chief Marketing Officer at GreenPath Financial Wellness, one of America’s largest financial services organization’s that has helped 200,000 households achieve financial goals and eliminate over $240M of consumer debt. Doleman Dickerson leads the brand and marketing initiatives with focus and deep customer-centric, innovative, and creative expertise. Upon taking on the role in 2017, she quickly designed transformative marketing strategies that have become an organizational pillar. She now oversees a national integrated marketing strategy that generates a measurable impact on GreenPath’s mission and bottom line. Her innovative approach to marketing has been game-changing in reaching more people than ever before with GreenPath services for financial wellbeing.
What is your day-to-day like and is there anything exciting that you guys are working on?
My day-to-day mission is to keep my finger on the pulse of our client's needs and their concerns about financial health and wellness. This is the insight that gives me what I need to direct or redirect our marketing and brand strategy. On the operations side, I’m focused on how our services are delivered — the customer journey and the overall experience. As marketers, our priority is to prepare prospects for the experience they’re going to have when they connect with us via website or phone.
We believe our experience at GreenPath is unique, I call it the GreenPath Experience because it’s steeped in empathy, with a human-centered lens that is judgment-free.
We help people navigate issues around money, debt, housing — these can be challenging situations that require an empathic voice on the line. Our marketing and promotional messaging must convey a consistent message of empathy as well.
We also continue to study what’s happening in the marketplace and current consumer trends. By doing this work, we can better understand the challenges people are facing and craft messaging and tools that are laser-focused on customer needs.
What are some of the trends you’re noticing right now within marketing for financial services?
In this time of COVID, a key trend we are seeing is the shift from in-person, face-to-face financial and debt counseling services to online, phone, and virtual counseling. We mobilized early on to deliver accessible, convenient digital and phone counseling services. Our recently launched app gives our clients an immediate and easy user experience that makes it effortless to interact with their debt management accounts, process transactions, as well as allows people to track their progress toward their financial goals. To better address the trend of consumer preferences for immediate and easy online access, our new Virtual Financial Coach offers users an intuitive digital experience.
What are some of the top marketing challenges you’re facing of late given the impact of the pandemic?
In light of the pandemic, we’re noticing speed, accuracy and agility are paramount, as it relates to our day to day work plans. As we create marketing content, we are hyper-focused on developing and distributing information that accurately communicates federal government relief programs such as CARES Act forbearance extensions, student loan deferrals, temporary mortgage relief, and other rapidly changing regulations that impact people’s everyday financial lives. Staying on top of the regulations to serve our clients has been imperative. Additionally, we have seen a 70% increase in people visiting our website. That says to us people really need the information that we’re curating, so we’re taking that seriously.
How are you dealing with the ever-evolving consumer identity?
We recently embarked upon formal consumer research studies. For much of our 60-year legacy, we successfully relied on friends and family and trusted credit unions and bank partners for referrals. Now with more formalized marketing efforts, we are honing in on client needs, focused messaging, and expanding our direct reach to consumers.
The research helped us understand what consumers are facing — such as their changing perceptions and attitudes toward debt, money, paying off loans, and achieving their financial goals. From these insights, we’re crafting new marketing plans and direct-to-consumer education and outreach initiatives.
Are you looking at more data partnerships to enhance your views of your customers? What are the challenges around that?
One of our goals is to truly understand the marketing last-click attribution — that is, what are the specific marketing campaigns, advertising programs, or other initiatives that maximize client engagement? Automated analytics and attribution data, in fully integrated data platforms, would allow us to compile timely metrics and to give us intelligence on the greatest return on our marketing dollars. We have been able to effectively bring together a collaboration of technology, operations, and marketing systems to close the loop. It’s a work in progress that will yield promising results.
How will emerging tech play a key role in the development and evolution of the financial services industry as a whole?
I think marketing and innovation are going to be the engines for growth in the post-COVID world. Companies that focus on creating digital experiences as part of that innovation will be the winners. When you think about financial services, for the most part, it is a transactional business.
But at GreenPath we want our financial counseling services to be transformational because we know that finances transform people’s lives.
Naturally, we want to interact in a meaningful way with our clients as they’re interacting with their money.
And in thinking about emerging technology, GreenPath has partnered with a technology provider, eGain, to test the impact of a virtual financial coach. The virtual coach is available 24/7 and the prompts and the interactions will be just as if a client is talking to a person in that judgment-free zone — leveraging our empathic voice to build motivate people to transform their financial health and wellness.
People will receive personalized coaching and actionable steps on how to address their financial priorities. For us, that is an emerging trend that helps us be transformational, not just transactional.
Do you have any last words or closing remarks you’d like to leave us with or any topics that you think the public needs more awareness around?
Our world has changed, yet some things are likely to remain unchanged in the near term — like how people interact with brands and products and services in the post-COVID digital world. How people deal with their money is what we’re concerned about.
I’m a true believer that digital marketing, innovating around a customer’s true needs, and delivering on transformational experiences are going to be paramount in our post-pandemic world.
And then I’d say we need continued awareness around empathy in marketing and customer experience. We have been on this journey for a number of years, structuring our services and organization to deliver human-centered, empathetic services. Having an empathy coach has provided us with a strong foundation to connect authentically with our clients and through our marketing messages. We would not have seen a 70% increase in new people connecting with us and believing in our value and advice without that solid foundation
I view our active commitment to empathy as brand equity and I think that equity has been a key contributor to our success, during such a difficult business year.
