Frost Bank + Magnolia DXP
Frost Bank makes personalization measurable with data-first personas on Magnolia DXP
关于客户
Frost Bank is a Texas-based financial services institution headquartered in San Antonio. It has served customers and communities since 1868. Today it operates more than 200 financial centers across major Texas markets and ranks among the 50 largest banks in the United States.
Its digital marketing team wanted personalization that delivers real business impact without losing control of data, compliance or resources. So the team built a repeatable seven-step framework that targets well-defined personas instead of individuals. On Magnolia DXP, the bank turns that framework into lender-specific pages and audience-specific variants, and measures each one against a single business objective.
Gage Talbert, Vice President of Digital Marketing, leads the bank's digital marketing strategy. He has 12 years of experience across website management, experimentation and optimization, paid media and data analysis. In that time he has run multiple personalization, optimization and experimentation programs.
Highlights
- Built templatized pages for individual lenders with a custom Magnolia DXP application, so visits and leads are attributed to the right lender.
- Launched consumer and commercial variants of its fraud prevention page and measured each against the default on engagement rate.
- Created a repeatable seven-step framework that ties every personalization effort to one mission-critical business objective.
The Challenge
More data doesn't always mean more relevance
Personalization is a priority for every digital team. But for a bank, the path to relevant experiences has real constraints. Frost Bank's digital marketing team faced the same hurdles most organizations do.
"Most of us are still trying to access data that is in silos. We're still trying to define, score and attribute our leads. And we're still trying to understand user behavior and keep up with the laws and regulations that allow us to use it."
The trade-off of hyper-personalization — every extra characteristic narrows the audience an experience can reach. Past a certain point, a more relevant message reaches so few people that it no longer moves the business.
"As you try to personalize on more characteristics, in effect, what you're usually doing is shrinking the size of that addressable audience so you can deliver a more relevant experience to them."
More data points also bring more risk. Each one can carry its own regulations, and personalization based on data customers didn't knowingly share can feel intrusive. Inaccurate or outdated data has the opposite effect. Instead of showing relevance, it shows a brand knows little about its audience. On top of this, every new variant fragments the customer journey and adds creative and operational load. For a team with limited resources, that makes consistently great experiences harder to deliver.
The Solution
A data-first framework, activated on Magnolia DXP
Frost Bank chose to optimize toward personas, not individuals. These are groups centered on a specific need, defined by data the bank can verify, use and audit. Broad descriptors like "younger users" or "urban customers" only become personas once the team agrees on exactly how each one is defined, and whether it can be used for personalization at all.
The team follows a seven-step framework:
- Explore your data sources. Catalog every system, from CRM to web analytics to consent management. Note the "connective tissue," such as a shared email address, that links one system to another. Keep a backlog of data that's missing.
- Eliminate data that isn't actionable. Work with data, legal and compliance teams to set aside data that can't scale, is incomplete or can't be used. Identify the fields that will trigger each experience, such as UTM parameters or returning-visitor status.
- Choose a mission-critical objective. Tie each personalization to one KPI and collect benchmark data before launch.
- Prioritize minimum viable data. Use the fewest data points that still deliver relevance, and run the numbers on audience size.
- Scope the program to available resources. Agree on bandwidth with creative, development, data and compliance teams before building.
- Build the journey.
- Execute and evolve. Hold regular performance readouts and keep a log of every change.
Steps one and two are revisited from time to time, since available data changes as technical debt gets resolved.
Turning personas into pages — Frost Bank uses Magnolia DXP to deliver these experiences at scale. To support lenders in one area of its business, the team built a custom application on the platform that generates a templatized page for each lender.
"We set up a custom application through Magnolia DXP to develop templatized pages for each of our lenders in a specific area of our business."
The team applied the same approach to its fraud prevention page. A single page serves both audiences. Personal content leads by default, but for visitors arriving from the bank’s Commercial and Small Business campaigns, UTM parameters rearrange the page in Magnolia DXP to put business content first.
The Result
Personalization that answers to a business objective
Because every experience is tied to a measurable objective, Frost Bank can say clearly whether a personalization worked. Lender-specific pages made total visits and leads attributable to individual lenders. Without them, those leads would have landed in a general internet bucket. On the fraud prevention page, the team measures engagement for the business-focused variant against the default experience.
"Understanding the engagement rate improvements between the default and then the business-focused variant is the primary KPI that we've been using for this experience customization."
Proving value before asking for investment — the program started with data sources the marketing team could use without outside approval, like web analytics and custom conversion tagging. Once those early use cases showed results, it was simpler to bring in the data warehouse team to connect more systems.
"I started with use cases that I didn't have to seek as much external approval on, to show the value rather than telling that there's value."
Looking ahead, Frost Bank sees AI as an accelerator, with people in the loop. Repeatable tasks such as data checks and template-based creative are good candidates for automation. Strategic decisions stay with the team.
"Use this framework as an opportunity to set your foundation and then find ways to automate the things that are repeatable, while still leaving the human strategic decision-making as a major core part of the process."
