Being Emotionally Supportive: Exploring the Value of Emotional Appeals Retargeting in Recovering Consumers of Financial Services

This study investigates whether retargeting, an operational approach broadly adopted in traditional retail but underexplored in financial services, is effective in recovering valuable consumers. Whereas informative appeal retargeting operations have been found useful and thus prevalently employed in traditional retail, we propose that emotional appeals retargeting operations should be more effective in successful financial consumer persuasion drawing on the uniqueness of financial services. Particularly, we explore the value of two types of emotional appeals retargeting strategies tailored for financial services: empathetic support and privacy commitment retargeting. Our field experiment involving a microloan platform reveals the effectiveness of emotional appeals retargeting in the financial service market. Specifically, empathetic support retargeting successfully recovers 11.93% of consumers, whereas privacy commitment retargeting recovers 17.27% of consumers. These effects translate to 5.19 and 10.53 percentage-point increases in the rate of return, respectively, over the no-message operation. This study further evaluates the quality of consumers retained by these retargeting strategies and finds that consumers called back by the empathetic support and privacy commitment retargeting present high credibility, with loan approval rates 11.4 and 13.69 percentage points higher than those of nonabandoning consumers, respectively. Accordingly, a more specific retargeting strategy is explored. Our study provides a systematical implication for nascent retargeting operation practices in the financial service market by elucidating the causes and effects of consumer returns.