If your customers opt out, how do you reach them?

By Alice Whitelam (Senior Consultant)

In today’s privacy-conscious, hyper-regulated world, customer communication has never been more complex or more critical. For banks and financial services providers, the challenges are perhaps more pronounced than in other sectors. You’re offering products and services that can genuinely make a difference in helping people budget better, avoid unnecessary fees, build savings, or manage debt. But too often, your customers don’t even realise these services exist.

Why? Because your message never actually reaches them. It’s buried in an overcrowded inbox, the subject line isn’t interesting enough, the email’s too long or, more likely, they opted out of your comms months ago.

Your customers are now firmly in control of how, when, and if they hear from you. And that means the old rules don’t apply anymore. To get cut-through, you need to move from broadcasting to connecting; from campaigns designed around internal priorities to communication strategies built on deep, human understanding.

There is a communication gap

Many banks are offering valuable tools and support, but they’re not landing with the people who need them most. Your customers have tuned out and are ignoring messages. Not because they don’t need help, but because what they receive doesn’t feel relevant, useful, or timely to them.

In our experience, communication often falls flat for a few core reasons:

Too many emails: Customers are bombarded with irrelevant or overly frequent messaging, so they unsubscribe.

Email dependency: Despite falling engagement, email remains the default channel often at the expense of other, more dynamic formats like in-app messaging or social media.

Tone-deaf messaging: Content speaks from a product or compliance point of view, rather than starting with the customer’s needs.

Overwhelming length: Research shows emails over 100 words quickly lose readers’ attention.1

The result is an ever-growing disconnect. You have something genuinely useful to offer – you're not sending useless spam! - but the message simply doesn’t land. And with every missed opportunity, trust and engagement take a little bit of a hit.

Why current approaches are not working

It’s not that financial services teams aren’t trying. I’m sure you know that better than most. It’s that the world of content and comms has changed, and many strategies haven’t really caught up. Too often we see that:

Communications are still built around averages, not individuals.

Campaigns only change when performance dips, by which point it’s too late.

There’s no clear plan for what to do when email isn’t an option.

If – like many others - you’re still relying on traditional, one-size-fits-all communication models, it’s becoming harder to stay relevant. It’s a challenge, of course it is, but it’s also a good opportunity to rethink and reimagine how you connect with your audience.

How insights help rebuild connection

So where do you start when the usual routes are blocked? It sounds simple, but the answer is ‘with insight’.

“We do use insight” I hear you say. That may be the case, but when did you last refresh that insight? The likelihood is that it was over a year ago and if that’s the case, it’s likely outdated, which is as bad as guessing. You need up-to-date, real insight about who your customers are, what they care about, how they behave, and how they prefer to interact.

When you have that understanding, everything else starts to shift.

For example, you might uncover that customers are opting out because your messages come too frequently or cover topics they don’t care about. You might find your tone feels too formal, or indeed too casual. Or that people prefer short, visual content in-app over long-form email.

This is where customer and behavioural insight makes the difference:

It helps you identify which themes resonate and what feels like irrelevant noise.

It gives you clarity on why people disengage, so you can fix it at the source.

It reveals which channels different segments prefer, and how to tailor content accordingly.

It enables you to spot high-impact moments in a customer’s journey, like payday, a new product activation, or an account milestone, so you can communicate when it really counts.

Let’s say you learn that a particular segment engages most with short, reward-focused messages delivered in-app. You can tailor your strategy so they only receive those types of messages, at the right moments, improving both experience and results.

Or perhaps you discover that customers with certain spending patterns respond better to a conversational tone on SMS than traditional emails. That knowledge allows you to build communications around their preferences, not your defaults.

Even more powerful is the ability to combine individual-level insights with broader behavioural trends. That’s how you move from reacting to preferences, to anticipating them.

This is what it means to shift from generic to personal. From reactive to proactive. From sending messages to building meaningful, insight-led engagement.

Moving beyond email

For the sake of this article, let’s assume your customers have opted out and email is off the table. What other channels are there?

Well, it’s not just about swapping one channel for another. It’s about building a multi-touch strategy rooted in context, behaviour, and intent.

Here are a few ways to start:

Be where your customers are. Whether that’s inside your mobile app, on their social feed, or within a third-party platform they trust - go to them, rather than expecting them to come to you.

Design content that adapts to the channel. A one-size-fits-all message lifted from email won’t work on Instagram, in-app notifications or push alerts. Keep it short, visually engaging, and tailored to the medium.

Use ‘moments that matter’ as cues for connection. Look for natural engagement triggers like salary landing, nearing a savings goal, or going into overdraft. These moments are rich with context and relevance, and customers are more open to help.

An opt out isn't the end

When a customer opts out, it’s not a closed door, it’s actually quite valuable feedback. It’s a signal that something didn’t quite work. That could be the content, the channel, the tone, or the timing.

Take that feedback seriously. Use it to reflect and refine. Revisit your segmentation. Re-examine the purpose of your content. Ask yourself: Are we offering value? Are we really listening?

Because when you start building communications around what your customers want, not just what you need to say, you begin to earn their attention again.

Where to go from here

The institutions that win in this new consent-first world will be the ones who listen better, act smarter, and communicate more personally. That’s how you rebuild trust. That’s how you drive action. And that’s how you turn passive audiences into engaged, loyal customers.

How we can help

At KAE, we help banks and financial services providers unlock deeper understanding of their customers by connecting insights about behaviours and expectations with strategies that deliver measurable results. If you’re rethinking your communication approach and want to create meaningful engagement that actually reaches people, we’d love to help - just get in touch.