5 Marketing Automation Tips For Community Banks and Credit Unions

Automation is the dominant theme in marketing today. But how can financial institutions with tight budgets and limited resources catch up with the rest of the banking industry?

One in three Millennials say they are open to switching banks in the next 90 days, and 71% would rather go to the dentist than listen to what banks say. So how do you smaller institutions plan to retain customers, gain their loyalty and increase sales via digital channels? How do need results driven campaigns, personalized offers and multichannel marketing.

1. Use Digital to Keep It Personal

Acquiring new customers is important, but retaining them accelerates profitable growth. After all, they say it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one. According to Paul Farris, the probability of selling to an existing customer is up to 14 times higher than the probability of selling to a new customer. Therefore, a centralized repository with access to all crucial information is basic for every financial marketer. It was pretty straightforward getting to know customers when they visited your branch every other week. But it is quite a different challenge with digital consumers. Digital marketing execs will need access to both the data and the technology in order to maintain that personal connection that consumers have come to love about community banks and credit unions. This will allow you to pamper customers with personalized and relevant offers, messages and information, even within the context of automated marketing campaigns.

2. Leverage The Advantage of Your Size

If you want your customers to love you, you have to love them too. The good news is that regardless of budget, banking providers already have everything they need. They sit on a goldmine of personal information. And the size of community banks and credit unions actually can give them an advantage. Their size and organizational structure allows them to get closer to their customers, and close the gap between online and offline marketing more quickly.

3. Automate Cross-Selling

In the digital world, marketing automation is vital to achieve success with cross-selling. It allows you to automatically recommend new- and complimentary offerings, and ensures that everyone gets timely and personalized offers. Furthermore, you can use a combination of segmentation criteria, machine learning and artificial intelligence to trigger the next best marketing action for everyone in your audience. You might not be as big as Amazon, but you have way more information about your customer. When Amazon introduced cross-selling in 2006 (i.e., “customers who bought this item also bought…”), their sales increased by 35%.

4. Stay Omni-Present, Not Omni-Annoying

Don’t waste opportunities to engage your audience with offers or products your they have already acquired or declined. You are (or at least should be!) sitting on the data to make sure you are only putting relevant offers in front of both existing customers and prospects.

Webinar
REGISTER FOR THIS FREE WEBINAR
CFPB 1033 and Open Banking: Opportunities and Challenges for Banks
Reserve your seat today for this live webinar and explore the potential of CFPB 1033 for open banking initiatives within your bank.
WEDNESDAY, April 17th AT 2:00 PM (ET)
Enter your email address

5. It’s About Simplifying Processes and Saving Time

When your institution finally jumps on marketing automation bandwagon, you will be shocked how much time you have been wasting. The coordination of campaigns can fall directly into the hands of marketing and sales, with no need to invest in additional IT expertise. Marketing teams should be able to analyze customers’ behavior in real time, without waiting for the whole campaign to be completed, nor having to lean on IT. This allows you to adapt to real market response and tune your offering for better results immediately. And with the type of intuitive and user-friendly marketing automation platforms available today, the learning curve has been cut significantly.

Bottom Line:Marketing Automation is no longer an option for financial marketers (at any size institution). In fact, it has been an absolute must while now. It’s no longer the exclusive privilege of large megabanks.

Paula Villamarin is Head of Marketing for Prisma Campaigns, Infocorp’s Marketing Orchestrator designed for financial institutions. Prisma developed campaigns based on predictive Machine Learning and message priorization to boost conversion rates and increase loyalty efficiently, taking omnichannel banking to the next level.

This article was originally published on . All content © 2024 by The Financial Brand and may not be reproduced by any means without permission.