A small credit union in central Pennsylvania wanted maximum ROI for a streamlined marketing strategy.
“As a small financial institution, a little marketing can go a long way,” the CEO told me, “and we certainly don’t have money to throw around. We need to target our spending to make the most of our limited resources.”
When we began working with his team, he had just added a newsletter for its 3,900 members, increased the frequency of in-house marketing fliers from quarterly to monthly, and encouraged representatives to get more involved in pitching promotions to members as they visited the credit union or used the drive through.
But there was one element still missing: custom on hold messages for when members had to be placed on hold, and it was this service the CEO was desperately seeking. He knew that callers are captive, they’re listening and they want information. So we explained how we produce custom content and play it back into the telephone through a cloud-based player that starts and stops content on certain dates or days of the week, as granularly as the situation calls for — perfect for communicating their time-sensitive promotions to current or prospective members holding for assistance.
Our client agreed to the service. We shipped the equipment, his IT team installed it, we began to produce and upload messages and, several months later, received this unsolicited letter: “When we added Easy On Hold to our phones, booked loans increased from roughly $300,000 per month to $900,000 monthly. Clearly our policies, promotions and staff played a major role in our success, but without this marketing, who would ever know? Currently our members are telling us that they learned of our products and promotions in roughly equal portions: 1/3 from our newsletter, 1/3 from our teller line and 1/3 from Easy On Hold.”
Our client provided a cost comparison of what the credit union spent in its annual marketing mix:
- Newsletters – Roughly $12,000
- Easy On Hold – Roughly $1,500
- In-House Fliers – Roughly $250
He went on to say in his letter how his members learn of promotions and important credit union information in many ways. “Marketing efforts must be reinforced to be effective. Easy On Hold allows our small credit union to make rapid decisions and multiple adjustments in our messaging when we find something that is working. Members get our message in print, in person and over the phone. Easy On Hold has been one of our best decisions in the past year!”
If your financial institution puts callers on hold in silence… or to a local radio station or sleepy music… perhaps it’s time to give messaging on hold a try. You might find your customers are thinking about you — and your products — in a whole new light.