Doing the Holidays Wrong: Banks Need to Refresh Year-End Marketing
By Nicole Volpe, Contributor at The Financial Brand
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Executive Summary
- Account openings remain strong through year-end, yet financial institutions cut acquisition advertising by 63% in December, missing 10 to 15% of annual selling opportunities.
- Continuous marketing (150+ days) delivers nearly 4x higher response rates and 40% lower cost per acquisition than short bursts, especially when competitors go quiet during holidays.
- 3 to 5% of customers shop for loans monthly year-round, and maintaining visibility during the holidays protects against churn to fintechs and big banks that never stop marketing.
Observing seasonality has been a marketing best practice for decades, if not centuries, with companies aligning their activities to predictable shifts in consumer behavior and attention throughout the year.
The playbook is well established in financial services. Loan applications, for example, rise in spring and summer and taper off in the fall. Auto and home insurance peak around spring, while interest in health and life coverage grows early in Q4. Mortgage refinancings and HELOCs spike after Federal Reserve meetings. And so on.
For banks and credit unions, one piece of enduring conventional wisdom holds that starting sometime around Thanksgiving, and running through New Year’s Day, consumers stop caring about checking accounts and other core banking products. The fourth quarter, the thinking goes, is a spending season, not a banking season. Aside from grudgingly dealing with a tax deadline or two, consumers aren’t thinking about their financial relationships, let alone whether they have the right ones in place.
But here’s the thing: data increasingly shows that pulling back during the holiday season is precisely what banks and credit unions shouldn’t do. In a marketplace where big banks can afford to stay visible year-round and fintechs dominate the mobile channel, smaller institutions that sit out the holidays risk ceding both share of mind and share of market.
To explore the issue, The Financial Brand spoke with two seasoned professionals — Tammy Holtzmeier, Director of Client Strategy and Client Strategist Wendy Erhart, both from Vericast, who analyzed three of the biggest holiday marketing myths, and offered suggestions on how to turn the “slow season” into a time of acceleration.
1. The December Downtime Myth: Nobody Opens New Accounts in the Winter Holiday Season
Acquiring new customers and deposits is essential for banks and credit unions, fueling low-cost funding and setting the foundation for long-term profitable engagement. And yet many institutions are apparently willing to write off 10–15% of every year’s potential selling time.
Analysis by Vericast, which helps FIs improve marketing engagement through more effective use of data, shows that while financial institutions cut checking-account acquisition advertising by an average of 63% from November to December, consumer demand doesn’t slow in the same way. Checking demand remains strong throughout the year—and in many cases increases at year-end: December 2024 account openings, for example, were higher than in 2022, 2023, and even the first 22 weeks of 2024.
“There clearly is a perception that marketing effectiveness just trails off around the end of the year, and that no one is looking to open a new checking account,” Holtzmeier said. “And it’s just not true.”
The irony is that the decision to sit out not just December but parts of November creates artificial pressure in the run-up to those months. As Erhart put it: “If you weren’t at goal by Thanksgiving, you can just cash it in, because you aren’t going to hit it.” This thinking can distort an entire year’s plan, and send mixed messages to team members and colleagues who may be inclined to keep powering through.
2. The ‘Pick Your Spots’ Myth: With Limited Budget, It’s Best to Prioritize Peak-Attention Months
Financial institution marketers, especially when operating with limited resources, might believe they can tactically turn the flow of campaign activity on and off. Their strategy is to keep as much powder dry as possible for times when customer attention is assumed to be high.
What this approach overlooks is that time out of market directly affects performance when you’re in market. Even if consumers aren’t transacting in December, they’re still online—scrolling, shopping, and absorbing messages. And consideration cycles can be long. When they come back into market in January (if they ever left in the first place) the brands that stayed visible in December will already have made a strong impression. “The institutions that have been in the market are already top of mind when someone is ready to act,” Erhart said.
Vericast data shows that “always-on” campaigns (those running 150+ days) deliver nearly 4x higher response rates and about 40% lower Cost Per Acquisition than 60- or 90-day bursts. (Another reason to keep the fourth quarter in your mix: In demand-priced advertising markets, CPAs may be lower.)
The bottom-line question is this: whether prospects are transacting or just browsing, why concede an open field? “If you’re seriously considering going quiet, you should recognize that some of your competitors have probably put their foot on the brake,” Holtzmeier said. “This is your opportunity to capitalize because less competitive noise increases your share of voice, and gives your message more opportunity to break through.”
3. The Cozy-Customer Myth: Attrition Risk Drops Off During the Holidays
The same thinking applies to playing defense as to offense. The premise is that customers are too busy with friends and family to think about something as workaday as a checking account. But just because they’re cozied up on the sofa doesn’t mean they’re cozied up with their primary financial institution.
The consumer might not be interested in opening a new checking account in the last weeks of December, but what about a loan? Don’t forget that the consumer on the sofa has one eye on their phone. “It’s easy to click a button and borrow with a fintech instead of your bank,” Erhart said. “But what if you knew that your bank or your credit union had you pre-approved?”
Around 3–5% of customers shop for loans every month, holidays included, according to Vericast. If credit-trigger or cross-sell programs go dark, fintechs and big banks seize the moment (because they’re always on) leaving inactive institutions vulnerable to churn. Retention and acquisition share the same calendar. Financial institutions should monitor credit activity and surface timely, personalized offers—maintaining outreach to protect share-of-wallet.
Gobble Gobble
When thinking about marketing during the holidays, perhaps the most important thing bank and credit union marketers can do is a gut check.
Ask yourself: Do your customers stop thinking about money when they’re spending it at record pace—and surrounded by media offering new stuff to spend it on? Do they stop checking their balances or wondering how they’ll cover the bills that follow? Do they stop reflecting on their finances when they’re home with family, looking back on the year, bombarded with reminders about tax deadlines, resolutions, and financial goal-setting?
During the last two months of the year, consumers are spending, planning, comparing, and recalibrating. Bank and credit union marketers who struggle mightily to differentiate their core products (and yes, that would be all of them) should take note: The holiday season offers a rare opportunity to make a meaningful impression.
