Tactics, Not Targets: A Smarter Approach to Checking Account Growth
By: Ben Udell, SVP Product Marketing at Marquis
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Strategic plans and marketing campaigns often point toward the same target: checking account growth. But what kind of new account activity can we generate? How much growth should come from marketing, banker outreach, referrals, or organic demand? How do I build a plan that encourages stretch goals with attainable expectations?
These aren’t easy questions. Each financial institution operates in a distinct market, with different demographic dynamics, team structures, strategy, and competitive pressures. Your critical thinking will help you examine the challenges that make benchmarking and goal setting so difficult, but so important.
Clarify What Counts
The first challenge? Defining what “growth” means. Is it a new checking account, household, or additional deposit accounts? Are you tracking gross or net growth? How will you account for product changes like a consumer converting a CD to a money market?
These distinctions and other variations matter. Without clearly defined metrics you might hit your target, but not your goal. Jacque Bryte, VP Marketing Strategist at Marquis, works closely with banks and credit unions to set data informed marketing goals that reflect real strategic intent.
Bryte notes, “One of the biggest pitfalls is setting growth goals without first defining what growth really means for your institution. Before discussing metrics, we clarify the intended outcomes such as increasing households, growing accounts, or strengthening relationships so the goals are rooted in strategy.”
Understand Strategy Behind the Numbers
Every bank or credit union chases growth for different reasons with different methods, which is why competitor benchmarks can be misleading or even counterproductive. What’s more important is having tools that help you understand your own customers or members more deeply. Solutions like Marquis’ Conversational Analytics and KEYs.ai give financial institutions the ability to interact with their data — quickly uncovering what’s driving growth, where friction exists, and which segments present untapped potential. By bringing this kind of insight to the surface, these tools support faster alignment across teams and smarter, data-informed decision-making.
Use tools that will help you:
- Identify top-performing products and regions
- See which customer or member segments offer the highest upside
- Track household-level net growth vs. churn
When paired with your financial institution’s goals and culture, these insights allow you to set smarter, more defensible growth targets grounded in what’s real, not what’s assumed.
Local Market Dynamics Rewrite the Rules
National, and even local benchmarks, start to become less relevant when you factor in your marketplace dynamics. These are some of the important topics you need to consider when applying your strategic plan that’s focused on your marketplace.
Urban vs. Rural: Dense markets may offer higher volume but command premium media or deposit and loan rates and have more competition. Rural areas likely have slower marketplace growth but may offer better grassroots efforts.
Population Trends, Demographics, and Saturation: In stagnant or shrinking areas, organic growth is limited, acquisition means taking share from someone else. Knowing your demographics, and how it aligns with your brand, is vitally important to connecting opportunity with action.
Competitive Intensity: If your market is flooded with aggressive promotions, your cost of growth just went up.
This is where Bryte, in her role as Marquis Strategist, emphasizes the importance of grounding growth plans with an understanding of the market. “We always encourage clients to closely examine their market and competitive position before setting growth goals. A thorough assessment not only informs the plan but also defines what is realistically achievable.”
Marquis’ team of experienced Strategists often begin with these questions:
- Is our growth strategy aligned with real market opportunity?
- Does our brand and experience resonate with our target audience?
- Are we allocating budget in ways that will drive meaningful results?
Be honest about your strategy and brand and how it can apply to the marketplace. A brand that identifies with an older population, or lacks a modern website design, may not attract younger consumers. Or, you may not have a large enough market of younger consumers to move the needle. A smart plan adapts to your unique circumstances.
Where to Start
Growth starts with clarity and there’s no perfect formula, but there are smarter ways to approach it. Here are concepts that can help you create a growth plan to withstand real world pressure.
1. Historical Run Rates
Understanding your baseline gives you a starting point. “Looking at past growth without context is like trying to drive by only looking in the rearview mirror, it gives you a view of where you’ve been, but not where you’re going,” says Bryte. “I like to really get the real story, like what marketing campaigns were in play, what competitive events occurred, and how internal changes influenced growth. It’s the difference between using data and truly learning from it.”
Don’t stop with just the numbers.
- Did a local competitor get acquired, creating a temporary spike?
- Was there a concentrated marketing push that added lift?
- Were there staffing changes, branch remodel, or product changes that created momentum, or interruptions?
This is where art meets science. Historical trends are even more powerful when you understand the context around them and think critically about their impact.
2. Identify Your Organic Growth Rate
Not all growth is driven by campaigns or sales efforts. Some of it is passive, the result of having a presence in the market. This “natural growth rate” is your foundation. It can be positive, flat, or even negative. Knowing this helps you understand what marketing adds and helps avoid overestimating what’s possible without it.
3. Layer in Campaign Cadence
Rather than straight lining growth across 12 months, look at your marketing calendar and align growth expectations with campaign activity. Some months are stronger than others, and your results may reflect seasonal changes. This kind of planning helps reinforce internal buy-in. When teams can see the connection between marketing activity and expected outcomes, the goals feel more achievable and less arbitrary.
4. Track Local Market Disruption
Few events impact growth potential like mergers and acquisitions. Bryte believes many institutions underestimate just how powerful these moments can be. “Market disruption is one of the most overlooked drivers of new household growth. When unexpected changes happen in your local market, like a competitor merging, closing branches, or struggling with service, it creates opportunities for your bank to grow, especially by gaining new households. Many financial institutions don’t fully take advantage of this.”
A typical merger or acquisition presents these opportunities:
- When the deal closes prospects will be more open to changes because they want to make a change on their terms.
- During the communication time frame prospects might find out branches will be closing, products will be changing, their relationship contacts are let go, or fees could be going up.
- Core conversions create significant customer services issues, giving you a prime opportunity to win new business.
- Secondary conversions like credit card conversion changes could prompt a second wave of prospects ready to change.
5. Don’t Forget the Cross-Sell Opportunity
Cross-selling checking accounts to households that already have a loan — but no primary deposit relationship — is often one of the most cost-effective and impactful growth strategies. Consistent, targeted outreach is key. Tools like Marquis’ Digital Communication Platform (DCP) help automate personalized email journeys based on specific product gaps, enabling institutions to keep relevant offers in front of the right households. By setting up always-on campaigns, banks and credit unions can build awareness over time and deliver the kind of personalized messaging that drives action — and results.
What makes a cross-sell attractive to your employees is the greater control, clarity, and opportunity to impact these results. Customers or members your employees see every day, and have a relationship with, are prime opportunities to grow your business. Many financial institutions are not setting goals for this type of growth or not supporting it.
Consider Goals That Go Beyond Volume
If you’re not confident in setting volume-based goals for new checking accounts, try setting goals for what happens after the account is opened.
- How quickly are new accounts being funded and is there a direct deposit?
- Are they paired with a savings account and debit card?
- What’s your referral rate between departments?
These are quality-based goals that drive deeper engagement and help ensure that new accounts stick. In fact, with abandonment and inactivity so common, investing in better onboarding can often create more sustainable growth than chasing volume alone.
As Bryte notes, “Volume alone doesn’t show the full picture. We help clients focus on what happens after an account is opened, like whether the account is funded, used, and followed by additional product adoption. True growth comes from engaged relationships, not just more accounts. If you want long-term value and retention, measuring engagement is key.”
To connect all the dots — branch-level performance, demographic trends, campaign impact — many banks and credit unions are turning to platforms that make data more accessible and actionable. Marquis’ Marketing Data Platform (MDP) is one example, offering over 70 dashboards that help translate raw data into insight. With daily-refreshing information and intuitive visualizations, MDP enables institutions to break down growth drivers and identify exactly what’s working, what’s stalled, and where opportunity remains. Instead of relying on static reports or outdated assumptions, teams can adjust strategy in real time and stay focused on what moves the needle.
Bring It All Together
When you layer together past trends, campaign cadence, market disruption, and internal sales potential, you get more than a growth plan, you get a strategy.
A strategy that aligns teams.
A strategy that supports your budget.
A strategy that reflects your brand.
A strategy that builds long-term relationships.
Realistic growth starts with leadership thinking critically about realistic opportunities.
