Banks and credit unions constantly face challenges to deliver on personalization, generate better cross-sell results, and demonstrate the value of every marketing campaign, all on a tight budget and with limited resources. Without embracing automation, this can be hard to achieve.
Automation not only can simplify efforts by automating marketing messages but can also be used to enhance the customer or member experience and relationship. But, how?
Adopting marketing automation can help banks and credit unions better understand their customers, allowing marketers to develop campaigns that help build long-lasting relationships, engaging across multiple products and services.
Check out these 5 things you can do with automation to improve and streamline your marketing efforts:
The Warm Welcome
Welcoming and introducing your new relationships to your institution should be standard practice for all banks and credit unions across all products. A welcome letter or email is usually included as part of the onboarding program, however, it’s so important for making a good impression and establishing any relationship, it’s deserving of its own section.
Our New Accounts Welcome Letter Template is our most popular downloadable template, and for good reason. However while banks and credit unions understand it’s importance, not all banks and credit unions are equipped to automate sending it.
Automation platforms, like Core iQ, work hand-in-hand with your core banking system, utilizing your core data that is refreshed on a nightly basis.
As a marketer, all you need to do is set up a trigger event so that for any new account that is opened – whether it’s a checking account, savings account, or auto loan – Core iQ, or your automation platform, will automatically identify those accounts, and send out a letter or email welcoming your new relationship to your financial institution.
Onboarding & Improved Cross-Sells
Automation tools can allow you to create unique onboarding experiences for new relationships across all products. By building audience segments based on your specific products, you can seamlessly onboard new relationships by automating messages 2, 14, 30, 90, or 365 days after a new product has been adopted. Whether it’s an email, survey, phone call, or direct mail letter, automation can help you achieve your onboarding schedule across any communication channel.
Adding cross-sells to your onboarding schedules is a great way to intuitively expand your relationships. You can decide what additional products to offer along with each individual product.
Whether it’s sending cross-sells for checking account go-with products or sending mortgage offers to new savings account relationships, you can determine what is important to promote based on your audience behavior propensity.
Automation platforms, like Core iQ, pull data directly from your core banking system and allow you to set up a priority cross-sell matrix that will automatically identify which product or service to offer each relationship that they do not already have. Automation can help you to improve your cross-sells, and measure your success to see who is converting and allowing you to make better offers.
Relationship Building & Engagement Communications
Retention is a top priority for bank and credit union marketers, as most financial institutions understand that it is much more costly to generate totally new relationships rather than keep and expand current relationships. This is why strategies for boosting retention are so important. While we recommend cross-selling and up-selling current relationships, general relationship building and engagement communications are critical for customer and member retention and satisfaction. When you build loyal customers and members, it will mark the beginning of a long-term relationship and they will typically engage across multiple products and services.
Send automated birthday messages to your relationships to show them you are thinking about them. With automation, you can effortlessly send a personalized birthday message or promotional offer that will positively influence your relationship with your customers or members.
Automating holiday branch closure notices is another great way to build relationships and give a reason for engaging with your customers or members. It’s important to communicate this type of information with your customers or members and can be easily done through an automated email schedule. Email is a very cost-effective form of communication, and setting up an automated holiday communication schedule once could save you lots of time throughout the year. Consider coupling an offer with an upcoming holiday. Whichever you choose, you will be positively adding to your customer satisfaction and engagement efforts.
Re-Engaging
Struggling with ways to re-engage dormant relationships or products reaching maturity? Automation can be a helpful component of your re-engagement efforts. With the right automation platform, you can:
- Automate messages or offers to loans reaching maturity – Set up a trigger to automate a message to any relationship with a loan that will reach maturity in the next 12 months. If it’s an auto loan, consider sending promotional messaging around buying a new car and financing through your bank or credit union and prominently promote your rates. If it’s a personal loan, consider sending promotions for starting a new home improvement project or finishing up holiday shopping.
- Automate messages or offers to CDs reaching maturity – Set up a trigger to automatically send a new CD offer to relationships whose CDs are close to maturing. Feature new rates and remind them of the benefits that come with opening CDs.
- Automate messages to accounts that have become dormant – Set up a trigger that recognizes the last activity date has been more than 180 days and send automate messages reminding relationships of the benefits of their account. Remind them to borrow from their HELOC or of the rewards associated with spending with their debit cards.
Personalization
Possibly one of the most valuable things that automation offers is personalization. With automation, you can create unique customer or member personas based on demographics, age, life stage, financial goals, or buying propensity. You can also target audiences based on product purchasing behavior. Look for trends among products that are converting new relationships and send offers for that product based on similar audiences. Automation also enhances personalization through the use of merge fields. With Core iQ, you can automatically personalize all communications with the name and contact information, product, balances, account open or close dates, upcoming payment dates, etc. You can even send communications from a specific banker complete with a photo. There are limitless opportunities that automation provides for personalization.
Automation is no longer an option for financial institution marketers and offers many benefits that can greatly enhance your marketing strategies and efforts. For more information or for a demo of how Core iQ can help you accomplish your automation goals, email us at
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