As trusted community advisors, banks and credit unions are valuable resources for raising awareness and encouraging action through financial literacy programs Financial literacy programs not only educate accountholders on wise financial decisions, they also make...
About marketing, Henry Ford once famously said, “The man who stops advertising to save money is the man who stops the clock to save time." Since automakers are expected to spend $31 billion on marketing this year, it’s clear that message got through. But does the same...
By Tiffany Daniel, Software Support & Training Manager My father and I used to do many building projects together. One of the things he always said was, “Measure twice, cut once.” He knew the importance of double-checking his work to avoid costly mistakes. The...
Ask a carpenter or surgeon, a mechanic or painter, and they’ll tell you the same thing: we form genuine bonds with our tools. Of course, software is no different. Spend enough time tinkering with settings or Googling shortcut keys and watch as appreciation turns into...
As the banking industry undergoes rapid transformation, marketers are grappling with a range of challenges that are keeping them awake at night. According to a recent report by The Financial Brand, the top three concerns for bank marketers are: Digital transformation...
Scammers, pickpockets, identity thieves, hackers – in the digital world, crooks come in too many shapes and sizes. In response, banks and credit unions beef up security. But as quickly as they build a better lock, bad actors build a better lockpick. By some accounts,...
People need financial institutions, period. So marketing their services should be easy, right? As a financial marketer, you’re familiar with the challenges – from limited personnel to combining multi-channel campaigns with cross-sell opportunities. But you’re also...
In the competitive financial services arena, staying ahead requires innovation and a partnership that fosters trust, understanding, and shared goals. EP Federal Credit Union found such a partnership with Onovative, and at the heart of this alliance is Core iQ, a...
At Onovative, we’re passionate about helping our customers succeed. With great technology and personalized support, we value hearing about our customers’ experience using our marketing automation platform, Core iQ, to collect insights that help spark continued...
As a strategic email partner for financial institutions, it is crucial to keep Core iQ customers ahead of the curve on the latest email security standards to ensure your email deliverability and sender reputation are safeguarded against digital threats. Recently,...
As trusted community advisors, banks and credit unions play a pivotal role in fostering awareness and educating account holders on the crucial topic of fraud prevention. Beyond demonstrating a genuine concern for financial well-being, sharing anti-fraud knowledge...
As a trusted community advisor, banks and credit unions are a valuable resource to raise awareness and encourage financial action through financial literacy programs. Not only will financial literacy programs help your account holders make wise financial decisions and...
Whether you are ready or not, the most wonderful time of the year will be here before you know it and now is the ideal time to start your holiday marketing planning. As a gift from our team to yours, we’ve put together some holiday marketing promotions and...
Personal loans can allow your account holders to borrow money for their various needs. From paying for purchases, funding renovations, covering expenses, to consolidating debt, personal loans cover a wide range of borrowing needs which can empower people to take...
As summer winds down, it’s time to solidify your fall marketing plans. Brands often utilize warm colors when it comes to fall marketing and focus on time spent with family and friends in this pre-holiday season. Reminding account holders of the warmth that comes with...
Higher interest rates on mortgage loans have a significant influence on consumer behavior. Homeowners are more likely to stay in their home to retain their low, fixed-rate mortgage and may prefer to tap into a Home Equity Loan or Line of Credit to fund home...
It’s almost that time of year again … time for students to gear up to head back to school! While a new school year can be an exciting time for both students and parents, it can also be a stressful and expensive season. According to a survey by Communities in...
Effective customer communications can be critical to your business operations as everyone in our country tries to navigate the future. Many of your customers may continue to face financial hardships as communities are recovering and resuming normal daily activities....
Over the course of the past year, community banks and credit unions took the spotlight for dedicating countless hours to ensure the survival of communities across the nation. You seamlessly adjusted operations to best serve your communities in safe and healthy ways....
With the environment we still find ourselves in, bank and credit union marketers continue to face the challenges of engaging and staying connected with their customers. The average consumer is exposed to over 5,000 marketing messages a day. Financial marketers are...
Today, banks and credit unions of all sizes, both big and small, need a data management solution that provides an efficient way to access and utilize their data. The goal of data management is to empower financial institutions to optimize the use of their data (within...
Measuring your marketing campaigns and efforts is necessary for both optimizing processes and proving value. In order to visibly see what is effective and what isn’t, financial marketers must establish and measure key performance indicators (KPIs). This will then...
It is well known that continuing to engage account holders is crucial to achieving ongoing goals for loans, deposits etc. It’s also no secret that is typically much easier and costs less to cross-sell existing account holders new products and services than it is to...
Throughout 2020’s challenging environment, marketing efforts have been anything but typical. Bank and credit union marketers were thrown into the spotlight and had to quickly rethink how to approach their consumers. As the role of marketing at financial institutions...
Studies have shown that building comprehensive onboarding programs is the best way to develop fully-engaged and profitable customers or members. However, all financial institutions will inevitably run into some issues of inactive, pre-dormant, or dormant account...
Promotional emails are an integral part of any bank or credit union’s marketing strategy. A good product offer can be a simple, yet powerful way to increase awareness of your products and services, grow loans and deposits, and improve loyalty for your financial...
Surveys are an integral part of any customer or member satisfaction program, and a critical practice for any successful financial institution. It’s the best way to identify areas for improvement and how you can continue to better your customers’ banking experiences....
An onboarding process is one of the best ways to expand the relationships that you have with both newly acquired customers as well as existing account holders. Without a well-defined onboarding process, your bank or credit union is missing out on key growth...
If increasing fee revenue is a topic that’s on the table for your bank or credit union, consider building an overdraft opt-in campaign for your new and existing accounts. Non-interest income plays a big part in the overall growth and revenue a bank or credit union...
As the demand for more personalized experiences and targeted offers continues to rise in the financial industry, banks and credit unions must learn to rely heavily on their data to build nuanced insights to better serve their customers or members. Since financial...
With financial literacy month coming up, it’s a good time to reevaluate your approach to your financial education efforts. If you don’t have a formal financial education program currently in place, you may be missing a huge opportunity when it comes to empowering and...
Working closely with our customers, we have found that it is very challenging for financial institutions to overcommunicate with their relationships - especially if they’re taking the time to send timely, targeted offers and messages that help with building...
We’ve been consulting with our customers on ways to use Google products to inform product promotions. A personal favorite of mine is Google’s Keyword Planner located in AdWords. Before we get into the post, let’s talk about the Keyword Planner a bit. Google’s Keyword...
An engaged relationship is a loyal relationship. While that seems to be a simple concept, it can be challenging to perfect the art of customer or member engagement outside of the typical emphasis on products or services. We’ve found that creating an ongoing dialogue...
Figuring out the best time to offer your IRA savings accounts and who to send your offers to can help you maximize deposit growth. Fully understanding your account holders behavior is essential to meeting your annual deposit growth goals. Here are 3 things to consider...
Kids savings accounts, while not always large in deposit amounts, are valuable and profitable products for bank and credit unions to offer. Not only are they an opportunity to educate young consumers on the basic fundamentals of good financial habits, but they also...
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...
America Saves Week encourages thousands of families and individuals to save each year. As a financial institution, it’s your responsibility to motivate and lead your customers and members in understanding the importance of saving and learning the right strategies to...
As more and more consumers are turning towards digital means for banking, banks and credit unions need to develop strategies and find creative ways to drive traffic to their branches. Holidays like Valentine’s Day are great opportunities for customer appreciation...
Building a great mortgage campaign isn’t always about the interest rates you can offer. It is also highly dependent on the timing, message, and audience of your mortgage promotion. If you’re in need of growing loans at your bank or credit union, it’s important to...
As a financial institution marketer, you operate among a highly-competitive landscape with growing demands for digital, customer-centric experiences. So how can you effectively compete to retain and grow customers? Personalization is a growing trend among marketers...
A lot of our customers today are saying they have no idea why attrition is happening among their customers and members, and aren’t quite sure how to stop the process. Most banks and credit unions focus a substantial amount of their efforts on expanding relationships...
When collaborating with our bank and credit union customers, many of them ask: How are other banks and credit unions successfully increasing ancillary product adoption? So, in response, we’ve collected some strategies and success stories from different financial...
How to solve the problem of invalid or missing email addresses seems to be the million dollar question among financial institution marketers. What if you could solve all your email address woes with a simple annual direct mail postcard campaign? Many banks and credit...
Objective: In this article we will be talking about how you can figure out which products are seeing the highest rate of growth or churn over a period of time. We will explore the following topics: What fields you need to be sure are coming into Core iQ before...
Customer and member retention is a critical part of every financial institution’s marketing strategy. In addition to promoting competitive offers, the best way to create loyal customers and keep them around is by fostering a great customer experience. Here are 5 ways...
Savings account promotions are essential to increasing deposits at your bank or credit union. As a marketer, you’re constantly working to learn account holder habits to meet your annual deposit goals. We’re here to help, so you can offer the right savings account...
Since almost all banks and credit unions offer student checking accounts, it’s important to make sure your offer and the timing of your offer can help your student checking account campaigns really stand out. So, how can you build a solid student checking account...
We’ve previously discussed how email marketing is the most common form of communication for banks and credit unions to their customers and members. And while financial institution marketers strive to keep their email lists up to date, there is still a lot of room to...
Email continues to be the leading digital communication platform among banks and credit unions, which means the need for valid email addresses from your customers and members is greater than ever. With all that’s going on, it can be easy to forget why maintaining good...
Email is great when you have your customer or members’ email address. But what happens when you don’t have an email address? Do you just stop communicating altogether? Obviously not. We’ve spoken with hundreds of banks and credit unions over the years, and we’ve seen...
Most bank and credit union marketers understand the importance of onboarding new relationships. And the best way to promote go-with checking account products is to create and execute an onboarding communication plan. Onboarding is essential for increasing retention,...
How do you measure customer experience at your financial institution? Are you communicating regularly with your existing relationships? When and how often? Sending surveys isn’t a new practice for banks and credit unions. Regularly surveying your customers and members...
Capturing new checking accounts, whether from totally new relationships or from existing relationships, can be a challenge for financial institution marketers. Once you’ve conducted your initial research to determine what and when to market to set you apart from other...
Acquiring new checking account relationships can be a challenge, particularly because most people already belong to a financial institution and switching can be a hassle. With this reality, financial institution marketers need to focus on the “how” and the “when” in...
Since the majority of individuals don’t change who they bank with very frequently, it’s important to understand why and when someone would switch financial institutions when trying to effectively capture new checking account relationships. Other than being...
When it comes to checking accounts and checking account products – what is it that people care about? If you’re planning a new checking account campaign or refining your current checking account campaigns, this is an important insight to understand. Especially if you...
The purpose of email marketing is to support your customers and members throughout the entirety of their relationship with your financial institution. It’s a great tool for your general onboarding, product-specific onboarding, cross sell and up sell opportunities, and...
Planning season is always here, it seems. How is your financial institution assessing accountholder needs to build a marketing strategy that converts? One way to identify what people think is important is to ask them. A financial needs assessment survey is a great way...
The most effective way to build an auto loan campaign is to map out a series of communications with specific content that will walk customers through the buyer cycle, resulting in new auto loan applications. Here is an example of an auto loan campaign consisting of...
Google Trends is a great tool that can help marketers understand the relative popularity of a search query over time. In other words, it’s a great way to identify hot topics, keywords, and trends to create top-converting content for your marketing campaigns. Let’s...
Creating a new auto loan campaign doesn’t have to be as complicated as it may sound. It’s important to remember that a good marketing campaign and content strategy begins with data driven research. By getting in the habit of using data to plan any new campaign, you...
Building a high-converting auto loan campaign can be tough, so it’s important to look at all of the data you can find when determining what your content and messaging strategy should be. Before we utilize what we have learned through keyword research and search...
What causes a small business to choose one bank over another? The easy responses are: simple and competitive pricing, low fees, relationships, etc. These elements are certainly important, but what we were most interested in determining were a few of the less obvious,...
Every time a holiday rolls around, banks and credit unions across the country take to Facebook and Twitter to send out festive greetings. We think that’s a great practice and definitely recommend it, but one question remains…How many of your customers or members are...
Communicating with your account holders on holidays is a great way to stay top of mind and strengthen the relationship. Federal holidays, specifically, are an important communication opportunity. You should always let your account holders know of any branch closings...
When you look online, you’d think that the only thing a survey is good for is to measure customer satisfaction. That couldn’t be further from the truth and we wanted to prove it. So we’ve rolled up all of our knowledge on bank and credit union surveys into a number of...
We’ve seen a lot of great resources online that discuss all aspects of surveys, in general. However, it's a lot harder to find anything that covers the unique needs that banks and credit unions face when it comes to building and conducting surveys. So, we decided to...
The 4th of July is a Federal Holiday celebrating the birth of America’s independence. Spirits are high at this time, it’s mid-summer, and everyone is ready to set off some fireworks and kick back and relax enjoying the freedom this country has achieved! Since it is a...
We’re marketers, so we’re sending out campaigns and that is great. But at some point, someone, usually in an operational role, is going to ask how effective our communications are at driving action. In particular, how effective are we at getting people to do things...
A lot of thought and hard work goes into every design you send to your account holders. As a designer myself, I’m all too aware of the multitude of steps and precautions that have to be considered before a communication is ready to be sent off to its final...
The last Monday in May is dedicated to those who gave their lives to protect our country and our freedom. With honor and gratitude we remember those who fought bravely this coming Memorial Day.Memorial Day is a federal holiday, meaning that financial institutions,...
April is upon us, and you know what that means... it’s Financial Literacy month! This nationwide initiative is a great opportunity to connect with your account holders and build relationships. One way to capitalize on this topic is by sharing helpful financial...
To cross-sell, or not to cross-sell, that is the question. After such events like the Wells Fargo incident in September 2016, the word “cross-sell” hasn’t been the same for many banks and credit unions. In fact, we’ve seen some financial institutions do away with the...
Google it. It’s become a phrase I hear and say almost every day. And even when I’m not saying it – I’m almost always doing it. Google has become the primary resource for searching just about everything, especially for my generation. We grew up with all the knowledge...
Celebrating your birthday wasn’t even a thing until ancient Roman times. Then came the invention of birthday cake thousands of years later during the industrial revolution and the Happy Birthday song in 1893. So there hasn’t exactly been a lot of innovation around the...
Each year, on the third Monday of February, the United States dedicates a day to celebrate the many great leaders this country has seen over the years. As Presidents' Day approaches this year, we couldn’t help feeling a little patriotic over here at Onovative. So, we...
Valentine’s Day is a great opportunity to tell those special people in your life how much they mean to you. To show how much we care about you, we designed these free downloadable designs that you can brand, share or repurpose as you see fit. We hope you’ll spread the...
With 150 million cell phone numbers discarded every year, 11.5% to 12.5% of Americans moving each year, and 7% of Americans making new email address every 6 months, it’s challenging to keep account holders’ information up-to-date. To make this task even harder, they...
Striving for equality and fairness for all, Martin Luther King Jr. had a great and lasting impact on American history. Once a year, on the third Monday in January, we celebrate his birthday as an American federal holiday. This year, we wanted to share in the...
A Collection of Best Practices for Communicating During Core Processing System Conversion. Learn When to Communicate Before a System Conversion Download our communication schedule & all 27 of our pre-built templates. Core Conversion Communications Resource...
Keeping account holders well informed during a core conversion is top priority. They need to know details about the conversion and how it will affect their account(s). Now, the question becomes, should you send letters, emails, or both? Letters vs. Emails Mailing a...
The core conversion date has been set. The impacted services and temporary business hours are written down. Now, it’s time to inform your account holders about the big change. There are two main categories of communication during a core conversion. These...
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, again. With the holiday season in full swing, many marketers find themselves creating an avalanche of content to share on social accounts. Take a snow day, because we’ve got you covered like a snuggie sitting next to chestnuts...
A core conversion benefits both the financial institution and account holders. It increases security and allows the financial institution to offer more services. However, it will also impact some of those products and services, and you’ll need to inform your account...
Want to know how mobile friendly 2,651 bank websites are? When it comes to speed, there is room for improvement. We ran the Google Speed test on 2,651 bank websites, and the results are listed below. Average score: 61.3 / 100 Banks with under $100M in assets faired...
Choosing to use just direct mail or email for a campaign may seem like a good idea. It does cut back on expenses and still gets your message across. However, by only using one channel, you are limiting your campaign’s reach because not everyone uses or responds to a...
It’s no secret that requesting and generating a list of customers or members can be time consuming. You will likely have to reach out to your IT department or an outside agency and tell them the criteria you want in the list. The issue with this, especially when...
Design can be a tricky subject for any marketer, especially when it comes to creating promotional material. You basically have two options: outsource the task or put on your design hat. If you decide to give the latter a-go, this article will help you create a clean...
U.S. branch closings are increasing in record numbers according to 2013 research performed by SNL Financial. This means that the number of communications banks are having to send out are increasing as well, costing them time and money.The FDIC manages policies that...
In 2012, counterfeit charges cost financial institutions $3.4 billion and merchants $1.9 billion.1 In an effort to reduce fraud, banks and credit unions have started issuing EMV cards. If this term is new, EMV stands for Europay, Mastercard, and Visa, and it’s also...
Do you feel like it’s getting harder and harder to get customers or members to stop by your branch? The fact is, people are just too busy and stopping by a branch is inconvenient. However, there is one object many people carry with them at all times; and that’s their...
Small banks and credit unions have small teams, and in an American Banker article entitled, One-Person Bank Marketing Teams Are Destined to Fail, Kevin Tynan asked the following question: "How can one staffer be held responsible for all marketing and social media...
As a marketer, time is our most precious resource and we're always looking for an edge. We typically need to know where best to deploy budget to bring the right eyeballs into our online offers. Google Analytics is an extremely robust tool, but sometimes it can...
How Are You Cross-Selling on Facebook? If you’ve been marketing on Facebook, then you’ve definitely been feeling the squeeze as fewer and fewer fans see your organic posts. We’re all being pushed to pay Facebook to advertise, but it’s not such a bad thing once you...
These three consultants brought the heat last week, which compelled us to feature them here in Last Week in Bank Marketing. If you only have time to read three bank marketing related articles today, then we highly recommend the following three posts. Amanda McMeans,...
Last week in bank marketing, Joe Day talked about the importance of a digital strategy in Credit Union Magazine. The take-away for bank and credit union marketers was that consumer expectations are being shaped by what are becoming everyday digital experiences. A...
Last week in Bank Marketing reminded us of a lot of things. First is that, all things being equal, most Americans would prefer to use a community-based financial institution over a large 'megabank'. However, wanting to use a community bank or credit union and...
Last week AdAge came out with an article on JPMorgan Chase and Company’s campaign to show consumers how easy their lives can be when they bank digitally. In the article, CMO for Chase Consumer Banking, Ms. Donna Vieira, referred to digital banking as “the way our...
When you think about bringing new people into your community bank or credit union, as well as cross selling existing customers and members, it’s very important to look at profitability. Serge Milman breaks this point down in one of last week’s best bank marketing...