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How can you do more in less time? How can you communicate with your members and customers on different topics simultaneously? How can you nurture current members and customers, but acquire new account holders at the same time? There is one simple answer to all of these questions, marketing automation. Credit unions and banks need to continuously add account holders and grow product and service usage with current members and customers. But that can take significant resources in time and employees. Let’s explore how using marketing automation can help with these issues.

Save you time

This is what everyone most likely hears all the time about marketing automation, and it’s true. Once up and running marketing automation can save you many hours over the course of a year. Helping you target the right prospects and win their attention with messaging that matches their needs.

Example

Managing a basic series of on-boarding emails is difficult. Moving contacts to the next message, making sure they don’t repeat, and making sure they get all the emails is difficult. And if you do all that perfectly, are the messages you’re sending relevant to the audience? With marketing automation, you can create more than a basic on-boarding series. You can create a series based on:

• Age
• Location
• Income
• Home ownership
• Member or customer type
• Or any other data point you collect.

Then let marketing automation handle sending the message at the right time, to the right person.

Improve engagement

You can only truly improve engagement when you collect customer/member data and use it to your advantage. Once you begin to understand behavior, interests and needs then you can begin to interact with your customers and members on a more personal level. You can increase leads, grow product and service usage, and increase customer and member satisfaction. The days of sending every email to every contact are gone. Content needs to be tailored to each person.

Example

Parents come in to open an account for their child. The member or customer service rep creates the new account for the child, updates the guardian’s data. Then with marketing automation being used the parents could automatically get added to a series of emails. First, we send the parents a congratulations email for starting their child off in the right direction to financial freedom. Then we begin sending emails about other products and services that build on that financial freedom. Like Education IRAs. We can send them a couple emails to build their awareness, then start asking them to schedule a meeting with our financial planning team. We can continue to nurture them and add in other communications.

Increase leads and conversions

Measure interest and intent by scoring and tracking all activity. Some of the behaviors that can be tracked are:

• Email opens/clicks
• Email Forwards
• Web page visits
• Form and Calculator Submissions
• Video views
• App or PDF Downloads
• Social Shares
• Live chat

Assign different values to each activity. These values continue to build as the visitor interacts with your website, emails and other messaging. We can then begin to target users based on their interest, creating more leads, and sending them content that is relevant to them at that moment can increase conversions.

Example

Let’s say you send an auto loan email to a group of contacts that are close to paying their current auto loan off. We can assign a score to users that click the link in that email. Then, over the course of the next month they visit your auto loan page 2-5 times for which you have a score assigned. Each time increasing their score and indicating that they are interested in an auto loan. Then they can automatically be added into an auto loan email automation. And begin showing them relevant content and messaging based on that interest. Eventually driving them to an online loan application.

But the nurturing shouldn’t stop as soon as an application is complete. The auto loan automation can continuously check to see if an auto loan application has been filled out, then once it has been completed the contact could start an auto loan follow up automation. This could involve any contact method and include links to forms asking for testimonials, ways to improve the process, and asking them the share something on their social media.

But what about the members/customers that are interested in an auto loan (or any important product/service) that you are not aware of. How do you determine who those people are? Lead scoring will capture those members/customers by finding the users that visit related pages like an auto loan page, rate page, or a payment calculator page. These page visits can be tracked within a specified time frame.

Once a lead hits a certain number of points there is a variety of things that can happen. We can notify someone internally to contact the member/customer, adding that personal touch. We can automatically create a deal pipeline within the CRM and record a history of follow up actions leading to a negative or positive outcome. We can enter them into an automated series of emails and SMS text messages. Target them with Facebook ads. Easily create pipelines that track customer journey based on products/services, or broken down by department.

Getting Started

Any size credit union or bank can benefit from using marketing automation. Once set up, marketing automation can save you a significant amount of time. And help you do things you normally wouldn’t be able to do. Automate the repetitive so you can focus on the impactful.

Contact LKCS to for a demo of our Marketing Automation tool for banks and credit unions. See how it works and can be applied to your marketing strategy.