Financial Marketing and Cross Selling Blog
Cross Selling Continues to be a Top Priority of Bank and Credit Union Marketing
According to the recent 2012 Bank and Credit Union Financial Marketing Survey developed by Jim Marous of Bank Marketing Strategy and Jeffry Pilcher of The Financial Brand, cross selling is at the top of the list of marketing priorities. With fee revenue under pressure from new federal regulation, it is not surprising that generating more revenue per customer is so important. This is nothing new. Looking at this year’s Grant Thornton LLP’s 18th Annual Bank Executive Survey, along with previous years’ surveys, you will see that organic growth (cross selling) has been a top priority for quite some time. Read more >>
Creating Cross Selling Opportunities
In a recent article from the Financial Brand, Datamining Social Media Profiles for Actionable Results, the first paragraph talks about the biggest challenge to cross selling. ”If a financial institution could know that one of its customers just got married…Or had a baby…Or got divorced…Wouldn’t those life events create selling opportunities for that financial institution? If a bank or credit union understood its customers’ life situations, wouldn’t they be able to market specific products and services centered around people’s unique needs? If only there was a way to figure out what was going on in people’s lives…”
As the title of the article indicates, it went on talking about data mining as a way to see these customer needs.
How Social Media is Changing Bank Marketing
Essentially, “Social Media” is really just a buzz word that has come to be used to describe the ever changing landscape of the internet that we’ve all grown to know so well. The phrase simply refers to all the social networks in existence and the way we, web users, customers, and brands interact with each other online today. Not only can a single social network be used as a marketing tool in itself, but integrating social media channels into your website gives you the power to leverage your website in ways that didn’t exist years ago. The difference between traditional websites and the ones within social media communities is the simple notion that traditional websites speak to a single customer at a time, where as social media sites allow everyone to have a voice. In this sense, social media is the catalyst that makes our everyday web experience so much more dynamic and it has opened the doors for individuals and brands to create their own unique online presence.
How Can Banks Use Social Media to Improve Customer Service?
What does customer service mean to you? Personally when I think of customer service, I can’t help but have my thoughts be overshadowed by frustrating experiences, automated call services and plenty of dead ends. If you provide any product or service, no matter what it may be, you have to be 100% dedicated to assist your customers when something goes wrong. You can’t simply provide a service and then turn a cold shoulder on your customers when something goes wrong. Customer service is a HUGE factor in how your brand is viewed and when your customers need help with your products or services, they should be able to count on you to provide them the information that will help them, which in turn will increase their loyalty to you in the long run. You may be reading this now and thinking that the connotations attached to a brand’s customer service is something that is hard to change. However, I was recently involved in a scenario with a certain internet service provider that left me utterly amazed.
How to Restore Branch Profitability
Mary Beth Sullivan from Capital Performance Group, in her recent blog article The Future of Branches: Reinvention in the Banking Strategies section of the BAI website proposed an interesting solution to retail branch profitability. It’s called sales. She referenced a huge market that banks can own by leveraging their branch network. This market is people who are looking for advice. Martha Stewart realized this a long time ago and built a business around it. People want to be told what to do. It holds true in personal finances as well. People are looking for simple and easy to understand information and guidance from someone they trust. And they will do business with the one who is there to provide it. This includes the enormous baby boom generation that has been turned upside down by the Great Recession. They want to be told what to do as they face retirement – without the confusing jargon.
While WE are Cross Selling, THEY are Cross Buying
It is the classic battle between WE and THEY in the financial banking arena. You know your consumers (THEY) need the products and services that you offer but you struggle to find a process that effectively allows them to buy multiple products and services. How can you bridge the gap between WE and THEY and make it an US relationship?
In the May 2011 issue of Bank Investment Consultant, Elizabeth Wine brings up some very valid points about the importance of cross selling and the poor execution that is happening inside many financial institutions.
Managing the cross sell is a task that does not have an end. To do it well, you should never be ‘done’. The art of cross selling involves all parties within the financial institution to be working together. The same BIC article also stated that “ninety percent of a recent BIC survey respondents said the support of senior management was critical for the successful implementation of a cross sell program.” Read more >>
Cross Selling In Banking Starts With Education
If your consumers don’t know all the products & services your institution offers, how are they supposed to ask about them?…or better yet, buy them!
Education will create value if you provide it in such a way that it is useful and timely. There is a lot of ‘financial information’ available in the market, mostly designed to tease you with bits of good information then go for the kill – the sell. Education is not a priority in these cases and cross selling is not a priority.
Institutions have the ability to create one of two experiences for their banking consumers: A Selling experience or an Educational experience. It is understood that consumers will be significantly more likely to purchase a product or service from an entity that provides them with good information when they are in the ‘evaluation’ process than just trying to sell them the sizzle. It is especially true when it comes to financially oriented products and services where there needs to be a level of trust before they purchase. Read more >>
REWORK: Recommended Book For Bank Marketing and Management
How can a business book written by the founders of a small software development company be applicable to bank executive and marketing professionals? I asked myself the same question. REWORK was written by Jason Fried and David Heinemenier Hansson, the founders of 37Signals, a company that has created several products that help teams work together more effectively. For bankers, conventional ideas and methodologies aren’t what separate you from your competitors. Most often it’s your ability to be open-minded to new ways of thinking and putting them to work…or sometimes reworking them entirely.
Prior to reading REWORK, I was somewhat familiar with the company 37signals and the products they developed but never really knew their background. For most that have never heard of 37signals, they are a small software company that have developed a number of web-based apps for collaboration, information sharing and project management which are now used by millions around the world.
REWORK provides the reader with the insight into the attitudes of the founders and a basis for the reasons for their success. As a designer & developer myself, I wasn’t sure how their philosophies and ideas could really be applied to the large scale audience but they certainly managed to do so from my perspective. If you subscribe to conventional wisdom, this book may not be for you because the authors tend go against your experience and what has been instilled into you during your college and post-collegiate years. Nonetheless, this is a worthwhile book, for everyone from the single self-employed individual, the small business owner, all the way up to the larger institution management and marketing professionals.
A move towards simpler times in the banking industry is on the rise
Trader Joe’s has come up with a new lager they call Simpler Times. While it may not be at the top of the drinking list for beer aficionados, the name itself is ingenious. People today are in desperate need of a time when life was easier to understand. Today’s complexities have clouded many of our own judgments and one area where people have clearly been out of touch is their own personal finance.
This is why you’re seeing all this talk about Personal Financial Management tools and people like Aaron Patzer, new CEO of Quicken and founder of mint.com, talking about the simplicity these tools bring to ones financial life.
Tomorrow’s State of the Union will surely gain the attention of not only average citizens but also those tied to financial reform. They’ll be looking out for things like “consumer protection agency” and “too big to fail”. There’s also been talk from the Obama crowd forcing banks to offer what they call “plain vanilla” mortgages (Read more about this in the New York Times). No matter what happens, I think that we can all agree on one thing – the simpler the better.
This is not just to please the bounty hunters in Washington but it’s also to please the customer. People want simple, easy to understand answers to questions they have about their financial needs. The more complex a product the more likely they are to second-guess their decisions. And... Read More >>
Generating referrals from your banks website -
In a recent ABA Bank Marketing magazine article, Little Changes -Big difference, it was noted that “nearly 95% of visitors to a bank home page visit to login”. This is a staggering figure, especially when you consider all the other areas of your site and the importance they hold in building relationships.
If this is where your customers are going, then this is where you need to be talking with them about all the other great services you have that can help solve their problems. But you can’t look at online advertising the same way you look at print, radio or TV advertising.
In our recent post on bank marketing we highlighted a report by Forrester that showed 32% of customers don’t mind targeted ads in their bill statements but only 8% said they didn’t mind these same ads on the web. This clearly shows consumers view information they receive online differently from the information they receive in the mail.
So what should you be talking about with your customers online and how should your messages look? It should appear natural and not too flashy. Anything with bells and whistles will turn your customer off. Unlike with print ads where if the design doesn’t catch the eye within the first couple of seconds its next location is the waste basket.
In this same October issue of the ABA magazine another article, Build the... Read More >>
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