Feeling Ignored? Why Bank and Credit Union Customers Tune You Out.

You’ve let the romance die in banking. 

I know that is counterintuitive but stay with me. When you are trying to figure out why your bank’s (or most consumer companies for that matter) marketing outreach and communications aren’t getting the attention you hoped for, think about this: People are just doing their thing. Your messaging is not important enough yet. So they feel ignored, and you feel ignored. 

There are 5 reasons that your bank customers are not responding to your messaging. 

1. Impersonal product suggestions. This occurs when your marketing tools are not updated, or your team doesn’t have the bandwidth to optimize the system. 

2. Boring offers that are just...expected. You’ve got a good handle on marketing, but the products you’re cross selling are available anywhere or are those products that you want to sell even if you are not sure the account holder or member is interested. In other words, your marketing is about you, not the account holder or member. It’s putting brand needs ahead of consumers’ needs. (And yes, consumers know when this is going on.) 

3. Repetitive offers that are tone deaf. Similar to the first two reasons, only on rinse and repeat. 

4. Lack of or incorrect personalization. Oof. We are not just talking about name here, but also what channel a user may want to be contacted through or personalized offers. Is there anything more off-putting than receiving an email (or worse, SMS) that’s not tailored to you, how you want to communicate, or your needs? Nothing says 'Unsubscribe' like over-saturation, in the wrong channel, with impersonal messages.

5. Inconsistent messaging across channels. In some case, repetition is a good thing – it’s the antidote to having great personalized promotional messaging that may still be ignored. When you have a good product, a good offer, and good messaging, don’t be afraid to repeat it across all channels.  But also respect the channel, some channels require brevity and others allow for length and interaction. You can't send the same message in every channel.

Listen, we’ve all done at least one of the items on that list with the utmost of good intention. Recognition is 75% of course correction, so congratulations, the hard part is behind you. And fortunately, there are a number of things that your bank or credit union can focus on to acquire and retain consumer attention. Whether you’re focusing on outreach to existing customers or prospective customers, invest in these areas to see a positive return on engagement and sales. 

Consider experience design as a key component to relationship building. What if you designed your experience by saying, “We would like to be so in-sync with our audience that they self-select to go as far through the purchase process as possible ANONYMOUSLY.” That means investing in how the consumer wants to be marketed to, how they learn about your products, purchase, and then receive service.  It’s simpler than it sounds, and a good experience design process can really illuminate how to make every interaction valuable to the audience instead of just to your institution. 

Use personalization and automation thoughtfully to ensure customers feel seen. Think about how we all communicate with brands we love. Every institution needs to be able to send an email, an SMS, a notification in mobile banking and have a product model that predicts the recipient's next best product.   

Inject provocative and unexpected turns of phrase into your messaging. Let’s try fighting for attention from the member or account holder. Risk management should not write your marketing! Instead, start by understanding what someone needs and tell them why they should pay attention to anything after the headline. Make it fun. Shoot, maybe even have a cool video that you drive them to, so they have several ways of understanding that you care about them, their needs, and challenges.   

Borrow from different communications channels to create messaging that sounds natural. Take the very conversational language from your brand’s social media and use it in your client newsletter, for example. And don’t be afraid of SMS! It’s not just for fraud alerts, but you do have to use it sparingly. Just know that a well-timed SMS, on the heels of an existing customer shopping on your site, is often welcome. When people leave your website without engaging in a 'next step' toward purchase, they may stop shopping because they want to shop elsewhere; however, sometimes they exit because they don't understand the product and still have questions. A little service or education in the shopping experience (especially with a complicated product like a loan) is very effective marketing. 

Share things that don’t necessarily make a “sale” for the bank, such as financial literacy content: how to get the most of your credit cards, how to build credit history, how to keep your identity secure, and so on. 

Now that you’re thinking about your promotional outreach more objectively, I bet you can come up with even more ways to ensure that people see what you’re putting out there, pay attention to it, and engage with it because it feels relevant to them. I’d love to see your ideas. Let us know which of these resonated with you and if you need more inspiration, Tria Prima has supported more than 500 financial institutions. We definitely have a few ideas just waiting to be uncorked (like a great bottle of wine). Cheers to putting the romance back into banking.