Advancements in data and technology can help you craft your campaigns to best target bank and credit union customers and members.

Creating a positive customer experience needs to be a core part of your business strategy. Financial research shows that customer-centric financial institutions are more profitable, can regularly prevent costly customer attrition, and create strong retention that yields big returns for banks and credit unions. The problem is, most financial institutions are not doing enough to understand and improve customer experience.

Banks and credit unions can’t simply count on acquiring or maintaining a consumer’s account to remain successful. Customers and members want to be known, understood, and engaged with true connections to strengthen the bond between them and their financial institution. This requires an orchestrated personalized experience strategically delivered across preferred channels.

There is more data available on potential and current customers than ever before, but having access to that information isn’t enough on its own. You need to know what you’re looking for while sifting through it all in order to craft the campaign that will target the customers you need to get in front of.

Building Your Banking Customer Journey Map

Embracing a holistic customer-centric strategy is imperative for any banks and credit unions going forward, and will empower the types of solutions across the customer journey that banks and credit unions seek. The research found that customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than the competition. But what does a successful customer experience strategy really mean, and what is currently happening in the market?

Shockingly, 32% of respondents to the research said they don’t engage customers whatsoever. So, how can banks and credit unions create an actionable customer experience strategy to ultimately deliver clear, measurable business results? Here are a few steps to accomplish just that.

Find Your Customers

Step one is to know where your customers are, and one of the best places to find them is through the shows they are watching. Since the pandemic hit in early 2020, people started turning their eyes to their televisions and mobile devices – streaming video grew nearly 75% in 2020 alone, and that number kept climbing through 2021.

Connected TV (CTV) or over-the-top (OTT) is the general label for TVs and other devices that can connect to the internet to stream video content beyond what’s offered by a cable box. Traditional TV advertising can hit a larger percentage of people for the moment, but CTV advertising can reach a far more precise audience.

Banking and finance advertising can be specifically tailored to reach custom CTV audiences based on psychographics, consumer behaviors, and interests. If you offer an entry-level, low-interest credit card, you can target your ads to 18-24-year-old viewers. Mortgage lenders can craft a campaign to focus on people who are in the market to buy a home in the next year. Banks can take advantage of additional data to target viewers who recently browsed auto loan pages and create a set of advertisements that can draw them to your offerings.

Advertising for CTV and OTT consumers is a severely underutilized area, but it’s rapidly growing. In 2019, CTV ad spending was approximately 10% of linear ad buys, but it’s estimated that by 2024, that number could reach 50%. The sooner you start looking into these types of campaigns, the better you position yourself ahead of your competition.

Craft the Right Message

A major factor in the customer experience conundrum is that customers and members want to feel that their unique needs are understood, and are actively being taken care of. But financial institutions are not doing everything they can to meet personalization expectations.

Of the responses for the banks and credit unions that do engage customers:

• 38% simply focus on increasing debit and credit card transaction volume 
• 37% solely communicate about fraud or a compromised card
• 33% of messaging focuses on just encouraging mobile banking usage

These are hardly the types of personalized and relevant messaging strategy touchpoints that will help deliver the types of connected experiences across the customer journey that banks and credit unions need. 

Financial institutions must proactively alert their customers and members about new products and services, but also make sure not to inundate them with irrelevant marketing messaging that doesn’t tie to personal needs.

Organize Your Data

The report found that the single greatest challenge facing financial institutions in creating successful member and customer experiences is efficiently utilizing data. Most suffer from limited data access, manual segmentation efforts, and an inability to drive home personalization efforts.

This is a major roadblock to data that would illustrate the type of personalization needed to, say, foster account acquisition, demonstrate proper onboarding practices, create an assortment of offers aligned to account holders for cross-sell opportunities, or the ability to respond quickly to changing account holder attitudes to deliver proactive messaging before they defect. 

23%of respondents had limited access to data but still work to provide relevant communications, 34% actually manually leverage data for attempts at segmented messaging, while only 15% said they leverage connected data to send highly personalized communications.

Banks and credit unions must build from your existing data, standard segments, or custom audiences, while also capitalizing on partners with robust data resources to create the full account holder picture.

Measure the Customer Experience

Financial institutions must be able to measure and justify customer engagement strategies. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to prove what worked and what didn’t across campaigns. 

Banks and credit unions that can connect results to actions that drive them using analytics and reporting tools can demonstrate the full impact of customer experience efforts and then put those learnings back into their strategies to continue to improve journeys over time. 

Campaigns must be able to meet account holders where they are, with what they need, and what they want. Data fluency can ultimately drive meaningful connections across the entire consumer journey, and measurable connections can empower financial institutions to understand the full market potential of a branch or credit union’s offerings in a competitive landscape.

Today’s consumers have diverse, unique, and evolving needs. You need to stay on your toes to overcome increased fintech competition, and Amsive is here to help. We study and research the best ways to help you grow relationships by leveraging data and insights to drive meaningful, measurable connections across the entire consumer journey.

Improving targeting and your customers’ journey is just one part of providing the best customer experience, discover how we attract and grow profitable customer relationships for financial institutions.