The first step to converting users is identifying them. With these best practices, you can start using data analytics to know what you can offer users and who is most receptive to those messages.

The Three Types of Data Analytics Users
Generally, data analytics users are responsible for three areas of digital banking:

• Administration
  This type of user answers operational questions with data.
• Marketing
  This user needs user lists, marketing insight, and the ability to track campaigns.
• Strategy
  Users in this group want insights to inform strategic decisions for their bank or credit union.

There’s work to be done before anyone can begin using data to gain insights, however. A clear strategy needs to be put in place to ensure your data is being used to inform decisions that benefit your users and financial institution (FI).

Create a Data Analytics Strategy

What does a data analytics strategy look like?

• Clearly provides specific business value
• Increases revenue
• Improves operational efficiency
• Strengthens experiences for members
• Easily communicated and understood

A data analytics strategy is more than:

• Performed activities
• Using or making tools (e.g., machine learning)
• Creating an enterprise data warehouse
• Measurement criteria

Once your strategy is set, you have a choice to make: do you develop and implement your own data analytics solution or search for a partner who can deliver insights for you with their solution?

If you do it yourself, you’ll need to build a data warehouse or outsource for one. You’ll also be responsible for gathering your own data from whatever separate sources you’ve used for storage, and manually create visualizations like graphs and charts that make sense of your data. Here’s when you can expect things to start moving with this approach:

— Time to insights: 6 months to 1+ years
— 3-6 month implementation
— Minimum 1 year building your own data warehouse

Choosing the right partner for a data analytics solution gives you an integrated source of all data with provided visualizations. A third-party provider also brings you insights faster:

— Time to insights: 2-3 months
— Approximately 3 months’ implementation

Why Use Data to Market Smarter?

Marketing smarter with data means targeting users to capture more wallet share. These common use cases highlight some of the more important business problems targeted marketing with data helps solve:

• Deepening relationships with users
  You can make user relationships stickier through offering products like new account types at the right time in the right stage of the user experience. With the right data insights, you can personalize and deliver offers that align with users’ lives.
• Identifying users with a credit card from another FI
  A data analytics tool should allow you to build user lists that segment and identify users who bank at other FIs. Once you have identified those users, you can deliver relevant offers on your competing products.
• Using Bill Pay data to achieve business objectives
  Your data analytics solution should also allow you to build lists based on data generated from your own products. With this kind of specificity, you could see who uses your FI to pay loans to another FI and generate a targeted marketing campaign.

Regional and community financial institution growth is dependent on deposits and other sales being generated digitally and systematically. Data can enable you to forecast and market smarter, but only if you have the right strategy and solution.