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2024 is already shaping up to be another challenging year for marketing for financial institutions. Not only do marketers need to bring in new depositors, but they also need to engage and maintain the account holder base they already have.
If you’re thinking about incorporating data into your marketing strategy in 2024, consider these top tips from financial marketing leaders. Coming up next in this two part series, we’ll share top tips from our Data & Marketing Client Success team.
Tip 1: Democratize your data
Data isn’t just used when marketing for financial institutions. It can be used to level up processes throughout the institution. When you’re looking into data-driven marketing technology, be sure to highlight how other departments can use it.
“You need to keep selling people on what the new technology can do for other departments. It’s how we better leverage our systems to make us more successful.”
– Ben Udell, Lake Ridge Bank
“On my team, I have marketing, sales, contact center, wealth advisors, and business intelligence, all of these areas that roll up. And I can tell you this technology touches all of those different areas.”
– Alisha Johnson, Ideal Credit Union
Tip 2: Get buy-in from your finance team
When evaluating technology solutions that offer marketing for financial institutions, providers often calculate your potential return on investment (ROI) from using the software. At this point in the evaluation process, it’s imperative to bring in your finance team. They need to understand the ROI calculation to rationalize the upfront cost of the new technology.
“When you have that ROI calculation, include your finance team right away. Your profitability is determined by your finance team. Don’t fight for your version of it.”
– Alisha Johnson, Ideal Credit Union
Tip 3: Optimize your campaigns using competitive intelligence
The competitors your account holders are banking with can tell you a lot about what they need. Comprehensive competitive intelligence used to be reserved for only the biggest organizations with a high level of transaction data cleansing. Now, with Alkami Data & Marketing Solutions, institutions of any size can discover your true competitors, how much money is leaving your institution, and where your products and services could be improved.
Alkami analyzes automated clearing house (ACH) transactions and identifies the products or engagements that account holders have with competitors. With this data, you can provide relationship managers with insights about account holders’ held-away assets or the competing institutions to which they send payments.
“We used to pull members that had relationships elsewhere at Wells Fargo. And we would get a fraction of the number of members that actually qualified for our messaging. Now, being able to utilize this will make that much more effective and efficient, and you’ll be able to present the results in real time.”
– Alisha Johnson, Ideal Credit Union
Bonus tip: Speak like your Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
To get buy-in from your finance team for your new marketing technology, learn their lingo.
“This is a hot tip: If you’re talking to your CFO, do a little research on marginal cost of funds. That’s what the CFOs want to know.”
– Ben Udell, Lake Ridge Bank
Marginal cost of funds refers to the increase in financing costs an institution incurs with each additional dollar of funding. As it relates to marketing for financial institutions, the marginal cost of funds can impact the types of campaigns you create. For example, if you promote a five percent rate for new money, the marginal cost of funds is not high. But if you start moving low-rate account holders to this high rate, that completely blows your marginal cost funds out of the water.
To maintain a healthy marginal cost of funds, promote your best deposit opportunities, like a high-yield savings account or certificate of deposit, to account holders who only have checking accounts with your institution. That way, you can avoid cannibalizing your own products and keep your marginal cost of funds low. That’s the power of hyper-targeted, data-driven marketing campaigns.
