Having endured 12 tough rounds in the ring during 2010, the free checking account remains standing tall. Suffering blow after excruciating blow, it emerged as the winner in a brutal fight to keep it down for the count. My number one banking prediction for 2011 is that free checking, once again, will survive all comers hell-bent on sending it to the locker room for good.
In spite of all efforts to dethrone it, free checking will retain its lightweight title – a title held for well over two decades.
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At the end of 2009, one of my posts encouraged readers to keep five simple marketing resolutions. If you’ve been a reader since then, how did you do?
If you started reading this blog since last December, you can still get some good ideas from today’s post.
Briefly, here’s a review of the suggested Five Marketing Resolutions for 2010. Read more…
What happened to all the bank and credit union ads? Will they ever return and if so, when? Why did they disappear in the first place? What are the marketing folks thinking?
Slowly paging through the front section of the Sunday edition of The Sacramento Bee, once home to an array of interesting bank and credit union ads, these nagging questions once again entered my mind. I’ve been pondering answers since these ads began disappearing earlier in the year.
And now that it’s late December, 2011 marketing budgets should not only be approved but the first marketing projects and campaigns should be in the execution stage. Having been in bank marketing for well over 30+ years, I can only imagine the give-and-take and tough decisions that were finally made after a number of contentious budgeting meetings. After all, it’s much tougher to arrive at consensus during an economic meltdown than it is when the economy is booming.
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Apparently, it’s not uncommon for tourists to mail coconuts from Hawaii. Not in a box. The plain coconut with postage and an address label attached. It really gets attention when their friends see the mail carrier standing at the door with a coconut.
Coconut mail was a mini myth tested and confirmed in 2009 by “Mythbusters,” the Discovery Channel TV series. It was also confirmed during a series of postal experiments conducted by the Annals of Improbable Research in 2000.
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Every year at this time I have fond memories of the $50 I had to spend on Christmas presents each year as a young boy in the 1950s. I had this money thanks to the local bank where my parents did their banking.
The savings routine consisted of a Saturday morning trip to the bank each week where my younger brother and I would deposit the $1 bill our father had given each of us as an allowance. It was mandatory that this money be deposited into our Christmas Club passbooks.
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(Editor’s Note: This is another in a series of blog posts related to the training of financial institution employees. If appropriate, please pass this information to your training staff.)
As another year winds down, it becomes an excellent time as a financial institution trainer to reflect upon what you have accomplished during the past year and, what you hope to accomplish in 2011. With 2010 being such a challenging year, this end-of-year exercise helps you reflect and, most importantly, refocus and get energized about your upcoming training year. This is strategic planning and New Year’s Resolutions all rolled into one. This is the same thought process we are currently going through within the ACTON Marketing Training Department as Christy and I are using this year-end time to analyze everything we are doing.
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Today, rather than wade into a serious topic at a time when our minds are on last-minute chores and the Christmas holiday weekend, here’s an image of a newspaper ad I call an example of Stealth Marketing.
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Direct mail is not going away anytime soon!
Forget the occasional news stories about social media ultimately replacing old-fashion mail delivered by your local postal carrier. It’s wishful thinking on the part of today’s youth who created and continue nurturing Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and an assortment of other time-consuming ventures that keep people increasingly dependent on some techno-gadget 24/7 for communicating.
Such apocalyptic stories make good filler for today’s round-the-clock news cycle where we are continuously treated to an array of mind-numbing predictions about everything from who will win on Dancing with the Stars to whether or not Michael Vick should be allowed to get a new dog.
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Anything your bank or credit union puts into print, records as audio or video, or posts online is open to critics and all sorts of disagreeable people. But that shouldn’t cause you to run and hide instead of promoting your company.
Remember the economic incentive of a couple of years ago? The federal government was giving out $120 billion to consumers to help boost the economy. The government wanted consumers to spend the money, but surveys showed a large portion of the public planned to sock away their stimulus checks into savings accounts.
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Still Mailing After All These Years.
That phrase popped into my head after a memory prompt dredged up the image of Paul Simon singing his song “Still Crazy After All These Years” many years ago on “Saturday Night Live” while he stood on stage dressed head-to-toe in a chicken costume. (“Memory” and “scarred for life” are interchangeable here.)
The demise of Direct Mail Marketing has been predicted over and over, yet it’s still an important marketing strategy. Every postage increase is supposed to doom Direct Mail. Email marketing was expected to make it irrelevant, but didn’t. Social media, the new darling, is supposed to damage Direct Mail, but that’s yet to be shown.
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Apparently my local credit union finally realized it wasn’t successful in getting all of its debit card users to opt-in for overdraft protection.
I know this because of the statement insert in my December checking statement which just arrived.
Now before you think I’m some Luddite, I have two free checking accounts with my credit union and have online statements for the primary account. I retain paper statements on my secondary account for the sole purpose of monitoring the statement itself and the monthly promotional inserts.
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Everyone likes to win. People go far out of their way for chances at prizes. Maybe it’s the excitement and anticipation of winning that pulls us in. Certainly, it’s the appeal of getting something, maybe something big, for nothing.
You can use that allure to draw more prospects into your lobbies.
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The marketing folks made the offer but forgot to provide the “reason why” an aspiring homeowner or someone wishing to refinance would want this new mortgage loan.
The quarter-page ad appeared for the first time in last Sunday’s edition of The Sacramento Bee. It immediately caught my eye – not because of an appealing headline or layout but because of the unusual offer.
The local Schools Financial Credit Union was promoting its new short-term, low-rate mortgage loan. And by short-term, it means your choice of a 5, 7, or 10-year term. Now, to me, those are some extremely short-terms given the continued high-cost of today’s overpriced homes.
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When I shop for Christmas gifts for my brother, I always end up buying something for myself. You probably do something similar. In essence, we’re making the store’s job easier by cross-selling ourselves.
Banks and credit unions don’t see that same advantage. It’s up to them to do the cross-selling.
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Sending a follow-up marketing message to prospects results in a second spike in the response to your offer. Here are some ideas that will help make your financial institution’s follow-up message more effective.
Early in November, I found a self-mailer promotion from a consortium of five area car dealerships in my mailbox. I thought about mentioning it in this blog because it was a good example of halo marketing. It tied dealer service department specials to a Toys For Tots campaign. Besides the local dealers combining for a $20,000 donation to the children’s charity (dedicating a full panel to the story), the promotion encouraged car owners to drop off a gift for the kid’s program when they came to use the discount service coupons.
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In banking, in the late 1970′s and early 1980′s it was known as the 40% rule.
Once 40% of the population adopted something new, especially technology related, it would stall at that level for a time until forward momentum eventually resumed with the late adopters jumping aboard.
By the end of the 1970s, the percent of banking customers using ATMs had hit the 40% penetration level and held there for some time. Moving this figure beyond 40% was a much tougher sell than the first 40%.
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What’s the word most financial marketers, banking executives, IT staff, legal and compliance people would like to see banned from the English language never to be seen or heard again?
Opt-in.
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In the movie “Field of Dreams,” we see Kevin Costner’s character walking through his cornfield when he hears someone whisper “If you build it, he will come.“ The next thing we see is a determined Costner clearing his field to build a baseball diamond.
It’s possible that a similar incident could have taken place in the early 1990s somewhere on the West Coast as a banker was sitting at his desk staring at the screen of his new desktop computer.
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Who is on your press release distribution list? You send out press releases, right?
A lot of businesses issue press releases. So many, that publications often ignore the obvious “put our name in your paper” types. Our local newspaper charges a fee and delegates all the “Bob got a promotion” and “We won an award” press releases to one large spread one day a week.
How do you get around obstacles like that?
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So your financial institution has given up on home loans and you need a product to replace the revenue those mortgages generated. Or, you simply need another use for all those deposits your customers or members are funneling into savings accounts.
Here’s how one small credit union successfully moved nearly $1.5 million in one week.
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