Food prices continue to rise
Gas prices resume ascent – $4 near
Housing prices continue to fall throughout the U.S.
Consumer confidence hit by steepest drop in year
Hiring is soft despite strong profits
In recent months, I’ve talked with two financial services marketers who said they’re focusing their marketing efforts on the younger crowd, meaning the Gen Yers.
For decades, the holy grail of national marketing has been the 18 to 49 age segment. Illogically, to those advertisers anyone age 50 or more doesn’t exist — even though that vast age group is filled with empty nesters who now have money to spend. Then a few days ago, an executive at CBS Corp. made the bold statement that age doesn’t matter anymore when it comes to TV advertising. The network conducted studies and testing to prove it. Now, CBS will sell ad slots based on factors like audience programming preferences.
So do the traditional age segments matter for advertising?
I have wonderful news for community banks and credit unions.
If the past couple of weeks are any indication, perhaps we’ve finally turned the corner on free checking articles.
What corner is that, you may be asking.
It’s the corner where you exit free checking is dead street and enter free checking is here to stay avenue.
“We’re going barefoot so they don’t have to.”
There’s a headline that grabbed my attention. It was on a small, two-color, 5 x 5-inch newspaper ad — from a bank!
A blog post I wrote last week described ways financial institutions can win back community support and good will after years of bad press and negative attitudes toward them.
I know Cornhusker Bank marketers didn’t read my post and rush out with their ad, but it’s the sort of action that tells consumers this bank wants to help the community.
Retail stores put merchandise in special display areas to encourage impulse buying. That doesn’t apply to financial institutions. But like retail shoppers, bank and credit union prospects don’t always know what they want when they walk in.
Let’s use a checking account as the most likely example. Your current direct mail materials, outdoor signage, and newspaper ads all promote your free checking. A prospect walks in with the intention of opening a free checking account.
Ready, fire, aim!
This appears to be the sequence of events at Chase Bank as it quickly made the decision to dump its Ultimate Rewards program for debit card customers.
No sooner had the Durbin amendment become law, Chase saw the opportunity to rid itself of what most likely was a very costly enhancement program – or as I like to label such things – just another bell or whistle attached to the checking account.
What might have been at one time a product differentiator, most likely had become an expensive albatross to the financial folks at Chase Bank. By now, with almost every bank providing some form of a debit card rewards program, the Ultimate Rewards program had quickly become a commodity enhancement.
“Thank You for Suing Us,” blares the headline on full-page national newspaper ads. It’s a counter response from a national chain that attempts to turn the proverbial lemons into lemonade. Or maybe that should be lemons into tacos.
Earlier this year, a lawsuit filed by an Alabama law firm accused Taco Bell of using something less than beef filling in its recipes.
Thrown overboard by the greedy mega-banks, free checking customers – instead of drowning – have caught the big wave…landing safely in the lobbies of many of the nation’s community banks and credit unions.
According to a recent press release from Moebs Services, about 13,000,000 checking accounts will be moving to community banks and credit unions by the end of this year.
A few days ago, I gave you some tips for social media marketing and told a story about an unfortunate tweet posted by an agency’s staffer to Chrysler’s Twitter account. I recommended you keep control over your social media to avoid embarrassment.
Meanwhile, Saab Cars North America is taking a completely opposite approach and opening a social media experience to everyone.
Whether you work for a bank or credit union, this should interest you. I read a brief article from Credit Union Times that said a Portland, Oregon, credit union is promoting itself as one of the remaining sources for free checking.
This marketing idea can’t be exclusive to the Portland market — and it shouldn’t be.
The other day a slick direct mail package arrived in my mailbox. From the card on the front of the envelope I immediately knew it was from the folks at American Express. A copy line above my name informed me that “You’ve been Selected.”
But what really irritated me was the teaser copy below the gold card image. It reads: “The recognition you deserve: The American Express Senior Gold Card with no annual fee for the first year.”
Isn’t social media for businesses fun? Just ask Chrysler executives and the execs at New Media Strategies, Chrysler’s former social media agency. If you haven’t already heard, an agency staffer posted an embarrassing entry on the Chrysler Twitter site.
Here’s a summary of the faux pas. The agency employee thought he was signed on to his own Twitter account when he was actually using @ChryslerAutos. He made a disparaging comment about Detroit and used a key phrase from the automaker’s new promotions that spotlight the Motor City. That would have been bad enough, but his tweet also included the f-word. (Not “fired,” but that was the result.)
What are the odds that this time next year we’ll be reading an article with a headline that goes something like this: “Free Checking Didn’t Disappear After All.”
This came to mind after reading an article about overdraft protection that was passed to me by a colleague this morning. Appearing in the money blogs section of times.com on March 7, “What Ever Happened to Overdraft Outrage?” was written by Brad Tuttle.
Tuttle reminds us that all the outrage over high overdraft fees and the predicted loss of billions of dollars in fee revenue from the mandated opt-in program turned out to be “much ado about nothing” or merely “a tempest in a teapot.”
Cold calls, by their nature, have a low conversion percentage. A bank marketer recently asked one of the ACTON Marketing sales staff for a list of reasons why he should use direct mail marketing for a niche product instead of telling his staff to make cold calls to prospects.
As the resident writer, I was asked to compile the list. I thought blog readers might be interested in a few of the reasons.
Spring arrives in about a week and I see seasonal home equity loan ads are already popping up. There’s one tactic I see as a waste of space and I’ll describe it so you can avoid the mistake.
The first ad I found in the newspaper, typical for this product promotion, has a group of bullet points that tells people what they can do with the money they borrow. The bullet points look like every other home equity list I’ve seen. You recognize them… Read more…
CNN posts an article (Debit cards: $50 spending limit coming?) that’s just too obvious to believe. Writer Blake Ellis cites a “source with knowledge of the proposal” that Chase is considering capping Debit Card transactions at $50 for its customers.
Take a breath… and think about that for a moment.
If you are in the market for a new checking account and came across a full-page magazine ad from a bank, which headline would most likely grab your attention?
#1 “What you like about checking. Minus what you don’t.”
#2 “A checking account should accumulate interest. Not fees.”
A bit of data from a recent J.D. Power and Associates research report identified factors consumers use to help them decide where to go when they want to move their accounts.
This is essential information because two-thirds of consumers who lose their free checking are likely to shop for a new bank or credit union. And, checking customers are valuable. Statistics show the average checking customer opens more than two additional accounts (2.35) with the financial institution where he or she has a checking account. (These statistics come from ACTON Market Intelligence research.)
The most important consumer decision-making factors uncovered by the J.D. Power and Associates study are: Read more…
These days, it’s shocking news when a very big bank announces that it is keeping its free checking account.
You see, information like this runs counter to a majority of the media stories lately about free checking going the way of the dinosaur. News like this simply doesn’t fit the current belief system held by the mega-banks and a bunch of self-appointed checking experts whose agenda is to scare the thousands of smaller banks and credit unions into dropping free checking.
Why the scare campaign?
Opening a new branch takes planning to make the location a success. Here’s an idea that can help establish your bank’s or credit union’s presence early.
I’m sure you already understand the importance of a grand opening event. You create a flurry of promotions over a specific timeframe aimed to generate the most attention for your new branch. A silent opening simply won’t pull enough foot-traffic through the doors.
Once all the grand opening activities are over, everyone in the branch and your promotional department sits back, sighs, and moves back to more mundane projects.
