As banks and other financial services institutions continue to embrace and offer new digital services to consumers, it stands to reason that the next frontier in the financial services industry’s digital transformation is marketing. While the industry has largely kept customer engagement strategies fairly traditional — largely due to strict federal and state regulations on content — the reality is that consumers are demanding to engage online with the businesses they buy from in every industry.
Financial services and banking is no exception, and in fact, the demand is even greater in this industry that requires customers to share in-depth personal information and hand over control of their hard-earned wealth. In the financial services industry, trust is paramount to customer loyalty, and a critical way to build that trust is by meeting customers where they are, engaging with them consistently across all channels.
If your financial services institution hasn’t incorporated digital into your multichannel marketing efforts yet, let our marketing services experts show you three ways to combine online communication with the print outreach you’re already doing in order to increase brand recognition, build stronger relationships with existing clients, and grow your customer base.
1. How can you enhance existing marketing?
Add digital CTAs to print outreach. You can start by using your existing print marketing efforts to invite your audience to engage with you online. For example, if you’re using direct mail to promote your auto loan offerings, hit the highlights in your mailing and use a QR code to drive recipients to the blog post your chief lending officer wrote about why it’s better to finance your vehicle through your bank than your dealership. If you’re introducing new checking or savings account options, you could send readers directly to the online application. If you’ve launched a new mobile banking app, use that QR code to send them to the app store download.
These small additions to your print marketing collateral create a big opportunity for customers to interact with your organization in a new way, gaining far more value and becoming far more familiar with your brand online than they would’ve through the mail piece alone. It also provides invaluable tracking to learn if your audience is engaging with the marketing pieces, and areas of opportunity for future campaigns.
2. How can you avoid early marketing pitfalls?
Use digital marketing to build familiarity before you hit mailboxes. Recent surveys found that adults in the US spend over 6 hours a day online. As they scroll, consumers are primed for the many advertisements and introductions of new brands that pop up between status updates and news articles in their feeds. Your post promoting new member fee reductions or limited-time interest rates will fit right in. And even if a potential customer doesn’t click on your ad or post right away, simply seeing it will build that first level of awareness, which will lead to a higher response rate once the direct mail arrives.
How much higher? A OneTouchPoint client recently saw a marketing ROI increase of over 200% when combining their direct mail and Facebook campaigns. Why? Because social media marketing breeds familiarity, and familiarity is the first step toward trust. When a potential client sees your postcard in their mailbox and recognizes your name and branding, they’ll be more apt to take action because you’ve already started establishing that invaluable trust.
3. How can you test competing marketing strategies?
Use online channels as A/B testing ground. With marketing teams at financial services institutions under pressure to achieve more ROI with smaller budgets, it becomes critical to reserve print marketing spend for just the right design and messaging.
Fortunately, when it comes to getting that printed collateral just right, digital marketing for financial services can help. Say you’re looking to send out a postcard advertising your bank’s new offerings for 2024. You can test that postcard’s design, image, and copy by sharing digital versions first. Set up two or three variations as digital or social media ads, and then study the engagement analytics to find out which images and copy perform best with your target audience, and use that data to confidently commit to a final postcard design.
Not only will you have conducted an effective A/B test with little to no additional marketing spend, but you’ll have introduced potential customers to your campaign via digital channels. Some of those potential customers may not be on your mailing lists, which means you’ve expanded your reach. And those who are will already be familiar with the campaign when it hits their mailboxes in postcard form, meaning they’ll be more likely to pay attention. This shows the importance of utilizing digital marketing for financial services institutions.
How OneTouchPoint Can Help
These three tips are just a glimpse of the ways digital marketing for financial services can combine with print efforts to increase brand awareness, customer engagement, and sales. At its most basic, showing up for potential customers on every channel — from their physical mailboxes to their newsfeeds — with consistent, valuable messaging lays the foundation of familiarity and trust that paves the way for lifelong customer relationships. This is the first step in showing customers they can be confident trusting your financial services institution with their money.
At OneTouchPoint, we’re dedicated to helping our financial services clients expand their marketing efforts into digital channels in order to create dynamic multichannel marketing campaigns. We invite you to contact us to learn more or request a quote on your next project. Our experts will provide insight and ideas to deliver phenomenal results at a great price.