Category Archives: Retail Banking

Say “No” to the Third Helping of Meatballs: The Strategy and Pursuit of Trigger Campaigns

Launching a trigger email is a little like going back for seconds and thirds at an all-you-can eat buffet: just because you can doesn’t mean you should. The temptation to launch a trigger campaign becomes stronger in light of the steady drum beat of email marketing experts who tell you it’s the right thing to do. However, what all this talk of email marketing “best practices” loses sight of is that, like any marketing tactic, trigger campaigns should be a logical response to a strategic problem.

The good news is that there are trigger campaign approaches that align with many common issues — you just need to figure out which campaign matches your strategic need. For example, let’s say you are a company that has made or will be making a commitment to content marketing as a driver of customer and prospect engagement. Your business model requires you to nurture contacts over a period of time until they are ready/have the need to buy. During this interval, you need to keep your company and products top-of-mind, but your response data suggests that you are not maximizing your potential to engage your audience.

In this scenario, the best application of a trigger campaign is to use your target audience’s responses to drive deeper engagement. Leveraging your available content, you can create a collection of emails triggered by a range of positive responses — clicking on an email, downloading a white paper from your website, visiting your booth at a conference — that offer the recipient “next steps” or additional information. The keys to making this kind of trigger successful are:

  • Clean data: Make sure that the email address to which you are sending the triggered email is the email address of the person who took the positive action.
  • Low friction: Make the featured content easy to consume to lower barriers to incremental engagement.
  • Timeliness: Deploy the triggered email within a day or two of the positive action to ensure that whatever spurred the initial engagement is still fresh in the target’s mind.

In our experience, triggered campaigns targeting those with a positive recent response have delivered view rates in the 60-70% range and engagement rates as high as 20%.

FDIC Quarterly Report Shows Upsurge in Bank Lending

The FDIC’s quarterly banking report shows signs of strong lending growth.  As increased lending is a sign of growing economic confidence, this report is a positive indicator both for the industry, which has been struggling for revenue growth in recent quarters, as well as for the economy in general.

According to the FDIC:

  • Total loans and leases rose 1% year-over-year (y/y) and 2% quarter-over-quarter (q/q) to $7.5 billion at the end of 4Q11. The charge-off rate was 1.37% in 4Q11, down 93 bps y/y and 9 bps q/q. The charge-off rate is now at its lowest level since the second quarter of 2008, just prior to the full onset of the financial crisis.
  • Overall loan growth was driven by strong growth in commercial and industrial (C&I) lending. End-of-period C&I loans rose by 14% between 4Q10 and 4Q11, and by 5% between 3Q11 and 4Q11. The C&I net charge-off rate fell 76 bps y/y and by 5 bps q/q, to 0.78% in 4Q11.
  • Drilling down into C&I lending, small business lending (defined as C&I loans of less than $1 million) fell 3% y/y, but rose 1% q/q, reflecting other recent indicators that banks are returning to small business lending. And it is notable that growth in small business lending is most evident among the largest banks.

So following a number of years of retrenchment, how well prepared are banks to ramp up their lending activity? To position themselves to benefit from an overall resurgence in lending, individual banks need to:

  • Undertake a comprehensive assessment of their capabilities and processes, covering vital areas such as product portfolios; positioning and marketing activities, sales structure and support, as well as customer communications
  • Benchmark bank performance against competitive best practices
  • Identify operational areas that are under-performing, and
  • Implement initiatives to quickly correct these deficiencies

2012 Email Evolution Conference: Email Isn’t Dead; It’s Just Evolving

The conference kicked off its Thursday session with a substantive and thought-provoking keynote from Jessica Harley, VP of Customer Marketing at Gilt Groupe. While her presentation touched on many aspects of Gilt’s email marketing efforts, the most notable theme was that we — as marketers generally and email marketers specifically — can’t think about email marketing in a vacuum. In that email marketing vacuum, response rates appear to be declining and social seems to be gaining precedence. But outside that vacuum, email continues to play a vital role in driving engagement and conversions.

Expanding outside the vacuum enables email marketers to recognize that conversions and email’s impact may be felt in ways that aren’t captured by traditional measures. In Harley’s experience at Gilt, customers may look at emails on a mobile device but then convert indirectly on the same day via the web or via an App. In this scenario, the email is the trigger to go to those transactional channels. Therefore, we need to evaluate email performance not always on an immediate basis — how many viewers or clickers did the email drive in the first day or two — but with a longer term view. And if we think of emails as doing more than driving a single transactional response, we need to extend our measurement, for example, whether a series of emails over time produce a more engaged, higher value customer population.

In EMI’s presentation with State Street, I expanded on this theme: consider thinking of email in the context of all the other response channels. Since our objective as marketers is to drive engagement and transactions, it’s important to remember that email is but one means to that end. For certain customers at certain points in the decision-making process, email might not be as effective a means as direct mail or calling.