The social media home page: Become the online expert mortgage customers need
You can wait for customers to find you or meet them where they already live. Here’s how online social and strong mortgage guidance intersect.
Digital transformation begins with operational transformation
It turns out that it’s not just the banking industry’s conservative nature and relatively slow innovation cadence that makes them a juicy target for fintechs. Banks can also be significantly hindered by their historical operating Read More
Customer experience meets your excellence: How to edge out the competition
In an oversaturated market rife with competition, financial service providers struggle for differentiation—clamoring to shatter the noise floor and garner customer attention. And what do customers want? Easy, user-friendly, personalized customer experiences that get them Read More
Free to check in: Should banks build multi-brands like hotel chains do?
Hotel chains such as Marriott International—with multiple brands under a corporate umbrella—can provide bank marketers for with the ultimate destination for fresh ideas.
Here’s why: Hotel chains often have a lock on maintaining customer Read More
Attracting millennials by attacking their challenges
Much has been said about millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) and how they don’t seem interested in traditional banks—a curious state of affairs, given that people need and use banking services for life. What’s Read More
The top 20 terms consumers use on banking websites
While financial services organizations know the importance of search engine optimization (SEO), few emphasize the need to optimize search and support on their websites. At the same time, more people than ever now engage with a Read More
How to combat common employee security mistakes
Whatever news the cheery Monday morning email passes on from the C-suite to the ground troops, everyone needs to make sure they absolutely, positive know who sent it. In fact, it’s paramount. All things being Read More
Customer experience, fraud and strong social media
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and other social media channels play a tremendous role in the everyday lives of many businesses–including banks and other financial institutions. These platforms make it easy to announce company news, provide Read More
Why social selling holds the key to winning consumer trust
Most people would sooner talk about politics, religion and romance than start a conversation on income levels or credit scores. Perhaps that even describes the person sitting in the cubicle next Read More
How high-touch coaching drives banking sales excellence
Relationship management has changed. To succeed in today’s highly digitized world, relationship managers (that is, your sales staff) must cultivate the art of high-touch selling. This means that your people make meaningful human connections that focus Read More
Three ways to deliver first-class customer engagement
Customer engagement is a two-way street. It’s easy for financial institutions to talk about what they want from their side of the relationship—loyalty, bigger wallet share, primary financial status. But it’s harder to execute a strategy Read More
The reg that begs the question: How well do you really know your customer?
“Know your customer” (KYC), while a critical regulatory requirement, can quickly get gummy and frustrating when data is scattered across multiple systems. Financial institutions collect massive amounts of customer data—where people live, what they drive, Read More
Why marketing must work hand-in-glove with IT
Can marketing’s creative, spontaneous spirit productively partner with IT’s more structured, security-obsessed culture?
It has to.
The most brilliant big ideas produced by the marketing team will go nowhere fast if the technology needed to execute is not Read More
Five steps, sure bets on the road to customer experience success
Let’s say your bank or credit union wants to raise its customer experience game. What step would you take first? Balloons in the branch lobby? A cute email on the customer’s birthday? Or how about Read More
Goodbye entanglement, hello engagement: Seeking a new way to measure success
Here’s how I think about successful customer relationships these days: Entanglement does not equal engagement.
The way we do business now, in trying to become our customers’ primary financial institution, we entangle them: We get Read More
The most valuable keys to customer engagement
Despite a newfound fascination with customer engagement, banks know it’s a constantly moving target that doesn’t reward indecision or momentary distractions. It takes strong resolve and concentration to stay on top Read More
Bank marketing moves from funnel to the flywheel
Financial services professionals traditionally see their marketing efforts through the lens of the “sales funnel” or “marketing funnel”; it’s been that way for decades. But working within that model could actually cause you to miss Read More
Pay attention to retention: How banks can turn around client churn
It’s been almost 250 years since Adam Smith penned “The Wealth of Nations,” helping set off an industrial revolution now in its fourth iteration. What would Smith think of today’s “Exponential Age,” defined by its Read More
Five ways to make social media a strong arm of your marketing plan
While social media has become an important marketing channel in the financial services industry, many banks maintain a presence simply for the sake of it. And those platforms—whether on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Snapchat—are just too Read More
Re-energized rewards, the omnichannel way
In financial services, the customer loyalty battle has evolved to where rewards programs must offer more than points—for after all, traditional one-size-fits-all points programs succumb to attrition and inactivity after a few moments of intrigue. Read More