Simple does not always mean easy. As a bank, you make a profit by collecting fees and interest from borrowers. Simple. Meanwhile, promoting your services and convincing people to trust you with their hard-earned capital can feel like an unwinnable battle. See the difference?
Marketing is far from an exact science. There is no blueprint a bank can follow to guarantee engagement with its audience.
Nevertheless, how marketers face a handful of common challenges dictates how successful they will be. If your current marketing approach leaves you unsatisfied, consider these strategies to break through the bottlenecks holding you back.
Making Time
With so many clients depending on you to guide them along the path to financial security, it’s easy to put email marketing low on your list of priorities. However, when performed sloppily or without due diligence, emails can alienate customers rather than attract them.
Planning out your content well in advance is one way to get ahead, but even that requires research for which you might not have time. Instead, consider taking advantage of an email marketing service provider that can craft tailored content for your audience and automate several of your processes.
Truly effective marketing can’t be rushed, so why corner yourself with deadlines you’ll never meet when there are professionals ready to lend a hand?
Putting Data to Work
Perhaps the most surefire way to guarantee your content accurately targets your consumer base is to base your marketing approach on actionable data. But what information is actually important? It’s no use combing through sales figures, leads, click rates, and in-market signals if the takeaways get lost in the jargon.
Take advantage of intuitive reports that prioritize the most important metrics, displaying them at a granular level throughout an entire sales cycle. You can then use these metrics to decide what sort of marketing a customer might respond to in the future. Suppose your analysis finds a certain customer clicked on an article about the resale value of cars in one of your recent newsletters. Now, you know exactly whom to send a promotion for an auto loan.
Data doesn’t merely tell you how your business is doing: it teaches you how to fine-tune your marketing to reach more individuals with the personalized content that will move them.
Standing Out
With over 100 billion promotional emails sent every day, to say consumers are bombarded with marketing content would be quite the understatement. So, how do you get your bank’s solutions to stand out among the countless others fighting for clicks?
The answer starts with tailored messaging. Your marketers must be able to discern which promotions are relevant to a particular customer and which will just come across as spam. That means measuring your audience’s response to content and adjusting future promotions accordingly.
Regularly crafting individualized emails that reliably bring value to customers can be a daunting proposition, but you can always try phoning a friend. Seek a provider that knows your industry and operates like an organic extension of your business, not a machine pumping out buzzword-riddled spam. Not only will new customers be more receptive, but your existing consumer base will grow more loyal with every message that caters to their specific needs and interests.
Keeping Pace
In the information age, content of any kind has a short shelf life. The drawn-out marketing campaign your team painstakingly developed might lose relevance within weeks. While planning out content in advance provides structure and confidence, the flexibility to think on your feet and adapt to changes in the marketplace is even more valuable.
Email marketing allows businesses to tweak their value proposition at a moment’s notice without scrapping months of hard work. Rather than waiting for customers to stumble upon your content, reach them directly with timely promotions that address your their most immediate needs. Combine this speed with the data-driven, tailored messaging we’ve discussed, and you’ll be providing solutions to customers before they even realize they need them.
Effective marketing may never be as clear-cut as loans and deposits. Still, it’s in your bank’s best interest to borrow these tips and invest in a strategy that will pay off in both the short and long run.