Regional Banks and Credit Unions Are Ready to Compete with the Giants

This week at the ABA Bank Marketing Conference in Baltimore, we’re hearing a lot from growth-oriented banks asking for help providing differentiated customer experiences and delivering an omnichannel customer journey. They were asking exactly the right questions at exactly the right time, as just last week we announced Redpoint SaaS Delivery Option for Retail Banking.

For decades, regional banks and credit unions have emphasized personal relationships and community ties to build business. As time as moved on, large super-regional, national and multi-national banks have heavily invested in marketing to improve the customer experience. Regionally, however, deep dives into omnichannel campaign management has, in many cases, been simply out of budget for institutions who need their marketing to show positive ROI in short order. So, spreadsheet analysis matched against the occasional ad hoc third-party data integration was the most a typical regional bank could muster.

Banking Customers Want (and Get) Personalization Everywhere

National and international banks invested millions of dollars and years of focus on customer data platforms (CDPs) that coordinate customer messages across every touchpoint. Whether or not a customer recognizes it, the big banks are analyzing a comprehensive demographic and behavior profile at every touchpoint and aligning each message to build a consistent brand message at every step in the relationship.

And it isn’t just the traditional big names in banking. Some of the world’s fastest-growing financial services are being issued by global enterprises that made their fortunes first in data-driven e-commerce, like Amazon and Alibaba. Data-driven personalization is the common thread and theme for customer experience success, and customers are responding.

It’s little wonder, then, that a survey by The Boston Consulting Group finds that a majority (54 percent) of customers say that personalization influenced their decision to become a customer of a new bank. More than two-thirds (68 percent) in the same survey say that personalization has influenced them to buy more products or services from a bank they have an existing relationship with.

Every Bank Can Be Persona-Driven

In years past we would have had to give growth-oriented bank stakeholders a tough choice—either stay on the marketing path they’re currently on and hope for the best or commit a painful amount of money and resources to an omnichannel experience solution geared (and priced) for a much larger organization. Instead, we were delighted to talk about Redpoint SaaS Delivery Option for Retail Banking, because the centralized marketing database they need to tie in with their core banking systems is now available in a product that features quick deployment with affordable monthly costs.

If the conference buzz is any indication, we’re about to see regional banks take a real leadership role in understanding financial services personas and designing personalized offers that resonate, convert, and improve stickiness. Instead of fighting through internal data silos and being contented with lightly personalized welcome campaigns and awareness messages, they will be have a single point of control for data, decisions, and interactions.

That’s going to mean more banks with turnkey access to unified campaigns across email, SMS, mobile, social, direct mail, and website channels that also sync up with face-to-face real-time offers. For example, when a customer’s savings levels and life stage change to become a new parent, Redpoint SaaS Delivery Option for Retail Banking can offer the highest-value avenue to pursue, perhaps a 529 plan through their investment service, and that offer can be presented consistently across multiple touchpoints, just like the largest institutions have done for years.

Unifying customer data into a single view and orchestrating dynamic customer journeys across touchpoints wasn’t easy, but today it’s more practical than ever. That’s directly thanks to the years of experience Redpoint has building data models, reports, and workflows for large banks.

In the face of unprecedented global competition for every customer’s financial services needs, the opportunity to reduce acquisition costs and improve retention and stickiness has arrived just in time for the banks already most closely associated with a personal touch. It’s an important step to help regional banks and credit unions push beyond brand awareness and loyalty and start competing on equal footing with some of the world’s biggest financial services and retail names.

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