In the United States, the start of the school year marks a two-and-a-half-month sprint to the beginning of the holiday season. Typically, the lack of school breaks during these months means fewer of your employees will take time off. You and your team will likely be reviewing annual budgets, identifying strategic goals, and implementing process improvements.
This time of year should also shift your focus to your marketing plan and identify ways to effectively reach your member segments during the holidays. According to the National Retail Federation, Americans spent $620 per person on holiday gifts last year. This underscores the importance of using your business-critical documents to cross-sell, upsell your services, and tap into affiliate advertising. Your members regularly receive statements, notices, and other documents from you —usually monthly. Using these documents to market to your member base is an easy way to drive action.
Cross-Sell/Upsell: Parents of young children who receive monetary gifts for the holidays, for example, should be thinking about opening a 529 account for college funds. Members looking to purchase a car for a child or spouse will be searching for the best auto loan rates. This is a great opportunity for you to reach these segments with personalized, dynamic messaging that will drive them to contact you and request additional services.
Affiliate Advertising: The holiday season is a goldmine for B2C businesses. Did you know those businesses are willing to pay you for advertising space in your business-critical documents? Tapping into affiliate advertising will drive member behavior and put more money in your pocket. It’s a win-win!
The Secret Sauce to Successful Statement Marketing: Cross-Selling, Upselling, and Affiliate Advertising
Historically, credit unions have used transpromo marketing and statement stuffers to send blanket messages to their entire member base. However, today’s capabilities allow for far greater benefits and results than these generalized marketing messages of the past.
By outsourcing to the right document services vendor, you can improve your document marketing by making it:
- Personalized – Face-to-face interaction continues to decline as members can now do everything from transferring money to opening new accounts remotely via mobile apps and home banking systems. Statements, letters, and notices are becoming a primary platform for businesses to engage with and upsell to their customers, but it’s important that these messages be personalized and targeted to specific individuals, rather than your entire member base.
A good document outsourcing partner will implement business rules to target specific members with personalized marketing messages, increasing the quality of your marketing content and driving member engagement.
- Dynamic – The key to dynamic messaging is the ability to change and update document marketing content at your discretion and at no additional cost. With this capability, you can create and modify dynamic marketing messages and images, designating which member segments will receive them.
- Automated – To ensure proper implementation of personalized and dynamic marketing, automation is essential. By eliminating human touchpoints, you can ensure that your marketing messages are sent to the correct member segments.
Using targeted and personalized marketing in statements and other business-critical documents is a powerful, low-cost marketing opportunity that should be capitalized on before and during the holiday season. Contact us today for a comprehensive consultation on how you can maximize the potential of your credit union member documents by turning them into personalized marketing.
