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With the shift of consumers from brick-and-mortar to the online banking market, we have found that best practices for digital selling are more important that ever. Here are some useful sales tips your bank or credit union really shouldn’t live without!
Useful Sales Insights that Can Help Your Financial Institution Grow
A lot that is written about sales techniques relates specifically to sales in the B2B environment. But that doesn’t mean your financial institution can’t take some of these lessons and use them to inform how your staff interacts with customers on a daily basis! Here’s some amazing stats that your front-line staff should consider when interacting with new account leads each day.1. Email Opens and Deletes…
Did you know… only 24% of sales emails are opened? Most of us are aware that people get a lot of junk mail, it happens to us all at times. But the fact that only a quarter of sales emails are even opened should tell your staff if that if they are reaching out to a sales lead via email it’s likely they will need to send 3-4 of these email messages to ensure that at least one of them gets opened.
Gone are the days of making one phone call and closing a deal. In today’s digital world, even high-quality sales content gets lost in people’s in-boxes. So, make sure your staff follows up with leads multiple times before giving up! When the average person deletes 48% of the emails they receive every day and this task takes them just five minutes, you just can’t take this practice seriously.
Be consistent with emails and make sure your sales staff don’t give up too easily.
LEARN MORE: Download our Free 12 Decisive Steps to Grow Your Financial Institution
2. One Hour Rule
Did you know… companies who attempted to reach leads within an hour were nearly seven times likelier to have meaningful conversations with decision-makers than those who waited even 60 minutes?
Now this might sound like a sales stat that’s not relevant to banks or credit unions. However, the lesson here is that it’s essential to put some kind of workflow or follow up in place to reach out to new leads as fast as possible.
If you don’t have the staff to call leads within hours/minutes during the day, make sure you at least send them a useful and impactful email as soon as they convert on your form or desired online action. And then have a staff member follow up via phone ASAP.
3. Subject Lines Count!
Another impactful email sales statistic revolves around the best length of subject lines for emails. In fact, subject lines with three to four words get more responses than shorter and longer ones.
We’ve also found the emojis in subject lines have a positive impact on open rates. 👍
In addition to subjects, there’s also data that suggests that emails containing one to three questions are 50% likelier to get replies than emails without any questions. So ask your reader for something if you’d like to generate more responses.
4. Timing and Length are Key!
Did you know… the sweet spot for email length is between 50-125 words? Emails of this length had response rates above 50%, so keeping messages concise but not too brief seems to work best.
It’s also worth noting that many people think mid-morning is the best time for sending sales or marketing email, but in fact people prefer to read these kinds of messages first thing in the morning, like around 6 or 7am! Use an email program where you can preschedule when a message gets sent out, as this will help hit inboxes early and get a prospects attention first thing.
5. Experience, Experience, Experience…
Above all else, it’s important that your front-line staff keep the customer or member’s experience at heart when crafting digital sales communications.
Some of the top ways to create a positive sales experience, according to buyers include:
• Listening to their needs (69%)
• Not being pushy (61%)
• Providing relevant information (61%)
• Responding in a timely manner (51%)
Take these tips to heart and be real when you’re reaching out to new leads.
Remember, 84% of buyers now kick off their buying process with a referral, and 92% of buyers trust referrals from people they know. So the better the experience of your current customers the more likely they will be to recommend your institution to others.
Want to learn more? Visit our services and pricing page to learn about all the ways we teach clients how to implement these best practices in their own financial institutions.
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