In this new episode, Meredith Olmstead sits down with Taylor Malm, Senior Marketing Strategist at P1FCU, to uncover an unconventional yet highly effective approach to application abandonment campaigns. Using HubSpot and MeridianLink, Taylor shares how his team engineered a smart workaround that boosted loan and deposit completion rates significantly, without relying on traditional form captures.
Key Takeaways:
Track with Purpose: Use custom event tracking between MeridianLink and HubSpot to capture key application behaviors in real-time.
Strategic Timing Wins: Trigger email workflows about 8 hours post-abandonment for optimal re-engagement.
Let the Data Talk: Focus on long-term tracking to measure impact; some campaigns need a 365-day view to show real ROI.
Transcription:
Meredith Olmstead:
If you're looking for best practices for your bank or credit union, join us while we talk all things sales, marketing and strategy for financial institutions. Let's make it happen with FI GROW Solutions. Hi there. I'm Meredith Olmstead, CEO and founder of FI GROW Solutions. We are a digital marketing and sales consulting agency. We work exclusively with credit unions and community banks. And I actually have a guest on the podcast today that is not on the FI GROW team, which is very unusual for us. We don't bring in guests all the time, but we do on occasion when we meet some great folks out there in the industry. So today I have Taylor Malm with me from P1FCU. Taylor is a senior marketing strategist and specialist at P1FCU. Say, hi Taylor.
Taylor Malm:
How's it going everybody?
Meredith Olmstead:
So thank you so much for joining us. Taylor and I know each other through the MAC organization and he was also recently chatting with one of our other senior team members at FI GROW about how they approach application abandonment campaigns at P1FCU. She was so impressed with the strategy and how they had set it up using the tools that we use as well. And so we figured, "Hey, let's invite Taylor to come on and we can chat about how to do application abandonment correctly for your credit union or your community bank." So just diving in, basically we kind of divided this conversation we wanted to have with Taylor into three steps. So the first one being connecting the data, and this is a little bit, as Taylor you told me when we were prepping for this, an unconventional approach.
So basically you are... Just so we get this out of the way, you use MeridianLink, which is a pretty pervasive lending origination system for people applying for new loan, putting in new consumer loan applications. And you are on HubSpot, specifically Marketing Pro. So we'll get that out of the way that those are kind of the two third-party tools in the mix here. But I want you to unpack for us the unconventional nature of how to decide, how to get the data from where somebody's going to start an application to whether or not they've finished an application and then get that information into HubSpot so you can run these campaigns, because you said this was an "unconventional" way to do it and that's what was kind of cool and we wanted to share with all of our listeners.
Taylor Malm:
Absolutely. Well, to preface, we had MeridianLink portal for pretty much my entire time at P1FCU. And we were like, "Oh, we needed an abandoned cart workflow." We've sacrificed thousands and thousands of applications over the years and we were like, "Okay, we need to get to HubSpot. We need to be able to find a way to follow up with these people." And we developed your standard abandoned cart workflow. We put a form on the page in front of the application and that was really easy. And we picked up, I think I have the data, but less than 2% we were recovering of people over the years of having portal. And we just thought, "Okay, when we're going to MeridianLink access, we need to find a better way to do this."
And people were complaining saying that we were gathering their information twice and they didn't really kind of see the inner workings of the URLs changing and stuff that okay, this wasn't the application. And so we were like, "Okay, let's figure out a way to do this." So we did a ton of research and we were like, "Okay, I guess we're going to have to put custom events into the application." So what we did is we set custom events on... We did the first and the last page of each of our applications, whether it's deposits, personal loans, auto, and that triggers events for us where all of the data is being fed into HubSpot, which PI base, it's only the first page, which was first, last, email and phone number.
So all your standard contact information that HubSpot needs. And we monitored them through the application only to see if they went to the last page or not. So that's how we set up our abandoned cart is we track them all the way to the end and if they didn't finish the end, didn't get to the end in that what I set it up is eight hours, so fairly real time. We could do it earlier, but that seems like a little big brothery and I don't really want to pressure people like that.
Meredith Olmstead:
Sure. Okay. So then step two is really then deciding how you're going to trigger and run your application abandonment campaign, which is basically a standard email nurture that's kicked off when a certain event takes place at a certain time and runs probably a couple of emails trying to nurture people back to that application to finish like, okay, I left some shoes in my cart on Amazon, do you want to come back and finish your purchase? Same kind of thing. Okay. So you said you give them around eight hours is what you all landed on for when you trigger the application abandonment workflows to begin?
Taylor Malm:
Yes.
Meredith Olmstead:
Okay. And then just loosely, what does your abandonment workflow include? Is it a couple of emails? Is it three? What do you guys do?
Taylor Malm:
Yeah, we do three. We do three, three, six days in between, and currently we're working on getting SMS inside. So hopefully the next time you see me out in public, you can ask me about how the SMS is going. We're trying-
Meredith Olmstead:
I was going to say that's a no-brainer, right? So maybe do email, text, email, email or something like that. You might not text them a lot, but it would make sense to potentially send a text or two.
Taylor Malm:
Open rate is so much higher. It's just something that it's not as easy to do because we use a third-party, we don't use HubSpot-
Meredith Olmstead:
For SMS?
Taylor Malm:
SMS. So We're trying to API in, and that's proving to be a bit more difficult, but I think we're going to get it done pretty quickly.
Meredith Olmstead:
Nice. Are your open rates for your application abandonment emails, are they good? What are you seeing with those?
Taylor Malm:
It's kind of hard to tell what is good these days. I'm sure most email marketers are kind of... It's nice having the bots and stuff and the bots and stuff filtered out or the Apple stuff and all their privacy issues. I would say that the open rates are around 25%, which I would consider pretty successful knowing I'm following up on basically hot leads, but also people that chose not to finish their application. So really I'm going to take what I can get, especially for years, we didn't do any abandoned cart, so anything I can get is super beneficial to me.
Meredith Olmstead:
So pretty high level, at eight hours you send a reminder email, "Hey, you started your application but you didn't finish it yet. We'd love to have you come back." You wait three more days, send another one, wait three more days, send another one. Or is it the six days?
Taylor Malm:
We go three, three, six.
Meredith Olmstead:
Okay. So there's four emails. Got you.
Taylor Malm:
Yeah, so the intent is changing a little bit each time, the messaging. Because sometimes maybe it's not the hard sell that brings them back. Maybe the hard sell maybe on the third one, maybe on the sixth day one, we just need to tell them who we are. Maybe they just didn't get to know that yet and we need to show our values. But just changing this sentiment I think is super beneficial. You can see some of our open rates and where people are coming back in the application.
Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah, nice.
Taylor Malm:
Yeah, I try to check that out.
Meredith Olmstead:
Well, so you teed it up then really nicely. What's the success you've seen since... So you basically have removed this grabbing people's information with a form lead capture on HubSpot, but instead embedded the events, the custom event code on the first page of your Meridianlink. So you can grab that exact same information you would've grabbed with the form just on the MeridianLink page itself, and then connected that through HubSpot, not even through a core integrations tracking to whether or not they click submit on the last page. What are you guys seeing when you're nurturing those people after that eight hours and starting? How many of those people are coming back and completing their applications?
Taylor Malm:
A lot, to be frank with you. Deposits were sitting around 9, 10%, and the loan and the consumer side is a lot better.
Meredith Olmstead:
Nice.
Taylor Malm:
Personal loan were sitting 15, credit card 11, auto 14. It's just those are high-intent applications and we're not doing a ton of marketing for those right now. So you're not getting the people that are just there looking. For our deposit side, we've been super heavy on deposits for the last three years, so that's where a lot of our marketing is going.
Meredith Olmstead:
Got you. And when you are comparing, really looking at results, do you give yourself an extra week and then compare whether or not somebody who started had finished the application, when they started the loan abandonment, whether or not those people have been... You're taking that original list and comparing it to the list that remains after that period of time to the reporting?
Taylor Malm:
Yeah. It's really hard to tell in real time because there are weeks where it's horrible. I can't break it down into short stretches of time. For me, I have to look at the long-term view.
Meredith Olmstead:
Like a quarterly report or something like that?
Taylor Malm:
Yeah. Because it looks bad, because who knows maybe you didn't catch that because it's not a ton of people. 9%, that could be freaking 1 in 10.
Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah, sure.
Taylor Malm:
It could be sad because you miss that one person in the quarterly reporting. So I personally like to look at it in a 365, just continuous view.
Meredith Olmstead:
Viewing back. Okay.
Taylor Malm:
Yeah.
Meredith Olmstead:
Okay, cool. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Taylor. This was really useful. So love to see the creativity with being able to use a custom event kind of functionality in one tool placed in another third-party tool to then drive your marketing back to where you want people to be. So it makes all the sense in the world when you look back at it. And I love the approach, even if it is a little unconventional. It makes a ton of sense. So thank you so much for joining me today and for sharing this approach. Hopefully we will see you again soon at MAC.
And for those of you who want to learn more about marketing for your credit union or community bank, please visit us at figrow.com. We have lots of other great podcasts and case studies. We do a lot with HubSpot and other kinds of digital marketing approaches, and we would love to be a resource to you. Otherwise, thanks again, Taylor, and let's just all get out there and make it happen.
Taylor Malm:
Thank you.