Episode 81 - The Most Successful Automated Emails Used by Banks and Credit Unions

In this episode of FI GROW Solutions' podcast, Meredith Olmsted and Rebecca Gwaltney delve into the world of email marketing for banks and credit unions. They discuss the benefits and strategies behind behavior-based or automated email marketing, focusing on how financial institutions can leverage automated workflows to enhance customer engagement and streamline communication. Meredith and Rebecca explore various types of email marketing, including onboarding new members, behavior-triggered emails, and the importance of segmenting emails to boost cross-selling and deepen customer relationships.

Key Takeaways:

• Automation Efficiency: Automated email marketing saves time and effort by sending personalized messages based on customer interactions, improving engagement and sales.

• Strategic Onboarding: Differentiating between direct and indirect onboarding emails helps tailor the content to the customer's familiarity with the institution, enhancing their initial experience.

• Behavior-Based Triggering: Utilizing behavior-triggered emails allows institutions to re-engage customers at critical moments, potentially increasing the effectiveness of promotions and offers

Transcription:

Meredith Olmsted:
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 Olmsted, CEO and founder of FI GROW Solutions, and we are a digital marketing and sales consulting agency. We work exclusively with banks and credit unions. I am here with our inbound marketing manager, Rebecca Gwaltney. Say hi, Rebecca.

Rebecca Gwaltney:
Hi everybody.

Meredith Olmsted:
And Rebecca and I were just having a great conversation about email marketing, specifically behavior-based or automated email marketing efforts. And we were specifically talking about all of the different ways that we see our current clients using email marketing in this way based on an individual user or lead or consumer's behavior, on their website or somewhere else. And then other ways that we want to see more emails, because Rebecca gets very worked up about this and she talks about how credit unions and smaller banks or community banks never email their customer lists enough because it takes a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of expertise, and a lot of times you have small marketing departments that are spread too thin. So I was like, "Rebecca, let's hit record and talk about some of these."

So we're going to do two podcasts about this. The first one is what we see usually and how we think those email types should be working. And then the second podcast we're going to do is really cool new ideas for how to use this kind of technology to nurture and automate your marketing follow-up.
So okay, first thing we'll say is basically what we mean by behavior-based or automated emails. Rebecca, what do we mean when we say that?

Rebecca Gwaltney:
Right. So a lot of times the emails will be delivered automatically to your members or customers based on how they interact with your content, with your website and other areas of communication that you have with your membership or customer base. So they're triggered after they engage in all those different forms. The best thing about them is that they're designed to boost sales, increase your sales, help with all your cross-sale goals, and increase their engagement. So we want to keep giving them more information about what they're interested in so they keep going further down that funnel.

Meredith Olmsted:
Right. And it's not done by an individual hitting a 'send' button.

Rebecca Gwaltney:
Saves time. Yeah.

Meredith Olmsted:
Yes. They are a new member or a new customer, they just took out a new loan product or opened a new account, and they get put into some kind of automated workflow or whatever you want to call it; some kind of sequence where emails get personalized, timed and sent out in an automated fashion.
So there's some basics, okay? So the first one is onboarding new customers, or new members if you're at a credit union. There's two different kinds really. We think about direct customers or direct onboarding, and we think about indirect customers with indirect onboardings. So direct onboarding, that is when somebody comes to your institution directly, they found you somehow, searched you on the internet, somebody they knew told them about you, they drove by and saw your sign, whatever. They come directly to you, either in person, on the website, they call, apply on the phone, whatever, and they become a customer or a new member. They know who you are, they know the name of your institution, they know what you do, basically. So when you're onboarding a new customer like that, Rebecca, just high level, what should those automated emails do?

Rebecca Gwaltney:
Right. So it's really nice because the automated emails, it's kind of like having a frontline tele-person sell to these members softly by introducing them to what the credit union offers. So it says, "Hey, you opened up maybe a savings account or a checking account. These are the next steps that you're going to want to take to take advantage of all the credit union or bank has to offer." It's always based on the client that we work with. Sometimes they prefer a series of seven emails over three months, or 12 emails over three months. And it really highlights their goals, it talks about the financial institution's personality, what makes them different, the key products and services that will help them achieve financial success, whatever that journey looks like. And the best part about the workflows, they happen automatically, and you can change the speed of the emails based on how they interact with the content they're receiving.

Meredith Olmsted:
Awesome.

Rebecca Gwaltney:
So it's very flexible.

Meredith Olmsted:
Yes, that is very cool. So if people are clicking, first of all, you're going to make sure that there's smart content, if you can include smart content. So if somebody has a new checking account, you want to make sure you're reminding them to look for their debit card within a certain number of days, activate that debit card, remind them of any rewards they might be eligible for if they use that debit card, because we know that you can leverage yourself into a primary financial institution with a new customer if they start using the credit card or the debit card quickly and regularly. But if they've already activated their debit card, smart content would be able to know, "Oh, this person, this is the fourth email in your onboarding, and they've already activated their debit card. Don't tell them about the debit card anymore. Tell them about something else." So that's really important with those onboarding emails, personalizing the content so you're not telling them stuff they already know when you can figure that out, based on known characteristics.

Now, the indirect onboarding is very similar, but it's for customers that come through indirect methods. A great example or a very common example is if they get an auto loan through a dealer. Okay?

Rebecca Gwaltney:
Absolutely.

Meredith Olmsted:
They may barely know the name of your financial institution, but they know they have a loan payment, a car loan payment, and they know they need to make it. So an indirect onboarding is very similar in terms of how it can be set up, but the content needs to be very different, because you really need to be a little bit more explicit about explaining who you are to this individual, this customer; how they came to be a customer of yours, how to make the loan payments, how to set up online banking, how to set up auto bill pay or automatic loan payment, all those different kinds of things.

Rebecca Gwaltney:
Right. Meredith, real quick too, a quick point. You're talking about how the smart content is able to understand and know what they have already. So it's pretty neat in HubSpot, right? The active list. So something of benefit to HubSpot is it's constantly changing. So it's not at the time they become a member, it's when those emails come out. The information will be live if they've gotten a product or service since they started, so it keeps everything fresh. Yeah, so everything's very real time and accurate. So I just wanted to reiterate, that's so important and what makes it unique and personalized.

Meredith Olmsted:
Right?.Awesome. Yeah, so you can have indirect members coming in all the time, every day, part way through the day, and as soon as the paperwork comes in and they get put through and the data hits your email platform, it can start to kick off these campaigns.
Okay. Now we also talked about behavior-based smart emails. These are emails that are kicked off based on when somebody takes an actual digital behavior or does something, interacts with something, more than likely on your website, that's really most of the time, but could be in other places; landing pages, could be on an email if they clicked a certain link, if they're a known user. Why are we seeing those being done with a lot of our clients right now, Rebecca?

Rebecca Gwaltney:
Yeah. I think it's just a great strategy for our clients to get their members and customers back on those pages that they're showing interest to. So if somebody's shopping for a mortgage and they're checking out mortgage rates, emails are automatically sent out that same day to get them back on that page to re-engage with the application. We know they're in that spot at that exact moment looking for that product, so we want to get them back there to take the next step, to apply for the loan or product that they're looking for.

Some of the questions we get with the behavior-based emails, yes, we can set up the top five for the five most visited website pages. So whether that's mortgage, personal loan, profitable products. But the great part about workflows is they don't all run at the same time. So if somebody has activated a mortgage workflow and then popped over to the auto loan page, we're not going to hit them with too much content. I know that's a concern a lot of our clients have. So it's monitored, we can pick and choose how many, maybe the priority of what you want to be sent first, but it really gets them to re-engage and activate those applications or even continue applications.

Meredith Olmsted:
Yeah. And we see when we set those behavior-based emails, and we do them for ourselves too, but we usually send those emails within 20 minutes of a page visit. So it's a little creepy, or could be, but it also is very timely. I think really what people do value about personalization now within digital interactions is that while they know we might be, as a business, tracking some of their behavior on a website, if we're showing them more information about what they're already looking for, it actually feels like a benefit. So it's not super intrusive, it's timely, it's right when they were there. So doing it quickly and making it useful, educational, helpful, all those kinds of things.

All right, now we also want to talk about form submission emails. So we think of form submission sometimes as like, "Oh, they want to download something on your website," or they're saving a calculation that they did on an auto loan or a personal loan quote or something like that. That could email them something to their email and they hit, "Email me my quote," or whatever. But what about for start applications? Because I know sometimes you see forms on people's websites where it'll be like, "Start your application now. First name, last name, email, next." How would that kind of a form submission to start an application for a loan or credit card or something like that be useful in terms of marketing?

Rebecca Gwaltney:
Right. So I think again, it depends on the client and how their loan applications are set up. So at times, if there's not a loan application directly set up on their website, it will capture the information, and it's great for a sales team for follow-up that they're showing interest in a product and they'll continue the application process in that way. For clients that already have the full loan application directly on the website page, it's a great follow-up to say, "Hey, we've received your application. This is what you can expect. Here's the next steps. Here's who's going to be contacting you." So we know, with our community organizations, they like that personal touch. So it really offers that information to keep the connections real and live. It's not just automated, the loan goes off into some huge portal somewhere. It also helps complete unfinished applications. So it's all dependent on how much data that the clients are able to provide, but we can really customize these application follow-ups and workflows to target the members and customers exactly where they start or finish their application.

Meredith Olmsted:
Gotcha. And then the last one that we see used a lot basically is sales automation, like emails basically, and this is where we're seeing a lot of clients. And a lot of them are internal emails. They're not actually going to the customer. So somebody, like what you just said, would potentially come in on a website page, a personal loan page on a bank or credit union, and they start a personal loan application. So maybe they start that on your website, they submit their initial little form, then they go to a third-party application and they're working on it. In the midst of that, you can have a deal created or some kind of record created to track that lead that just started, and we want to make sure it gets finished, but it takes time. Those applications can take 20 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever. Somebody might start it in the morning, finish it at night.

So we can automate a follow-up to internal sales teams during that day. Maybe we give the sales team a lag, maybe we wait two hours and then send an internal email to let people know, "Hey, this person started an application at so-and-so time. We are going to send them a follow-up and you'll need to check the status of that application and follow up with them within 24 or 48 hours." Or something like that; whatever your sales process is when you're using your email automation and your CRM involved, if they are connected.

But the other really cool thing about that is that if somebody is a lead, like a known customer, and maybe they've applied, maybe they're looking for a mortgage, so it's a big product, or a business loan or something that's very valuable, and they go back on the website a couple of days later or a month later. Maybe they were a lead, they fell off, now they're back. We can actually, if you've designated them as a lead, as somebody who is a real potential for new membership or a new account, you can send an email to the internal person who is the salesperson for that lead and say, "Oh, so-and-so was just back on X, Y, or Z page. You might want to give them a call." We do it a lot with business development teams for smaller institutions or SEG-based credit unions. So they know, "Oh my gosh, this small business owner down the street who I had just met with last week in person, he just visited our website." And the salesperson who may be that business development person who had met with that person individually would get an internal notification saying, "Hey, so-and-so was just on your website looking at this page. Why don't you pick up the phone and call them?"

Rebecca Gwaltney:
Yeah. And to follow up.

Meredith Olmsted:
And it's perfectly timed, right when they're looking at your information. So it's not intrusive, it feels timely, it feels relevant and those kinds of things.

So, awesome. All right, well we're going to do another podcast where we talk about some new ideas for how to use behavior-based and email automation. But for now, we'll stop there, because that's a lot. And we will just say, in general, as a rule of thumb, most banks and credit unions do not email enough.

Rebecca Gwaltney:
That's very true.

Meredith Olmsted:
If you're segmenting and being strategic with the emails and things that you're sending out, there's no reason why you shouldn't be sending out multiple, multiple emails a week to various different groups about lots of different products and services. So when in doubt, probably send the email is a good rule of thumb.

Rebecca Gwaltney:
Absolutely.

Meredith Olmsted:
Thanks Rebecca. Appreciate it. If you all are interested in learning more about marketing or sales for banks and credit unions, please visit us at figrow.com. And otherwise, let's just get out there and make it happen.