Create Credit Union and Bank Marketing Campaigns that Convert! [5 Tips]

Creating effective marketing campaigns in any area of business can be challenging, but for credit unions and banks, it can be especially tricky. Because the banking buyer's journey is long and convoluted, it's not always easy to track conversions and directly prove ROI. Here are a few quick tips to remember when setting up goals for your next credit union or bank marketing campaign. If any of this sounds great, but you aren't sure how to make it happen, get in touch, we can help!

1. Remember You Have to Walk Before You Can Run!

This might be a cliché, but nonetheless, it IS true. When you think about the goals for your next marketing campaign remember that you can't double the traffic to your financial institution’s website overnight. Heck, that might be hard to do even in a year! So start slowly.

When targeting a specific product or service page you would like to grow traffic to, set a reasonable goal. Driving an additional 500 page visits to your target page in a month is a respectable number of new visits, and also a goal that is likely reachable, as long as you give people a good reason to go there and promote it across the right channels! In addition to good content, you must use actionable and exciting calls to action (CTAs) that encourage people to click and discover your offer.

Keep in mind that your goals should be specific, realistic, and relevant to your overall business goals so that the numbers you are measuring actually relate to growth instead of vanity metrics... in other words, make them SMART goals!

DOWNLOAD NOW: Our Free SMART Goal Worksheet for Marketing & Sales Success

2. Don't Forget to Ask the Most Important Question... WHY???

Using the example above, WHY do you want to drive traffic to this specific product page? Make sure your credit union or bank marketing campaign goals are aligned with your overall business goals. Once you have confirmed your goals are aligned, have a plan for what happens next! Just increasing website traffic isn't necessarily going to put money on your bottom line. How will you then take that new traffic and continue to bring them through your sales funnel? You MUST have a plan in place to capture the leads from this traffic and keep them moving forward toward a conversion.

We also recommend that you look at every credit union and bank marketing campaign holistically. If you are trying to grow auto loans and are trying to grow website traffic to your auto loan page, remember that a member might see more than one piece of content from you before making their buying decision. Maybe they come across your eBook offer on your homepage, an email, a paid ad, or social media promotion all featuring your auto loans. Weighing all of these efforts together at the end of the promotion is important. The combination of ALL of these useful interactions likely led to their conversion.

3. Is Your Promotional Offer Good Enough For People To Share Their Contact Information?

Increased impressions of a targeted website page may mean little to your CEO or Board of Directors. And rightfully so! Your goals should build on this traffic and aim to get your new contacts one or two steps closer to converting.

So, if you are driving traffic to an auto loan promotion page, perhaps you should consider giving away something related to the campaign, in exchange for a name and email (forms are a great way to implement this on your website). How about a gas gift card or a great eBook about the top 10 mistakes consumers make when buying a new car?

Whatever your offer, make it authentic, helpful, and motivating. You should ask yourself if you would be willing to provide your name and email address to a company in exchange for what you are offering. If not, it is time to upgrade the offer.

With these new leads, you now have the opportunity to email them additional resources and information about the special offer or product you are promoting and get them closer to conversion.

For more ideas on how to capture potential leads on your website, check out our blog article that discusses intelligent lead capture and SEG lead capture.

4. Get Sales Involved in Your Marketing Campaigns

Once you start generating new leads, your marketing team should initiate an automated email campaign offering additional resources and blogs surrounding your promotion. Without coming across as pushy, these campaigns will help encourage your new contacts to develop a trusting relationship with your credit union or bank as you offer resources to help them make these important decisions.

Not everyone who has downloaded an eBook is ready to be aggressively pursued for an auto loan. So don't just have your sales team bombard them with calls and emails, this will only turn them off. But if they have interacted with your follow-up emails, it may be a good indication that it is time to turn the leads over to the sales team.

Using a tool like HubSpot’s Sales Hub, your sales team can easily identify the most qualified leads so they can spend less time sorting through leads and more time closing deals. Sales Hub also makes it easy to automate repetitive tasks, communicate between departments, and track results helping justify your campaign spend.

Interested in learning more about Sales Enablement? Contact us today and learn more about how you and your team can close more new accounts and loans increasing your share of wallet!

5. Don't Give Up Too Soon When Trying to Convert Leads

Now this one is key, but it's more important for your credit union’s or bank’s sales staff than for marketing. We recommend that anyone following up with the leads should have a good understanding of how the lead came to the credit union or bank in the first place and what information they've been given already. Knowing the contact’s journey and what information has been shared with them is crucial in making an informed follow-up. 

We also recommend multiple follow-ups. Sending just one email to someone who has been downloading your content and visiting the blog and website is not likely going to end with a conversion. There's no set email follow-up strategy that works every time, but depending on if the lead is brand new or a long-time member considering a new product, your strategy will need to reflect these varying levels of comfort with your brand.

In all likelihood, sales should plan to send 3-4 emails, spaced out with 3-7 days between each one. If you have a phone number for the lead then member service MUST call the person to try to connect a couple of times as well. Developing email templates and talking points for them to reference during follow-up calls can also be very helpful. These suggestions will help the interactions be more productive and meaningful, and hopefully lead to some new business for your financial institution.

Can't imagine your credit union or bank marketing team or sales team having the time to manage these extra tasks? You are not alone.

Don't give up yet, it is possible! We love helping financial institutions with their marketing, sales, and website development, but we can't do it alone. As a HubSpot Gold partner, we rely on tools that automate the marketing and sales process for our credit union and bank partners. If you want to explore how to make more campaigns that convert, get in touch! We would love to help you and your team make it happen!