Member Marketing & Communication Management for CUs
Reaching out to new members is not as simple as it used to be. Communications channels continue to multiply – mobile, social, online and e-mail mix with plain old print and mail to present a more complex and changing communications landscape. As a result, it has become much harder for credit union marketing professionals to provision content, media, messaging and campaigns across these many channels where members engage.
Effective Communication Strategies
For credit unions effective communication strategies require visibility across the touch points where members interact with your organization. These touch points include online and mobile banking, your web page, and social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ pages. Traditional banking related platforms often miss the mark because they lack the ability to quickly create, promote and measure marketing messages to your member base. Indeed, old school approaches require marketers to create the same or similar messages in multiple channels and this drives up costs, takes more time, and most often leads to inconsistent delivery. Plus, traditional approaches give you have little opportunity to optimize and adjust your efforts since there is no single reporting ability across the various channels and delivery platforms. As a result, this leaves CU marketing pros to gauge effectiveness of messaging, content or imagery with very little data to go on. Disparate processes make it very difficult to effectively gather, track and measure marketing ROI.
Member Communications in the Cloud
With the onset of Cloud-based computing services the ability to integrate data from traditional transaction systems has become a “plug and play” for credit union marketers. These engagement platforms are shaking up the marketing ecosystem by allowing you to create content, refine your messaging, and define the channel delivery from one single point of service. Cloud-based communications services, like OMI’s TransXaction, aggregate all the channels, messaging, campaigns, and promotions into a single view that provides analytics and reporting in ways that encourage a better return on your efforts and ultimately drive value to credit union shareholders in ways that traditional approaches simply do not do.
Compounding Improvements
Now is the time for credit union executives to take an inventory of their various member marketing processes and work to consolidate disparate activities with the aim to eliminate unnecessary costs and redundant effort. A holistic approach using Cloud-based systems enable marketing staff to execute effective campaigns that ultimately drive deposits, loans and auxiliary services that grow shareholder value. Consider mobile, social, print, online and e-mail to be one multi-faceted environment not separate pieces of the puzzle.
Catalyst for Change
Cloud services are empowering credit unions with new and effective member communications and marketing tools. But the technology alone will not bring about effective change. Credit union marketers must be the catalysts to create, manage and drive messaging across key channels where members engage; it just takes the willingness to reboot the “way we’ve always done it” mind set. Imagine eliminating disparate activities and systems and instead envision better analytics and reporting, more effective marketing and lower operational cost.
Brad Banyas is CEO of OMI, a leading Managed Communication Service Provider that assists organizations in transitioning print communications to the paperless world. OMI products, Statement2web® and TransXAction, ™ provide a single point for creating, managing, and measuring customer communications of all kinds. OMI enables business-changing strategies that utilize daily, weekly and monthly customer communications as focal points to reduce cost, increase revenue, improve brand loyalty and boost customer satisfaction. Visit www.omi.co.
