How often do your new customers show up and open an account or fill out a loan application as a first touch? No engagement. No using a calculator or other onsite content? No social media referral?
If you’re like most institutions, this scenario happens with 40-60% of new customer acquisitions. They just show up and convert. However, they’re a small part of a much larger audience that doesn’t even consider you. You are cut out of the opportunity to engage with this crowd and influence their decision.
Customers have much more freedom in their own journey. Search, social media, 3rd party rating/recommendation, like Nerdwallet, all give a path for discovery and decision before your customer even knows you exist.
Similarly, existing customers may turn to you unprompted with a new need, life event, or transaction. Or they may not even consider you, even thought they’re a deposit or borrower.
In both of these situations you’re confronted with a potential opportunity, but lack the clear indications of a customer walking up and telling you they’d like to do business with you. This hampers your ability to engage with them in a personal way, that matches the stage in their journey.
While digital channels and advertising networks are lousy with data, “activating” that data, or putting into a context that you can act on, is harder to get. It takes effort, and spending time and energy in areas many competitors don’t. Some of the struggles that stand in your way:
- Anonymous web traffic, growing with marginalizing of cookies
- Reduced effectiveness and insight from ad networks (e.g. downstream effect of Apple’s ATT initiative)
- The moving goal post of SEO
- Missing or poorly understood mobile app usage
- Prospect and customer data existing in silos
All of these areas, often in concert, contain the insight you could be using to stand out and get ahead. Together in can provide you With a full view and control of your customer and prospect experience with your brand.
And provide them the stand out, personal service that community banking is built on.
If you think you’re missing insight into your customer journey, we’d love to talk about it and share what we’ve learned helping financial institutions like yours. Grab a 10-minute call to see if we can help.