Correspondent Blog

In banking, there is often a discussion about “who are our best customers?” Some banks rank customers against current profitability, others against lifetime profitability, and some use a technique called “RFM,” which stands for “Recency,” “Frequency,” and “Monetary.” This article explores the methodology and shows you what this analysis means for a typical bank. How…

One of the lessons that was driven home at the recent American Banker Small Business Banking Conference in Nashville was the difference in marketing between large national banks and community banks, particularly deposit marketing. Most national and regional banks allocate marketing resources to recently acquired customers to get them to build deposit balances and purchase…

If you want to know if your bank has an alignment problem, ask ten co-workers, ”What is your bank’s brand value proposition? If 80% or more say close to the same thing – that is fantastic, and you are likely in the top 1% of bank performance. If 60% of your co-workers say the same…

If you want to grab a material amount of new deposit balance, offer a 5.05% money market rate, post it all over Instagram, and sit back and watch the money roll in. This approach has many problems, the first of which is a negative return on your investment (ROI). You will also end up cannibalizing…

Maybe you saw Oppenheimer over the weekend, maybe it was Barbie, or perhaps you did the “Barbenheimer” thing and did both. Maybe you opted for Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part I. No matter your choice, there was a clear winner: Barbie. Film quality aside, there have been few movies in the history of the…

If you are looking to see the future of how banks will utilize artificial intelligence (AI), look no further than marketing. Even if you are not a bank marketer, this article is worth a read to understand AI’s capabilities. Bank marketing AI is ground zero to showcase the transformation that is already taking place. We…

Last week, the American Banking Association (ABA) held its annual Bank Marketing Conference in Denver, receiving rave reviews. The theme was – developing your marketing superpowers. Amid the brewery networking, superhero costumes, and fun, some fantastic bank marketing lessons were had, and not just for bank marketers. The theme was how marketing needs to be…

In the olden days, if you wanted to market deposits, the head of Retail would come to Marketing and say something like – “We need to raise deposits.” Marketing would then put together some ideas for a print or digital campaign; Retail would sign off on it, and then they would roll it out. Maybe…

Email is one of the most effective bank marketing channels available. Most banks send emails with little regard to optimization – they create an email, then send it. Other banks, like ourselves previously, pour over countless amounts of data to optimize open rates, clicks, and conversions. Now, it is about personalization and using artificial intelligence…

In an earlier article, we discussed how we use “cost per impression” as a metric for planning, budgeting, and executing bank events that are specific for customer retention and branding. In this post, we expand that analysis and apply it to those events that a bank hosts or participates in designed to generate leads (“lead…

Banks don’t respect the power of understanding customer lifetime value (CLV). It is the one performance metric with the highest correlation to long-term bank profitability, around 88%. It is more important than margin, cost of funds, non-interest income, and loan profitability COMBINED. Not only do few banks calculate it, but many banks also spend resources…

How many “How to Market to Millennials” sessions or “How to Attract Gen-Z” have you sat through? Chances are you were wasting your time focusing on demographic segmentation. Every generation is indeed influenced by different environmental forces such as – war, protests, smartphones, social media, or crypto — but there is little evidence that shows…