Response Media
June 19, 2019 5 years ago
(1)Cross-selling and upselling products and services are critical to boosting sales and profits for banks and other financial institutions. After all, it’s much easier and less expensive to market to existing customers who are already predisposed to buy from you than it is to attract new customers. Digital marketing has opened up a whole new world of cross-selling opportunities for banks. Email marketing, in particular, makes it easy and cost-efficient to keep customers informed about additional bank products and services that might be beneficial for them.
Email Marketing Remains Effective
Research points to the effectiveness of email marketing today for many businesses. According to eMarketer, nearly three-quarters of marketers who use email marketing say it is either a good (44 percent) or excellent (30 percent) marketing channel. Total open rates for marketing emails are approaching 25 percent, with unique open rates at about 17 percent, notes eMarketer. The most successful digital cross-sell marketing campaigns personalize communications so offers are targeted to groups of recipients and are relevant and timely for their particular situation. The goal should be to send the right offer to the right customer at the right time, using the right communication channel. For example, you wouldn’t want to send special offers to open new checking accounts to your existing checking account customers or HELOC offers to customers who don’t own their homes. Doing so may frustrate your customers, many of whom may rightly believe your bank doesn’t know them or their needs very well. It could even prompt some of them to shop for a new bank.
Comprehensive Data Analytics Is Essential
Successful digital cross-selling requires comprehensive data analytics to provide you with current information about the products and services customers are currently using, as well as their Internet usage and buying patterns and whether they’ve reached out to the bank with any specific questions. The resulting 360-degree view of the customer will help you craft the right cross-sell and upsell offers for particular customer segments. When it comes to data analytics, the more current the data, the better. Customer information ages rapidly — one large U.S. bank determined that customer data older than 30 days had limited value and online leads could become stale after just a few days. This bank decided to take a last-in, first-out approach to responding to online leads to ensure the freshest leads got attention first, even at the risk of neglecting some old leads. While demographic data like age and income can be helpful in personalizing digital communications and targeting offers, it’s generally not as useful as tracking customers’ real-time behavior and transaction activity. Therefore, your bank should be relying mainly on these kinds of data analytics to guide you when targeting cross-sell offers to customer segments.
The Ideal Digital Cross-Selling Platform
Your digital cross-selling platform should allow you to adapt offers based on customers’ true needs at the moment. For example, let’s say you send out an offer for a travel rewards card based on data indicating a customer is a frequent traveler. But, the customer has scaled back on travel and now would prefer a cash-back rewards card. A sophisticated technology platform will be able to adapt the offer in real time so it’s more targeted to what the customer currently wants. The ideal digital cross-selling platform will also centralize customer data into an offer repository that’s accessible across all channels. This way, decision makers can see at a glance which offers have been accepted and rejected by which customers. And it will break down channel silos to ensure data collected via online channels is analyzed and quickly shared with the appropriate departments to avoid falling through the cracks and disappearing. In addition to email marketing, you can expand your digital cross-selling to social media channels. Some channels enable ad targeting to individuals who are on your email lists. Examples include Facebook’s and Snapchat’s Customer Audiences, Twitter’s Tailored Audiences, and LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences. Targeted ads appear as native content on these channels.
Cross-Sell and Upsell More Efficiently
Banks continue to rely on cross-selling products and services to increase sales and profits. This isn’t likely to change anytime soon, so it’s smart to consider how you can utilize digital marketing tools such as email and social media marketing to cross-sell and upsell more efficiently and cost-effectively.