Best practices for community banks and credit unions in successfully marketing investment services to their account holders.
Financial Institutions are not typically known for ground breaking marketing. Big Brand Banks rely on massive budgets over creativity - Capital One alone spent almost $5bn in 2023 and they are far from the largest. Community FI's don't have those budgets.
A key challenge is that whilst earning and spending money is a high interest topic for most people storing it (banking) is not. Additionally banking is essentially the same product proposition as it was 50 years ago. There is just a limited amount new to say.
By comparison Fintech companies have used marketing and product innovation as the key part of their value proposition. The average consumer focussed Fintech is communicating something to their customers through multiple different channels every few days - sometimes more. The average Community FI maybe once a month or even a quarter. For the Fintech community marketing is a core competence.
investing offers Community FI's not just a new product feature but a new way to communicate and engage with their customers with frequent, permissioned and personalized multi-channel communications. This keeps the FI top of mind, encourages them to engage with the brand and increase the frequency of logging in and using digital banking.
Take a look at the variety of ways Robinhood uses to intereact with their customers above and beyond paid advertising:
- Robinhood Snacks - Weekly email with personal finance and investing news and editorial
- Pricing notifications - ad hoc often daily price notifications
- How to emails - when you open an account you will receive emails every week or two on how to use the service and reminding you to complete certain actions e.g. linking a bank, making your first trade etc.
- Promotions - at least once a month an email product promotion with Robinhood Gold being especially hard pushed in recent months and more recently their new Credit Card
This adds up with barely a day going by without some sort of communication from them to their customers but its highly varied, is personalized to an extent and to some extent information that a customer might find useful at some point. The urge to block them is mitigated by the fear you might miss out on something that will benefit you.
Unifimoney is a turnkey digital wealth management platform enabling Community Financial Institutions to compete with Fintechs and Big Brand Banks at high speed, low cost and without the need for technical integration. Owned by Palm Ventures a large family office backed investment firm. If you would like to speak to us please reach out or visit the website.
