Quarterly goal data tracking is important to a Credit Union, but to a digital marketing company perhaps it’s greatest utility comes after the fact, as hindsight, and even then only as a technical means to measure the accuracy and range of our ability to highlight, seek and find a motivated online clientele in search of a solution to a problem.
But just how many leads actually follow through and sign up as a new account or apply and qualify for a 30-year home loan, or recruit family and friends to join for a cash incentive?
Credit Unions that track this data can determine how much it costs to execute a marketing objective in their sales department and then quantify its worth against a backdrop of earnings or deposits.
We lean forward on our own digital marketing data and use it to make decisions about what to do in our area of expertise, how to structure our search for online behavior, and how to set digital yardlines on the field of play.
And we work towards a digital marketing culture of accountability and transparency.
This is why we measure our digital marketing data in light of the goals our client has set out to achieve. We can almost always tell you how often and precisely when who from where has looked at your content, and for how long at which place you have shown them, and then tell you just how often on average they’ve opted in to asking for contact that opens the door to sales.
We can do these things and more because when customers opt-in wherever they choose to click, their progressive and interconnected activity releases a tight burst of classifying data that immediately updates our perception of just who is responding to our approach and just how likely a similarly profiled individual would reliably repeat the same behaviors.
We can see where and when the most agreeable times for publishing are rewarded with contact, and we can measure how tightly connected most verified online leads truly are.
CASE STUDY
Our client is a Credit Union. Their goal is to increase memberships and open more accounts and serve more members. They know that it costs $181 to acquire a customer on average based on two membership drives. How did they come to learn this? Let’s take a look:
Their VP of Marketing sent us this:
MGMT team planning session –
VP of Retail wonders:
‘Does $50 promo to attract new members result in them sticking around?’
Fair question. Same Q over the ‘Bring ‘Em In’ promo:
‘Do members who refer friends and family all get $50 & stick around, too?’
In short, VP of Retail wants to know:
‘Do either of the campaigns result in members staying?’
or is it just a case of: ‘Get my $50 and run’?
Well, I asked our business analyst to create a report of:
Active vs. Closed accounts, for our promotions:
BRINGEMIN (member referral),
and;
50FORME (Get $50),
plus their average balance, so I could measure deposit impact of these members.
The VP of MKTG told us:
The results are really interesting!
50FORME
(open new free online DDeposit check acct w eStatements get $50)
338 – Total new accounts opened since 2016
267 – STILL ACTIVE
71 – CLOSED (21% of total new accounts are closed)
$4,554,463.74 avg TOTAL DEPOSIT BALANCE of 267 still active
Cost to acquire 338 members
($50 payout each plus advertising cost since 2016): $180.17
BRINGEMIN
(refer a friend, both get $50 on membership criteria approval)
999 – Total new accounts opened since program intro in 2016
753 – STILL ACTIVE
246 – CLOSED (24.6% of total new accounts are closed)
$4,806,435.75 avg TOTAL DEPOSIT BALANCE of 753 still active
Cost to acquire 999 members
($50 payout each plus advertising cost since 2016): $191.10
So for these programs, avg cost $185 to acquire a new member.
We sign up 22.5% that wind up leaving.
The BRINGEMIN member referral campaign brings in the most members by 3X, yet the average daily balance is nearly equal, even though the 50FORME campaign has about 1/3 fewer members.
$185 cost average to acquire one customer – for the credit union, what is the benefit of determining this statistic ?
When you know this cost-per-acquisition number it makes accountability transparent. The industry benchmark is around $500, first of all. This statistic is a dollar-driven way to measure how effective your marketing efforts are. In sales this is when they ask what is the close rate.
Credit unions are unlike shoe brands or regular commerce. A new account is likely to bank there for life, buying and using every product they have: savings, checking, credit cards, auto loans, CDs, retirement IRAs, mortgages and student loans.
The money spent to acquire one customer at a credit union buys a purchase that often lasts more than a hundred years, as friends and family members and kids also come to open accounts.
What we can’t do on the Unimarketa infrastructure side is learn how much it costs our clients to land a customer and earn a profit, so what did we learn in the chat message ?
All credit unions can do this type of analysis, but it’s time consuming. The backend of credit union financial data is inaccessible to us because we’re not their business analytics department.
We are a part of marketing: the phones ring, the door swings and applications are submitted, that’s what we do. We can’t know what happens in a credit union after the application has been submitted and we can’t track from lead to closing.
This info was a BIG DEAL for the client to manually collect.
We can say that there are this many submissions and they are up 10% but we’ve got no idea of closure rates or failures. This is called gap data. In this case it shows a true return on investment.
When he says “MEASURE DEPOSIT IMPACT” what is this metric for a credit union and why is it internally important ?
This is another way of saying ‘how much money came in’ because of these new accounts. A credit union is a balance of cash and loans.
Credit unions always have either too many loans, and need cash, or too much cash, and need loans. It’s a pendulum that is always swinging. Too much cash is a problem, because they make money from their loans.
This credit union sent out the language ‘we need more money’ with their marketing campaign, and then asks ‘how much from the campaigns did we get?’ by determining their acquisition cost per customer, which in this case is the whole budgeted marketing campaign plus the bonus cash awards at sign-on.
Our first priority at Unimarketa is to help you grow your business. Big brands care about eyeballs, Coke and Nike are everywhere, and for small businesses and credit unions that have digital marketing strategies that mimic Coke and Nike eyeball goals are wasting money.
The old KPIs: eyeballs, clicks, page views and sessions, that’s old school. 10 million page views with no FOMY, what’s the point? It’s based on performance.
If you’re not tracking facing the chart form day one, you’re selling an empty bag of sand, with no sense of accountability. It’s eye-opening for clients but most digital marketers don’t even know to ask this question, and the unique advantage and value proposition that Unimarketa offers it that we base our numbers on real metrics that others don’t know or didn’t even know existed.