Does your credit union need real-time analytics? I hear this question all the time from marketers. They’re perfectly happy using their MCIFs and their Raddon data and Experian data to help them figure out who to market to on a day-to-day basis.
In this post, we’re going to cover real-time analytics here, and how much you need it.
Real-time analytics is all about creating a more dynamic, faster-moving, more timely, personalized way to interact with your member in their digital marketing experience. This all comes back to the four Ps of marketing, which we talk about all the time, but also the 4 Ps of data. The 4 Ps of data are Performance, Personalization, Prediction, and Privacy. So those data elements are key.
Now, I’ll tell you first off: I don’t think real time marketing is all that necessary. I do think “near real-time analytics” – by which I mean daily or weekly data feeds, not monthly or quarterly and certainly not yearly data feeds. The reality is your members’ needs and wants are always changing, and I find it frustrating as a member of multiple credit unions, who, when I’ll take their promotion, their new certificate, or their new credit card, keep marketing the same silly product over and over again.
That generally makes me think the brand doesn’t know what it’s doing: because you don’t realize I’ve already taken it, and you’re wasting my resources as your member to keep trying to sell me the same thing you’ve already sold me. We all get so much marketing information all the time, from TV, from email, text messages, from every channel out there, that really valuing your members’ time is key, and they’ll appreciate and reward that with better trust. They’re going to love your credit union more. So once you take that real-time data and personalize it, it becomes effective in your digital marketing channel.
There are 6 types of data your credit union actually needs and six questions that are answered:
| Data Type | Question Answered |
| 1. Inbound Analytics- Search and Web | What problems does your member want to solve? |
| 2. Transactions Analytics | What has changed in their life? |
| 3. Design Data | What is the best solution for the problem based on their life stage and the problems they have? |
| 4. Profitability Data | How do we make sure we are here tomorrow? |
| 5. Wallet Share and Competitor Data | What solutions do they have from other competitors that I can easily steal? |
| 6. Trigger or Execution Data | When should I educate or propose the solution? |
Ultimately, the panacea of real-time marketing data is all about triggers, and that comes from transactions. It’s looking at your treasure trove of data, knowing that a person just got married, or they’re thinking of going to school, or they’re touring colleges, or looking at buying cars. A huge portion of that data can be found in the transaction-level data. When that information is combined with their search results that you’re getting from your marketing automation, the email campaigns they’re responding to, and the things that are showing up in branches, all of that starts to paint a really useful picture. If you’re able to coordinate that and use Nexxus Intelligence or another data analytics company to tie all that stuff together, it creates this great picture that allows you to really personalize and use the four Ps of marketing (Price, Product, Place, and Promotion) in this mode that really drives that value proposition for the member.
Most credit unions have one or two of those data points – very few have all six. But that’s more key than your credit union having a credit warehouse or other tools out there. It’s far more important to just figure out, “How can I get all this information about how my members are interacting with me, and what types of triggers I’m going to need to trigger to compartmentalize for the next marketing message?” Real-time marketing is key to maximizing that and to creating a great digital experience for your members across all your digital marketing channels.
In closing: does your credit union need real-time marketing? Well, it probably doesn’t need real-time marketing, but it absolutely needs near real-time marketing. That is absolutely key, and it will be important as you build out your marketing technology stack, your data analytics, your marketing automation, your new website design, and your email campaign. As you start building all of those pieces, that real-time or near real-time marketing is going to be really key to delivering the triggers and creating a great digital marketing experience.
Ready to embrace digital marketing? Buy the Credit Union 2.0 book to learn more!
