Does your credit union effortlessly acquire new members? if so, this post is not for you! However, if you work for a select employer group SEG-based credit union and you’re looking to grow your memberships, read on.
Have you been frustrated with how to target SEG members when the SEG isn’t as supportive as they used to be? Do you sometimes feel like your member growth strategy is stuck because you are leaking members? If you have challenges finding members and growing your credit union membership, this blog is for you!
1. Stop the leaking
First, before you spend any time trying to add new members, you MUST stop the leaking. Most credit unions don’t realize that 25–40% of all new members walk back out the door in the first 100 days. I know it’s shocking, but we have seen it over and over again.
The reality is, we get the member through door, open their account, and then everyone pats themselves on the back and forgets about them. Unfortunately, just because the new member nibbled the free sample, that doesn’t mean they want to buy the product. Most people will try anything once, but it’s the onboarding and engagement process that truly converts new members to loyal ones.
Here is the proof of one client for whom we ran an automated onboarding engagement process. Over a 90-day period, we saw their churn rate drop from 39% to 7%. This means if you are adding 1,000 checking accounts per month, you would grow members by 11,610 instead of 7,32. That’s about 4,000 more members over one year!
How did we do it? Well, we leveraged analytics, enterprise automation, and marketing automation to understand where the member was in their journey. Then, our platform triggers educational content and experiences to give the member have a highly personalized and relevant digital journey.
Let us know if you want some help! At the end of the day, if you did nothing else, you could still grow your membership by simply improving your retention rate and capturing a bigger piece of your current pie.
2. Convince your SEG to give you employee lists
Great. Now that you’ve stopped the leaking, let’s discuss adding more people to the top of the funnel. To do that, contact each of your SEGs and find out if they are willing to share their employee email list(s) and allow you to send a few emails a year. Then, create a special offer to get those new employees through the door!
3. Credit union SEG targeting
Take all of your SEGs and rank them as follows:
- Propensity to grow: are they actively trying to grow, or are they just plodding along?
(Navy FCU grows a small credit union a day because the NAVY is a great SEG that is always growing and churning new recruits and members.)
- Ease of doing business: are they super credit union friendly and easy to work with?
- Speed of decisions: do they take forever to make decisions, or do they move quickly?
Once you have this list, build a strategy to target your top 20 SEGs and don’t worry about the rest. Focus your attention on the biggest fish with the best ability to grow. Tailor everything to them. You don’t have to fire the rest, but don’t worry too much about them.
Most businesses spend their time tailoring their services to the 20% of customers who complain rather than the 20% who like them as they are. It’s much easier to focus on finding more SEGs like your best ones instead of trying to be what you aren’t!
4. List building
One of the strategies we have used for some of our clients is to extract and build custom lists based on LinkedIn profiles. Most of your SEG employees will show their employer on their LinkedIn profiles. If so, we can extract all of those past and current employees (and refresh quarterly for new employees) and then provide list enhancement services to add email addresses, phone numbers, etc.
From there, we use marketing automation to warm up the list in a GDPR compliant manner and send content about the pain they might experience at other financial institutions. If you are really bold, you might send an offer! However, we generally find that it’s better to build a relationship before going into sales mode.
5. Social media strategy, Google Adwords, Facebook ads, and retargeting
Repeated impressions are key in the marketing world. The more times a consumer seems your brand, the more likely they are to do businesses with you. As you go through the strategies above, make sure you have a way to integrate content with your social media strategy. You should then drive additional traffic through Google and Facebook ads (along with retargeting) to those prospects throughout the digital marketing ecosystem. We’ve found that marketing automation is a very effective way to accomplish this and grow you credit union’s membership.
6. ATM placement
Do your SEGs tend to congregate around specific locations? Strategic ATM placement in these high-traffic locations can provide extra convenience to members. For example, you might place an ATM in the lobby of an office building or in the break room of a factory. Even a simple cash-dispensing ATM can reinforce your brand, improving retainment and conversion.
As an incentive to increase conversion, the ATM could be surcharge free for members. Non-members who want to use the ATM may join the credit union to enjoy the fee-free perks of the ATM near their workplace.
Final Thoughts about SEG Marketing
As you go through all of these strategies, you can build a member generating machine that allows you to highly personalize and target key SEGs and prospects while keeping a bigger piece of the pie! Put them all together and get your credit union membership growth strategy on track!
Need help? Want to see more about how we make it work? Learn more here!
