Thing 7 of 30: Ask for your members' e-mail addresses

September is 30 things I would implement or consider implementing at my credit union if I was a credit union leader.

Thing 7: Ask for your members' e-mail addresses

I know social media is all the rage, but what about good old-fashioned e-mail? Whenever we are developing an integrated marketing campaign for credit unions, we always ask the question, "Have your members opted into an e-mail mailing list that we can utilize?" The answers range from "No" to "We have a few."

As I mentioned in thing 5, maintaining a personal relationship with credit union members is only going to get harder. With the convenience of online banking and debit and credit cards, members rarely come into the branch anymore. Having the authorization to send personalized and relevant e-mails from time is a tremendous relationship building and marketing tool and bridges the gap left by a lack of face time with your members.

Take iTunes for example. In five years of its existence, Apple now has 100,000,000 accounts with credit card and e-mail information! I am one of those account holders and I gladly receive a weekly e-mail announcing new music and specials that are relevant to me. Audible (now a division of Amazon) also does a great job of sending me personalized e-mails on a regular basis that alert me of audiobook titles that I might want to consider spending my credits on.

Credit unions don't do this and they are missing a huge opportunity to deepen member relationships and also to cross sell relevant products and services on an ongoing basis.

There are numerous e-mail services that you can use to manage your subscriber database and that will allow you to publish personalized and professional-looking e-mails. I did a fair amount of research on this recently and chose Aweber for all of our Young & Free and Mommy Blogger programs.

Others e-mail services that I considered include Constant Contact , iContact, Emma  and Mail Chimp. And if you are looking to go beyond simple e-updates, definitely check out DigitalMailer. It is a credit-union industry CUSO that can also handle all of your e-statement and mobile alert needs in addition to marketing e-mails.

If I were a credit union leader, I would definitely put some serious effort into getting every single one of my members signed up for e-mail communications.

Tim

Challenge marketing for credit unions part 0: A preface

It's time for a meaty series of blog posts. This is part 0 of however many it takes.

Currency Marketing works exclusively with credit unions. That I know. However, for awhile now I have been wrestling with what Currency Marketing does for credit unions. We have been the agency of record, the design studio, the brand consultancy, the interactive agency and the communications firm. To cover all of the bases, we call ourselves a credit union marketing agency. 

But then this wildly successful social-media-plus-user-generated-video-Internet-contest-spokester-extravaganza-campaign-that-never-ends-marketing-mash-up-program took us in a new direction and has given us a new competency in something very exciting and very different.

At first, I thought it was social media marketing, but that's not enough. Social media is just one success factor. The more I think about it, the more I like the term challenge marketing.

In fact, I feel so strongly about this type of marketing approach that I have changed the positioning of our firm. This is what we do.

Super-charged credit union member engagement. Driving product sales and member growth through powerful challenge marketing programs.

If you don't believe me, check out our new homepage.

I will remember 2008 as The Year of Dozens of Long Flights. I prefer the aisle seat, because I can easily grab my laptop from the overhead compartment and plunk away when the feeling hits me. On a few of the longer flights, I have been attempting to write a white paper that reverse engineers Young & Free Alberta's success.

But I realize now that I work better in blog post chunks. So, I am going to bash out a series of posts that identify the success factors of challenge marketing. And, ideally, you the reader will challenge me in the comments and in the end I will have what I need to put it all together and have the white paper that I have been hoping for.

Here are the sections that I will write about:

1. An introduction to challenge marketing—moving beyond passive contesting and throw-away promotions
2. Getting comfortable with sales and marketing on the social web and how to keep things local
3. Designing a challenge, a product offer and a reward that are sure to ignite a niche group and align with your credit union's goals and objectives
4. Using traditional and non-traditional marketing to jump start your program
5. Should you require a log-in to participate?
6. Building your program on a suitable web platform
7. Creating a steady stream of entertaining and educational content
8. Encouraging multiple levels of participation that build and reward an army of followers
9. Setting participation goals and consistently measuring
10. Allocating appropriate resources and support and figuring out who should be involved

Does that sound like a good plan to you? I am sure I have missed something, but 10 parts will be a great start. And now that I have put it out there, I have to complete it.

Tim

Get on the e-mail boat-now!

In the last week or so I've had conversations with two different clients that went like this.

• Me: "So about how many member e-mail addresses do you have for this group?"
• Them: "Uh, I think about... I'm not sure. Maybe a couple hundred?"
• Me: "Is it part of your application process to collect an e-mail address?"
• Them: "Yes. Well... it was on the online app, but I think... (to the other "them" at the table) do we have it on the form in-branch? I think so."

People. PEOPLE! You need to be actively collecting e-mail addresses. Here's why, courtesy of my Twitter friend Ron Shevlin who tweeted the link (e-mail me if you are scratching your head over "Twitter" and "tweeted"):

E-MAILS SENT TO HOUSE FILES FOUND TO PRODUCE HIGHEST RETURN-ON-INVESTMENT FOR SOLICITING DIRECT ORDERS

ORLANDO, FL, OCTOBER 13, 2003 -- A new landmark study from the Direct Marketing Association (The DMA) found that e-mail offers, particularly those sent to in-house customer lists, produced the highest overall return-on-investment (ROI) for marketers focusing on soliciting direct orders, generating leads or building store traffic.

Copy and pasted totally without permission from The Direct Marketing Association

There's more to this article (and I sincerely apologize for the screaming caps– their choice, not mine) but you can see why it's VITAL that we are building e-mail databases.

There's no excuse. You're sitting at your computer right now, so you can e-mail everyone who needs to make this change. I mean it.

Nala