Anywhere from a quarter to half of all banking purchases go to financial institutions that are not the consumer’s primary financial institutions (FIs). However, 78% of consumers who opened a loan in response to a direct offer from a competitor have stated that they would have purchased from their primary FI had that institution provided a similar offer. So how do you keep from missing those opportunities? Lauren Snow recently shared her thoughts on solving this issue in her presentation Optimize Applicant Engagement With Automated Cross-Sell at the 2023 MeridianLink® User Forum. Here are some of her key takeaways and ideas:
Key Trends
While the above statistic is enough to make any FI take notice, understanding how to put it towards an actionable solution is not always so clear. Many banks and credit unions are struggling to leverage their existing data to build consumer loyalty and trust—and not because they don’t know that it’s important, but because data access is a true challenge. In fact, staff have difficulty turning their data into real insights because:
- 80% struggle with data reliability
- 73% can’t glean actionable insights from their data
- And 70% lack the resources to process and analyze the data that they do have
So, while 66% of consumers expect their FI to understand their unique needs and expectations and use those insights to deliver a personalized experience, the majority of institutions don’t have the tools in place to do so.
How MeridianLink Can Help
Leveraging data from MeridianLink® One, including MeridianLink® Consumer and MeridianLink® Opening, provides these tools at users’ fingertips. Through proven marketing strategies and easy-to-implement campaigns, customers can finally optimize applicant engagement at their FIs–building stronger relationships and placing their financial institution top of mind.
Additionally, customers can solve challenges related to data reliability, access, insights, and resources by implementing MeridianLink® Engage and MeridianLink® Insight—our business intelligence tool and data analytics tool, respectively. This pairing helps staff uncover cross-sell opportunities for both deposit and lending accounts, including personal and vehicle loans, HELOCs, and credit cards. The process is simple:
- Create Targeted Campaign Lists: MeridianLink Insight analyzes applicant data with prescriptive filtering to uncover cross-sell target audiences by leveraging tradeline, credit, and organizational data.
- Quantify Opportunities To Understand Potential Impact: Insight provides current stats on target lists to understand the opportunity. This process does not require lists to be passed through Consumer or Opening.
- Execute Cross-Sell Campaigns: Target audiences are delivered to Engage for refinement and marketing deployment, including the use of pre-designed campaign templates for simple execution.
- Track Campaign Performance: Campaign performance is continuously monitored as it matures so you can make real-time adjustments for even more success, with the ability to view metrics including cross-sell, simple ROI, processing times, fallout, officers, and more.
The consumer experience is efficient and delivers that personalized touch vital to building lasting relationships. Place relevant campaigns in qualified applicants’ preferred channels, create personalized individual URLs, and allow those applicants to review a pre-filled application for submission to minimize barriers from start to finish and encourage application completion.
The Proof Is in the Pudding: A Customer’s Experience
FedChoice Federal Credit Union has been one of the first customers to take advantage of the power of Insight + Engage and has already seen impressive results. Its team used the combo’s cross-sell capabilities to target consumers interested in personal loans as well as consumers who are ready for a HELOC—here’s how each campaign shook out:
Personal Loan:
- Campaign ROI of 1,897%
- 7.05% audience qualification opening a new product
- 3% opened the personal loan
HELOC:
- Campaign ROI of 1,986%
- 12.05% audience qualification opening a new product
Read the full case study to learn how FedChoice launched successful cross-sell campaigns with Engage and Insight.
