Banking is becoming increasingly competitive as alternative payment methods continue to grow. Digital wallets, electronic payment providers, and online banks are just a few of the competitors vying for banking customers’ transactions. Accenture reports that about 60% of customers report use online banking at least once a week while only 35% of consumers still do not use their mobile phone for banking.

Customers expect online and mobile features to be cohesive with the rest of their customer experience. Customer disappointment stems from the lack of integrated, cohesive end-to-end banking customer experiences. Only 27% of consumers say the experience they receive from their bank’s branch, online and mobile channels is completely seamless—down 7 percentage points in just one year.

Adoption of online and mobile banking applications is critical to customer satisfaction. Tailoring communications based on behavior is a proven technique at driving adoption and usage of online and mobile bill pay. The following is a mini-case study for a digital data-driven program enabled by marketing automation. Marketing automation driven by business rules allows the program to be versioned and executed efficiently.

The program is organized into streams. Each stream is aligned to a key customer behavior. Behaviors trigger a series of communications. Customer behavior determines whether they remain in a stream or are triggered to move into a new stream. For example, prospects that initiate the sign-up process, but leave the landing page before all steps are completed are members of the “Abandoners” stream.

The five key streams used in this banking campaign are based on behavioral definitions. Business rules use the behavioral definitions to trigger communications:

  • Acquisition – converting the prospect to a customer, to begin using the service (this data is imported as the starting point)
  • Welcome – series of multiple emails to drive adoption, initial contact sent upon sign-up, follow-up email series triggered if set-up wasn’t completed
  • Abandoner – re-targeted users that visited the sign-up landing page, but didn’t complete the enrollment process
  • Lapsed – series of emails aimed at re-engaging with those customers that stopped using the banking service for X days, incentives have been tested to understand the motivating thresholds
  • Power users – a stream of communications are triggered that encourage new product application for users that login and use the service X times within X days; the goal of this series is to turn heavy users into advocates, lifelong customers and deepen the relationship for future up-selling

A series of email streams were used for each of the behavior segments. Each stream has 3 to 4 emails.  Each series is directed to a different landing page to drive a specific action for service sign-up.

This program was developed for a division of Jack Henry, iPay Solutions. iPay Solutions provides online bill and payment solutions. Ultimately this triggered program had over 4000 banks and credit unions participate. The program was hugely successful with above industry open and click-through rates. The program grew overall transaction volume by 18%.

Sheera Eby collaborated with the Chief Marketing Officer to architect the strategy and oversaw the team that execution as well as handled the set-up and management of the marketing automation.