LAS VEGAS—Three credit union marketers representing a range of experience and asset sizes were part of a panel discussion Q&A here that covered everything from how to handle criticism in social media, how to deal with lending peaks and valleys, the effectiveness of direct mail, and more.
The panel took place at the CUNA Marketing & Business Development Council’s annual meeting. Taking questions from the audience as panelists were Rich Jones, the former SVP-marketing with the $1-billion Elements Financial, who is now with Leading2Leadership, Tucson, Ariz; Josh McAfee, VP-marketing with the $232-million Leaders CU in Jackson, Tenn., and Chris Phillips, VP-marketing with the $212-million Land of Lincoln CU in Decatur, Ill.
From left, Rich Jones, Josh McAfee and Chris Phillips at CUNA Marketing and Business Development Council annual meeting in Las Vegas.
Below is a look at some of the questions from audience-members, and the panelists’ responses:
Q: How would you or should you respond to a bad comment about the credit union made online?
McAfee: In social media reputation management and handling of negative comments (has become very important). If you’re handling your credit union’s reputation online, you need to have as as many resources in your hand as possible to let you handle it 24/7. Don’t let negative comments sit out there for any time; address them as soon as possible. Even if you don’t have a good answer, people want an answer, even if it’s ‘I’m sorry that happened to you.’ Acknowledge a bad situation and then try to resolve it, and try to move offline as quickly as you can.
What we’ve done is offered face-to-face meetings. I took a guy to lunch one time after he blew us up on Twitter over holds on checks at ATMs. After he was satisfied and happy with where it had gone, I asked if he would mind getting back online and telling people the issue was resolved. We weren’t able to take away the deposit-hold policy, but we were able to explain why it is in place.
I also recommend that you do your homework if it’s a product or service issue. It means a lot to the member if the person responding takes the issue personally.
And don’t delete negative posts when they come in. That really looks scuzzy. That’s a black hat behavior. But if it is a negative posting on your website or Facebook, keep a log and make sure your compliance staff have a copy of any kind of dialogue that took place.
Q: We are having a real struggle with lending. Volume rises and then it falls off. How can we be more consistent?
Jones: It sounds like your efforts are promotion driven, which has a cyclical nature. So you need to build into your DNA consistent promotion. What are you doing during those dark times to fill that channel with cheaper marketing?
One thing we did was put an initiative into place where you have members schedule times to come into branches to review their credit report, and we could help them discover where they were spending money on loans that would be better served by the credit union.
You need to make sure your marketing efforts aren’t peaked and ‘valleyed.’ A content marketing approach is what we use, which is more pull marketing than push marketing. You put out content on how to buy a car, for instance, and then you follow it up with another post on how to sell a car, and then a third post on how to talk to the F&I guy, and a fourth post that we have a great rate. What content marketing does is make your member feel like you are more a part of the process.
McAfee: Something else to consider is adjusting the compensation structure for staff. And I don’t just mean for loans, but for the other stuff that also goes around the loans. You can get the loan volume if you incent heavily for the products that surround that loan.
Phillips: That can take time. Some of our staff can make up to $15,000 a year extra as a result (of incentives). The big thing is at the front line. We originally had our teller lines trying to cross-sell, but we moved that to ‘touch points’ where they basically just have the tellers mention something and then pass the member on to other staff. But the big thing is to have goals here. If you’re going to make cold calls and you’ve pulled credit reports, to me it’s the easiest call you’re going to make.
McAfee: If you have Marquis or a MCIF, you have an approved/not funded list. That list may have a lot of opportunity on it. These are members approved for a loan, but they never took advantage of it. You can have a couple of ‘call nights’ per month, or feed to the lowest-performing branch, because they’re hungry.
Q: How you recommend CUs get top of wallet with debit/credit cards and Apple Pay.
Jones: That’s a tough one. I think it’s going to have to be analytics-based. You need to know which members have a debit card and how they’re using it, if they’re using it at all. So go after your inactives--which means an inactive checking account, too--and give them incentives to activate an account they already have. The same thing is true with credit cards. Know your transactors and your revolvers. One thing to also know is that you’ll never be top of wallet unless you raise their credit limit. People spend up to 60% of credit limit, and then it goes to the bottom of their wallet.
McAfee: Go into your (MCIF); members have opted in, whether they know it or not, to look at all their other business. The nice thing about Apple Pay is it’s the great equalizer. (Your card is) going to function the exact same as Capital One or BofA or anyone else. At the end of the day it comes down to other things. So if you look at your (MCIF) data you’ll be able to pick up some trends pretty quickly.
Q: With everyone moving to digital, how effective is direct mail now?
Phillips: Partly, that depends on your membership base. For us, we still have quite a bit of older members—not that they don’t use digital media—so we still see some success with direct marketing. We do less of it and try to pad it as much as we can with our email marketing.
Jones: I would do a quick A/B test. I’d split my list in half, send half an email and send half direct mail. If you get significant lift from that email, I’d question the direct mail expense.
McAfee: But make sure there is some sort of call to action that is trackable, especially with the direct mail. Are you familiar with EDDM--Every Door Direct Mail? It’s a discounted postage rate if you select postal zones rather than individual recipients. So you can hit entire mail routes, which is really nice if you’re prospecting.
Q: How often can you email your members?
Jones: That’s driven more about how relevant the email is to the receiver. If the email is not relevant, then one is too many. But if I’m in the market for (the email message offer), then I can get three or four of those, and I’m OK. I do think you need to have a meter set per household on how much email that household will receive. But relevancy is more important than the number of emails.