Business Problem

A Texas-focused community bank needed to grow deposits to fund its loan demand. At the same time, the bank wanted to grow market share – adding new deposit customers across its 22 established branches.

Solution

Bankers often believe direct mail doesn’t work and is too expensive. With FI Works, this community bank proved this presumption wrong. Using its powerful sales and marketing software, FI Works collaborated closely with the bank’s marketing team to develop a highly targeted direct mail campaign that really paid off.

Together, they decided on new deposit special offers that would attract new customers and FI Works analyzed the bank’s current customer data to understand how to profile the best targets in each branch’s market. FI Works also facilitated the campaign execution and recommended a single, cost-efficient mailer to position the most desirable deposit products based on the characteristics of each targeted customer.

Campaign Details

The new deposit campaign was executed over a six week period and consisted of a single, standalone direct mail piece that was customized to come from each branch. Here’s how the campaign was executed:

We solve the data dilemma in banking.

Solving the Data Dilemma

Customer Data

A critical component of the FI Works solution is its ability to consolidate and cleanse a bank’s customer data. On a daily basis, customer data is collected across the different banking systems, consolidated in the FI Works software platform and cleansed for duplicate information. This provides a complete view of all the bank’s up-to-date customers and the foundation needed for accurate targeting analysis.

Targeted List Acquisition

Using the platform’s results of its “Look Alike” profiling, FI Works cloned these characteristics to acquire a list of highly targeted non-customers for the bank to use in the campaign. Working with the list vendor, different rules (mile radius and lifestyle clusters) were used to make sure both urban and the more rural branches had strong targeted lists for the campaign.  FI Works also used its automated tools to cleanse the acquired list eliminating customers that should not be contacted.

Smart Personalization

Based on the targeted profiling characteristics, FI Works provided variable data to the printer and mail house so the letter could be personalized for each branch and branch manager and personalize the offers based on the deposit products the targeted customer had the highest propensity to need.

We make intelligent targeting easy for bank sales and marketing

Making Intelligent Targeting Easy

“Look Alike” profiling

One of the unique capabilities of the FI Works software platform is its predictive analytics engine. Using advanced statistical and machine learning techniques, FI Works analyzed the bank’s current customers across a multitude of dimensions for each of its 22 branches. The results identified trends and demographic characteristics (lifestyle clusters plus others) not just of customers that have deposit accounts, but those that had recently opened accounts (over the last 12 to 24 months). Using this “look alike” profiling intelligence, FI Works now had very targeted criteria to purchase a list of non-customer households from a list broker.

Narrowing the Field to Improve Results

FI Works’ Intelligent Targeting enabled the bank to send its mailer to a much smaller, yet highly qualified list of targets. The FI Works’ analytics enabled the bank to reduce the number of people to mail without reducing the response – making this a very inexpensive direct mail campaign that yielded big results.

We drive high-performance behavior.

Driving High-Performance Behavior

Campaign Dashboard Monitors Results

As part of the campaign, the FI Works account representative set up a dashboard to track the day-by-day performance of the new deposit acquisition campaign. The standalone direct mail campaign did not include any banker outreach. The dashboard provided visibility to marketing’s direct mail response rate and the number of new deposit customers added from the mailer, by branch.

Visibility to What Worked and What Didn’t

Another valuable benefit of the visibility the FI Works dashboard delivered was that the bank’s marketing team could see what was working and what wasn’t. Armed with this information, the bank expanded the mile radius for some branches and tweaked the product offers when it repeated the campaign in the future.

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The Proof is in the Numbers

6 week campaign

22 branches (3-10 mile radius)

1 low-cost mailer

$50 million new deposit customers