Reg E Realities

Reg E ... Everyone's in a panic ... it's the End of fee income as we know it ... all Eyes are on Marketing to make it better.

Sounds like the Y2K scare a bit, huh? My bet is it's probably as credible.

The reality is that Reg E will effect less than 50% of your existing NSF income (debit and ATM only). And the 50% that's at stake, is driven by about 12% of your customer-base.

The trick is to target those heavy overdraft users and make sure they opt-in.

From a communication stand-point you need to:

• Educate: Stick to the basics of: what an overdraft is and what will be different on Aug. 15 than today.
• Motivate: The customer can make an informed decision if you provide examples of how fees will apply and when a card will be declined. Do they want the chance to buy a $30 cup of coffee, or do they want their card declined in the busy grocery line?
• Get a Response: Make it easy. Include a form with self-address and indicia in your customer letter. Make sure your front line staff know your heavy users and are pushing for a response in the branch and when the customer calls in. In the last 2 weeks, divide your heavy user list between your personal bankers and have them make outbound calls (provide a script).

The more heavy-users you can get to opt-in during the next 3 months, the less impact this reg. will have on your institutions bottom line. Come January 1, we'll all look back and wonder what the big hoopla was all about.

Has your institution maximized it's investment in an MCIF?

Does your institution have a MCIF?

More importantly, if so, is your institution getting the maximum return from it's investment in an MCIF?

So often, the individual that championed the initiative to select an MCIF vendor and bring the technology in-house moves on to find a "new challenge." When this happens, it is not uncommon for the MCIF to set idle as no one else in the organization "steps up" and assumes responsibility for making the MCIF an integral part of the organizations marketing strategy. Consequently, the data doesn't get refreshed on a timely basis, management forgets why the investment was made in the first place, and finally, the system that houses the MCIF sits off in a corner someplace in the office "collecting dust."

If this has happened in your organization, the organization is missing out on a great opportunity to retain and strengthen existing customer relationships!

Let's assume you have an MCIF and it is being updated in a timely manner and you are using it to retain and strengthen existing relationships.

Have you taken the next step to maximize your investment in an MCIF?

Retaining customers and strengthening relationships is only "half the equation." In order for your organization to grow and prosper, you need to bring in new households.

Appending a segmentation code to every household in your database allows you to better understand the type of customer your institution serves. It allows you to see the types of products that they have a propensity to purchase, the channel they use to purchase those products, balances they are likely to bring when the product is purchased, etc.

Utilizing segmentation also allows your organization to find prospects that look like your most profitable customers, provides information on the best product to offer to initiate the new relationship, tells you the best media to reach out to the prospects, etc.

Bottom line - if you have an MCIF and aren't using it, get started. If you are currently using your MCIF to retain and strengthen relationships, but haven't appended a segmentation scheme, get started.

The April "Brown Bag" webinar was on "Segmenting Your Market." If you were unable to attend this session, contact Bruce Clapp at MarketMatch and he can email you the presentation complete with the Q & A that took place.

Have a great week/weekend!

Mike Witsken

Seven Predictions for the Future of Banking

Today, Susan Wolfe, Vice President of Financial Services from Mintel Comperemedia, presented a webinar entitled, "Seven Predictions for the Future of Banking" where she explored trends in the industry based on the research and direct marketing examples from their custom consumer surveys and mail panel. Each of these trends correlate with what I have seen in the marketplace even though many trends have been impacted by the massive influence Reg E has had on the focus of many bank marketing departments over the past few months.

The predictions presented in the Webinar were:

1. More Aggressive Focus on 'Relationship Banking': Even though trust in banks has waned lately, banks are emphasizing the building of a stronger relationship through integrated accounts like Fifth Third's Relationship Savings Account and with rewards programs like PNC Bank's points.
2. Increased Promotion of Account Builder Programs: Responding to a much higher savings rate, especially by higher income segments, new products are being introduced such as SmartCents by Capital One and U.S, Bank's S.T.A.R.T. program.
3. More Debit Card Marketing: With the loss of overdraft fee income, banks will encourage debit card use for automatic bill payments and will begin to share interchange income with per use rewards programs and sweepstakes.
4. Continued Importance of Incentives: As mentioned my recent Blog, incentives for opening new checking accounts have increased and are becoming more widespread. BBVA Compass also offers incentives through an offline and online refer-a-friend program.
5. Mobile Banking is the 'New' Online Banking: While the adoption of mobile banking currently is inversely correlated to age, this trend could easily reverse as offline sign-up expands and promotion of text messaging and electronic alerts increases. Bank of America has around 3 million subscribers with the majority using an iPhone or iTouch. Online money management tools also continue to become more sophisticated such as those from Mint.
6. Proliferation of Financial Literacy Programs: Banks are focusing efforts on new programs to help customers better understand and manage their finances such as Chase's Blueprint and Bank of America's financial education website.
7. Expanded Testing and Use of Social Media: Financial services firms continue to test ways to leverage social media such as American Express's online booking app on Faceboook, Bank of America's help page on Twitter, Chase's Facebook charitable giving event and Stagecoach Island from Wells Fargo.

Google Analytics releases 38 features...

It’s only been a year since we launched the Google Analytics Data Export API and developer programs. To celebrate we are highlighting some of the exciting solutions that extend Google Analytics in our new Google Analytics Application Gallery!

Here are just a few of the exciting applications in the gallery:

Analytics HD

AnalyticsApp is an app for Google Analytics on the iPad!

Analytics Visualizations

The Referrer Flow visualization shows you what sites link to you and which content works best. The Keyword visualization displays the most frequently used search keywords and how they are used together.

BTBuckets

BTBuckets is a free segmentation and optimization webapp that allows sites to create user segments and take actions upon them in real time.

CallTrackID

CallTrackID allows telephone enquiries to be tracked from various traffic routes, including direct, organic, PPC ad, affiliate and offline straight into Google Analytics.

ShufflePoint Studio for PowerPoint

ShufflePoint Studio allows you to associate PowerPoint text, table, and chart placeholders with refreshable Google Analytics data.

The App Gallery makes it easy for customers to find 3rd party solutions that extend Google Analytics in new and useful ways. We also think it’s a great way for developers to find new users and attract more customers. If you’re a developer and you’d like to have your application listed in the gallery, we've created a simple submission form to get your app added.

Finally, if you’re interested in learning more about how you can integrate with Google Analytics, join us for our presentation: Google Analytics: End-to-End on May 20th at Google IO.

Thanks!

Posted by Nick Mihailovksi, Google Analytics API Team

New AdWords reports in Google Analytics

AdWords provides several ways for you to track the performance of your ads– most of which focus on clicks. Sometimes, however, understanding what happens after people click on your ads is just as important for measuring your AdWords performance. Today at the eMetrics conference in San Jose, we announced a new set of AdWords reports in Google Analytics to help you do exactly that.

The new AdWords reports in Google Analytics give you more insight into what happens after the click. For example, suppose you wanted to see if potential customers searching for your exact matched keywords were more engaged with your site’s content than those who were searching on broader terms. Using the new reports, you can view all the visits from clicks on exact matched ads for any keyword, ad group, or campaign in your account. You can also see how many pages that group visited and the average time spent on site. If you use the funnel reports in Google Analytics, you can even see the specific step where visitors tend to drop off when trying to make a purchase.

Want to see other ways you can use the new reports? Check out this short video:

If you’re ready to use the new reports, you just need to have a linked Google Analytics account with destination URL auto-tagging turned on. This is easy to set up; you can start by clicking on the Reporting tab, and then selecting Google Analytics in your AdWords account.

We’re rolling these new AdWords reports out gradually over the next several weeks, so you may not see them right away. You’ll know when the new reports have been added to your account when you see the AdWords section in your Traffic Sources reports in Google Analytics.

(click for full-size image

We hope these reports make it easier for you to measure the success of your AdWords campaigns!

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

The Growing Google Analytics Ecosystem

Google Analytics is not simply a product but also a growing ecosystem of developers, tools, users, and partners. Today at the eMetrics Summit in San Jose, Brett Crosby made several announcements that highlight this ecosystem.

All Google Analytics customers have access to a worldwide network of Google Certified Partners (formerly known as Google Analytics Authorized Consultants). And now the ecosystem is growing further with developers who are creating a variety of applications on the Google Analytics platform. Today, we’re announcing the Google Analytics App Gallery. Among the current list of 32 apps, you’ll find tools like Excellent Analytics, which lets you work with your Analytics data in an Excel spreadsheet, and the Analyticator for Wordpress, which automatically implements Google Analytics across your entire WordPress site. There are many more applications in the gallery, so go take a look. And if you’re a developer, you can learn how to publish apps in the App Gallery here.

Google AdWords is another important part of the ecosystem. Website owners drive traffic using AdWords, and use Google Analytics to understand the performance of that traffic. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be making a new set of AdWords reports available in Google Analytics. These reports expand significantly on the AdWords reports you currently see in your account. For example, you can break out your AdWords traffic by actual search query, match type, distribution network, and many other AdWords attributes. We’ve added reports for day parting, placements, and destination URLs. For a 3-minute overview of what you can accomplish with the new reports, check out this video.

Also, developers can now access AdWords information via the Google Analytics APIs. This makes it much easier to combine your AdWords and Google Analytics data for both analysis and automation. We’re very excited to see third party applications that use this capability to offer new functionality to advertisers. For details, check out this article, which includes a code sample and more, on Google Code.

Also part of the AdWords/Analytics ecosystem, AdWords Search Funnels was announced one month ago, and today is available in all AdWords accounts. We’re also making two short tips videos available (tip 1 and tip 2) that illustrate just a couple of the ways you can use Search Funnels.

Finally, supporting the ecosystem of all websites using Google Analytics, the new faster page tag comes out of beta. The asynchronous tracking snippet will soon be the default snippet when you set up a new profile. This new page tag will speed up your site and every site that uses Google Analytics across the web. If you want to upgrade from your existing tag (which we highly recommend), you can learn how to do that here.

We'll follow up with deep dive posts on each of these topics next week. Thanks for being part of the ecosystem.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

Train Your Bankers to Talk to Gen Yers

Since the financial meltdown on Wall Street began in 2008, I have believed that we all, as bankers, could have done a better job of advising our customers in sound financial principles.
We talk about "selling" to our customers, and we measure our "cross-sell" ratios, and these things can be good objectives. But has your bank intitiated a training program for your front line people about how to advise your customers on basic financial topics? Shouldn't this be part of banking's "customer service" concept?

Today, I would like to talk about the new, young Generation Y group. These may be individuals just starting out on their own, or young married couples just starting a new life together. Their financial needs are different than other generations. Do you train your staff in how to talk to them?

For example, Gen Y looks at the world differently since they have grown up in the information age and are incredibly knowledgable and comfortable with things like the internet, computers, online anything, cell phones with many functions, and instant access to anything they want.

Yet they still need basic financial lessons. How many young people today get good financial literacy at home or at school? Not many. So, a couple of basic lessons we could help them with would be saving and managing their credit score.

I teach lots of bankers about cross-selling, but I always talk about how to really help customers with the financial needs they have based on their life cycle stage. Basic financial needs really are predictable based on where you are in your life stage... For example, these Gen Y'ers could be offered a suggestion like: "We recommend to our customers to save 10% of your take-home pay... is that something that we could help you get started with?"

Or how about "Managing your credit score is really important in today's world... have you established any credit in your name yet? How has that gone? I can share some ideas with you about managing your banking that will help protect a good credit score or help you improve a weaker one. Would you be interested?

In our Winning Team Training program, we then go into detail and examples of how to have these conversations, what options to offer, how to continue to connect with this generation in selling the related products and services, like online banking, mobile banking, and more. There is a "right" way to talk to them that lets them know you "know who you are talking to". It can make a huge difference in their loyalty to you and a huge difference in their financial lives....

After all is said and done, bankers can be the unsung heroes to our customers, if we are well-trained, if we take opportunities to be financial advisors, and if we are alert to each major group of customers and their life cycle financial needs.

I will discuss more about the "Charlie's" next time. Those families with children and how their financial needs are different and how we should be helping them.

Until then, think about your financial institution's sales training programs... are you addressing the real financial issues your customers are concerned about or just training to "sell"?

Email me your concerns or issues at slovejoy@marketmatch.com.
Happy Tuesday!
Sharon