Insights From The Outside: Nick Riegel

My background is in marketing and branding, but it was pretty focused on the restaurant and retail industries. But at the end of the day, we’re meant to serve members within the credit union, right? And in the restaurant space, you’re meant to serve your customer. That was the “aha” part.

When Ascend Federal Credit Union ($4.5B, Tullahoma, TN) set out to reimagine its marketing strategy, it didn’t just look for a leader with experience, it looked for a leader with perspective. That search led the cooperative to Nick Riegel, a branding and communications veteran whose career spanned retail, food service, and tourism. Notably, it did not include financial services, but that didn’t deter Riegel or Ascend.

“I come from a world that’s consumer-led, so how do we make sure we’re member-led?” Riegel says. “If our members succeed in their goals, we’ve done our job.”

Now, Ascend’s new senior vice president of marketing is applying a member-first mindset to help the credit union rethink how it connects with community.

Talk a bit about your background. What was your journey to What drew you to Ascend?

Nick Riegal: I wasn’t looking to get into the industry. My background is in marketing and branding, but it was pretty focused on the restaurant and retail industries. But at the end of the day, we’re meant to serve members within the credit union, right? And in the restaurant space, you’re meant to serve your customer. That was the “aha” part. It wasn’t until having a conversation with our CEO Matt Jernigan and Leslie Copeland, who’s now the SVP of our data and analytics team, that I started to feel it was a fit. Hearing about Ascend’s mission to serve its members, I can see those actions in our backyard and how they benefit people versus seeing it on a ledger sheet and seeing how revenue performed as a percentage. It’s much closer to home.

Did you have any assumptions about the industry that you have discovered are wrong or different from what you anticipated?

NR: My wife was a part of a credit union when we lived in Florida. My job at the time didn’t have a sponsored 401(k), so it was an opportunity to open an account to put some retirement savings in through a Roth IRA. My assumption was that it’s a closed-off membership that you have to qualify for by fitting specific criteria. I didn’t think about it as regular banking.

When I came aboard, I had a lot of things locked and loaded for initial research: What is this about? Where can we get different footholds? I had this big idea of a David-and-Goliath story — banks versus credit unions. Yet when we did some initial research, there was a little more negative sentiment toward banks, but it wasn’t huge. That made me go, “Alright, let’s look for something else.”

What were your priorities in the beginning?

NR: Marketing has three goals. We need to increase future demand, we need to capture current demand, and we need to retain and build member loyalty. We were doing really well capturing current demand, but we weren’t doing as well on the future demand and loyalty side.

One of the first things I did was hire a new advertising agency. There wasn’t anything wrong with the previous one, but we needed to rightsize our media plan. We were in those lower-funnel conversion tactics, but we weren’t telling the full story so people would know about Ascend before they’re ready to make a move. Our new agency helped us look at that entire member journey from start to finish.

From a high level, it’s only been in place for about a quarter, but we’ve seen about a 25% increase in people taking action and about a 25% increase in new visitors we’re bringing to our website.

Talk about a marketing campaign you’ve led since joining Ascend. What were the results?

NR: We’ve historically given a $50 incentive for opening a youth account in April for Youth Month. This year, we took a different tack. It wasn’t revolutionary, but we upped the incentive from $50 to $100 and took a more focused approach to the promotion. In the past, it might have been one of multiple things going on. This time we stayed singularly focused across all of our communications. If we didn’t have to talk about anything else, we didn’t. We made sure Youth Month was front and center.

We also got the branches behind it. They’ve always been supportive, but this time we gave them a budget to decorate however they wanted. We also ran incentive contests for branch staff for whoever brought in the highest percentage increase in accounts opened.

The promotion was wildly successful. It was the highest new membership month we’ve ever had, and it actually surpassed the last two Aprils combined in terms of the number of youth accounts opened.

How do you define success in your role?

NR: Helping the brand grow but not by any means necessary.

I like technology. I like new product offerings. But it’s our job to maintain our culture and our brand. That means making sure the member stays at the core of it all.

We were doing some research recently and heard a story from a woman who came to us with no credit at all. We set her up with a secured credit card and gave her a plan. I want to say in six months she boosted her score and we got her into a regular, low-rate credit card. When we do what we’re supposed to do, we earn business. She’s now telling friends and family about us. It’s not just a referral program like, “Bring in this coupon and get 10% off your next transaction.” It’s the things we do that are apparent as a brand that help organic growth happen.

Is there anything strategically that you’re looking forward to in the next six to 12 months?

NR: We’re going to develop a new creative campaign toward the end of the year. It’ll be exciting to talk about the brand the way we want to in a way that aligns with our new media approach. We’re working through some positioning and messaging, but it’s really about breaking down communication barriers that exist in the credit union space. First, we have to get through the hurdle of explaining what we are as a credit union. Then, we can focus on who we are as a brand.

The other big one is going to be marketing automation. We’ll be going through a whole process to find the right partners as well as work with our internal teams. Right now, we’re trying to understand the data connection. That’s the missing piece. We need to get everything into our data warehouse and then into the email platform and have those two systems talk to each other. That’s been the bottleneck.

At the beginning of next year, we’ll also look at revamping the website. The goal is to better understand the role it plays in both lead capture and how it functions for our current members.

This article has been edited and condensed.

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