As the market contracts, members are making fewer financial decisions, delaying or forgoing some larger-scale and discretionary purchases entirely. But rising interest rates don’t change the fact that members continue to face pivotal life events — even in challenging macroeconomic environments.
People get married. They start or grow their families. Parents send their kids off to college. Empty nesters downsize. Events like divorces or deaths spur the reorganization of assets and/or wealth.
But life must go on, and credit unions must recognize these pivotal life events as critical opportunities to strengthen member relationships and build trust. A robust marketing and member engagement strategy allows credit unions to anticipate and address life events with personalized campaigns and product offerings that encourage members to stick with them in the long run.
Personalized Strategies For A Personalized World
Personalization is no longer a key differentiator. It’s now something members expect — and demand — from their credit unions. A recent Salesforce survey found 73% of consumers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations, up from 66% in 2020.
To capitalize on consumer life events, credit unions should explore personalization strategies in four key areas.
1. Segmentation And Targeting
Credit unions need to be able to recognize the signs and signals of their members’ life events because Experian doesn’t include “had a baby” in its consumer reports.
Day-to-day member behavior produces a wealth of data that can alert credit unions to significant life events. Specific purchases, consumption trends, opening and closing accounts — these behaviors and transactions often arise from a member’s anticipation of (or response to) a major change.
The key is making sense of these signals. Credit unions need to identify and use tools and technologies capable of aggregating and analyzing member data in practical ways that enable member segmentation. More importantly, they need tools that can perform this function at scale and in real time. No individual or team has the time to manually review member data, which means they need automation and analytics tools that are purpose-built to recognize these signals and bring them to the surface.
Too many marketing strategies sputter out after the segmentation phase because credit unions lack the time and/or tools to effectively create and deliver personalized messages to align with their segmentation. Now is the time for credit unions to seek out and invest in modern member engagement tools that can solve this challenge by automatically crafting and delivering tailored messaging and personalized offers. This level of targeted outreach generates new ties between members and their credit unions, deepening the relationship for both.
2. Proactive Financial Planning
Once you’ve segmented your members and flagged a life event, how do you engage them? You can’t just call the member and say, “I see you just had a baby — would you like a loan to buy a mini-van?”
Members crave guidance and education on core issues of financial literacy. This presents an opportunity for credit unions to provide their members with proactive financial planning resources related to their specific financial needs — and prevents members from feeling like they’re being treated as another transaction.
Credit unions can leverage their understanding of member behavior to create touchpoints with members who are approaching, going through, or recovering from life events. For example, if spending habits indicate a member is considering buying their first home, a targeted outreach tool could engage them with an email campaign regarding saving strategies and lending options.
This personalized engagement solidifies credit unions as trusted financial partners — increasing member loyalty and building lifelong relationships.
3. Product Innovation
Credit unions should also be using member life events as the foundation for product innovation. Patterns in member data can give credit unions unparalleled insight into the real-life, real-time needs of the people who use their financial services — so they can create and enhance offerings to address these specific needs.
Depending on your member base, certain life events might be more prevalent. Credit unions need to understand where their members’ lives and needs are headed and push their product innovation to stay ahead of those needs — creating specialized mortgage packages for new parents or developing tailored investment portfolios for downsizer, for example.
4. Data-Driven Insights
At the core, none of this is new. These are the essentials of relationship banking — the old-fashioned notion of knowing each of your members by face and name and using that familiar relationship to deliver value. But the frustrating reality for most credit unions is that achieving that level of connection is nearly impossible today. The scale of the average member base, combined with the acceleration of digital-first interactions, has removed the closeness that finance leaders once felt with the people who rely on them.
It’s possible for credit unions to get back to that level of hyper-personalized service and value. But that requires the ability to harness all their member data so they can understand member behaviors, preferences, and needs — at scale.
Data analytics and customizable member outreach enable this type of close relationship through personalized communications and trend predictions. Savvy financial leaders can leverage this data to refine their member engagement strategies, anticipate member needs, and build a stronger overall relationship with their growing member base.
Meeting Members Where They Are
High levels of volatility and uncertainty have wrought hesitation and indecisiveness on credit unions across the country, but this environment makes it more critical that credit unions move to meet members where they are.
But where are they? They’re anxious, rate-sensitive, and quick to switch allegiances. Life is still happening — marriages and mortgages, kids and college funds, downsizing and deaths — and broader uncertainties make them crave trusted financial guidance more than ever.
Credit unions need to build the marketing tech stacks that enable them to identify and elevate these member life events as the tremendous connection points they are — and empower them to make the most of these connections by delivering hyper-personalized messages, at exactly the right time, at scale.
Total Expert is the purpose-built customer engagement platform trusted by more than 200 financial enterprises. Deliver the perfect customer journey across every financial milestone. Learn more today.
