Customer Data Platforms are Driving Member Relationship Marketing Success

FEW INDUSTRIES HAVE AS MUCH RICH, TIMELY DATA TO MINE AS CREDIT UNIONS.

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Financial institutions today face a fast-rising level of competitive challenges to growing the right members, remaining relevant to consumers (especially younger audiences), and building stellar brand experiences in channels that help them stand apart.

The new fuel to simpler, more personalized mobile, online and in-person experiences lies in gathering, linking and harnessing the right data at the right moment, including leveraging new advanced generative-AI. And few industries have as much rich, timely data to mine as credit unions.

Unfortunately for most FI’s, gathering, organizing, enhancing and leveraging that data into meaningful, simple ways to help improve members lives, pain points, and financial health via intelligent, data-driven marketing – at exactly the right time, remains as elusive in 2023 as ever for most financial services data and marketing leaders.

The new tool to accelerated marketing strategy, performance and results

As financial leaders face the lingering economic challenges and high rates going into 2024, a new tool of innovation in relationship marketing has emerged: the Customer Data Platform, or CDP.

Built on a foundation of modern cloud-based tools like Business Intelligence (BI-visualized dashboards), machine learning, generative-AI insights, and smart behavioral, lifestyle segmentation, and trigger-based tools, the CDP is accelerating the road to advanced relationship marketing growth results.

The challenge many marketers and data leaders are finding is that not all CDP’s were designed to meet the unique needs, and more limited resources and data talent of small to medium sized financial institutions like credit unions. Most CDP’s were built for multiple industries and much larger funded organizations with large data teams and budgets to customize applications to their own needs.

Before jumping in to choose a marketing technology solution, financial leaders must come to grips with the organization-wide disparate data challenges they face to success. That includes advancing beyond old legacy marketing systems (e.g. MCIF and email marketing solutions), and into newer, well linked tech-stack solutions designed to grow more engaged and personalized relationships. Leaders must avoid the urge to expect “instant quick fixes” to becoming a data-savvy, marketing-driven, brand-led experiences organization overnight.

Here are the five key challenges to frame your journey to advancing smarter data analytics insights, automated journeys, and member relationship growth and sales performance in 2024.

Five Key Organizational Challenges to Effective Data Analytics & Relationship Building Marketing Programs:

1.      Difficulty for marketers (and other leaders) to access or use intelligent and enriched member data effectively, with countless non-integrated systems. This is coupled with reliance on over-burdened IT and BI resources that slows relationship growth processes and improved actions.

2.     Lack of simplified relationship insights, or “smart” lifestyle, psychographic and behavioral segmentation (and Persona) profiles that lead to incomplete, or worse yet, an inaccurate picture of members lives, needs and financial journeys.

3.     Difficulty and IT hurdles in accessing or conducting simplified system data queries, and instant list generation of smart profiles of “ideal target users:” infused with behavioral and lifestyle “triggers” for improved needs assessment, profiling and smarter targeted cross-selling and onboarding journeys that deepen relationships and stop costly churn.

4.     Complexity to easily create relevant, tailored, AI-driven financial solutions, guidance and advice; automatically linked to multi-channel marketing automation to build personalized, full-funnel communications and marketing campaigns, that include frontline staff access to member CRM insights. Timely, relevant insights into member’s lives, active journeys and behaviors is critical to personalization and tailored solutions.

5.     Cumbersome manual workflows (often monthly) to track lead journeys to conversions and daily sales attribution. Old data results and the lack of two-way daily data flow, lead to missed opportunities; weak campaign reporting and non-existent BI dashboards for continuous marketing strategy improvements, reporting and smarter relationship building.

Why a financial-focused CDP like Strum Platform Advances Member Relationship Insights, Improves Personal Experiences, and Tracks Performance and Results

The Strum Platform™ CDP is designed to build rich and insightful profiles of every member’s lifestyle, relationships; and behaviors into a single solution that drives smarter, data-driven and personalized marketing.

Strum Platform does this by linking a range of your own 1st party data (e.g. core, mobile, behavioral and transactional), and then enhancing it with licensed 3rd-party customer data sources like demographics, lifestyle and psychographic insights, and vital timely life event triggers to help develop timely and meaningful solutions for members.

Unlike earlier legacy marketing technology (like MCIF’s), CDPs link a wide range of customer data from dynamic consumer interactions like website journeys, social media engagement, digital marketing, email marketing, customer service interactions, online and offline transactions, and more. With the sunsetting of social media cookies, this rich trove of information is now mission-critical to serving members.

These rich member profiles give financial leaders deep insights their customers’ needs, preferences, families, behaviors and current financial goals. And that allows leaders to build enriched, simple and far more relevant guidance, to design highly personalized offers, in exactly the right channel, delivered at exactly the right moment in time.

By building more data-informed marketing solutions for members, and using smarter strategic marketing and relevant product-based offers, organizations can instantly improve and personalize member experiences, increase engagement and cross-selling, reduce costly attrition, and create more profitable relationships.

Strum Platform delivers a highly user-friendly interface that can be shared among marketers, sales teams, branch managers, strategists and other leaders, regardless of their level of data skills, knowledge or expertise. The ability to easily access rich data, query and use customer data insights and visualized “data stories” from business intelligence, helps financial leaders design smarter, more proactive marketing strategies, more personalized communications and richer brand experiences.

To learn more about how to improve and simplify the use of your data to enhance member insights, improve experiences, track results and deepen profitable relationship building, visit www.strumplatform.com, or schedule a demo of our CDP capabilities and client success stories.