The Rest of the Story
Dennis Keopke, Vice President

My Analytical Side

Denny Koepke, Vice President

Sometimes I think a group of marketers hearing the words “the numbers” immediately illicit yawns and rolling eyes. Granted, numbers can seem to be less fun than creative themes and great offers. However, I think having good analysis of “the numbers” provides “the rest of the story!”

For example, in reviewing the data pulls from one of our client’s MCIF databases, the VP of Marketing direct mailed to almost 8,000 member households for a home equity campaign and sent only an e-mail to almost 8,000 members. The results were very interesting. The cost of the direct mail was higher than e-mail and the credit union did the broadcast in-house. After electronically “tagging” both groups to track results in MCIF, we found the following:

Direct Mail group – opened 7 Home Equity accounts at $287,654. Also opened additional loan accounts worth $844,000 and deposit accounts worth $1,422,000
E-mail group – opened 10 Home Equity accounts at $263,393. Also opened additional loan accounts worth $1,074,000 and deposit accounts valued at $1,369,000

What conclusions to draw from this? That you still need both direct mail and e-mail because there is a “rest of the story” behind this. Reviewing their data, out of 71,000 members, only 26.5% of their members over age 18 have an email address. If there had been no attempt to draw in members without email addresses through direct mail, the credit union would have potentially missed over $1.3 million in loans and $1.4 million in deposits in this example.

A quick look might have caused a knee-jerk reaction that e-mail is cheaper and pulls the same response as direct mail. However, digging deeper showed that there is a risk in lost business without finding out “the rest of the story!”

2 thoughts on “The Rest of the Story

  1. Denny, very interesting findings and a good case for an integrated marketing effort. Why the statement. . . “out of 71,000 members, only 26.5% of their members over age 18 have an email address”? I’m assuming you mean that they didn’t have them on file rather than the flat statement that very few people over 18 have email. Do you have recommendations on how this CU could garner those “unlisted” emails?

    • Thanks for the clarification! The statement is meant on file in the credit union’s database only, not that the people don’t have one. Regarding capturing more email addresses, we have recommended front-line incentives as well as adding a sign-up to receive information on their website as well as an automatic email request when logging in to home banking.

Leave a Reply to Julie Arnsdorf Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.