What Do You Know about Your Gen Y Members?

My Marketing Strategy
Nicolette Lemmon, President & Founder

There is so much talk about the “new age wave” of Gen Y, that I decided to find out more about what impact this generation was having in the memberships of client credit unions. In picking seven clients of sizes ranging from $90 million to over $500 million, it was interesting to see the profiles of young adults that opened accounts at the credit union.

Take the time to review the young adults in your membership to see what products and services they have with your credit union. Here is an interesting chart about checking penetration of current 18-30 year old members at seven different client credit unions. The purple column is those who joined the credit union as little kids, before age 13. The burgundy column represents those that joined as a teen, between ages 13 and 17. The gold column reflects those who joined after age 18.

Gen Y_Checking Chart

Isn’t it interesting to see the high percentage of checking for those that joined ages 13-17 that are still in the membership after 18? In every credit union client, the percentage of those with checking was higher than the penetration level of those joining later, after 18. The key finding for me was that it is essential to market to teens with a special offer to get them (and their parents telling them) to turn to the credit union for their first checking account.

In most cases, the members who joined as children had a significant penetration of checking as well.

What are you doing to capture youth before age 18? Is it different than marketing to 18+?

While it is important to understand marketing to Gen Y, what really stood out to me was marketing to parents to get accounts for their children at even younger ages will help build deeper relationships as they age. Looking over our data for our white paper, “Understanding the New Age Wave: Gen Y,” there is a benefit to developing youth marketing, especially when Gen Z or the next baby boomlet is beginning to grow past age 10.

Learn more key findings about Gen Y. Check out our newest white paper, Understanding the New Age Wave: Gen Y.

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