My Marketing Strategy
Nicolette Lemmon, President & Founder

Recently, I saw an interesting headline. “After a failure, customers need a reason to remain” in the Daily Briefing by American Banker.  The fact that the article started with is that nearly two-thirds of failed bank customers either switched to another bank or were likely to change banks in the months following a takeover assisted by the FDIC.

This screams “opportunity” for credit unions in the markets of the 64+ failed banks to promote being the safe, trusted place to consider moving accounts.

Moving a customer to the takeover bank is likely to have all kinds of account differences, fee changes, and culture changes. 

When credit union mergers happen, members are absorbed into the new credit union family with ease. 

If there are bank customers on the move, it is great timing.

Yet, it is not a time to take this for granted. You need to have a great new member program in place that welcomes and cross-sells a deeper relationship over the first 3 months and continues up to 9 months. If you don’t make a big effort to gain more share of wallet early in their membership, 50% of share only will likely leave in the first year or simply leave their small deposit in the share account just in case they need you later.

What to capture? In MCIF research, the addition of each core product (checking, money market, certificate, IRA, auto loan, home equity loan, mortgage, credit card, etc.) will increases the profitability of a member. While balances, rates and type of product weigh in on profitability, the key is that increasing the relationship across your credit union’s core products will continue to improve your bottom line.

This is not the time to cut back on marketing in terms of keeping in front of new members to open more and existing members to move more!