Rewriting the Golden Rule: A Fresh Approach to Tailored Marketing Strategies

[caption id="attachment_61986" align="alignright" width="300"] © Can Stock Photo / bdspn[/caption] From the May issue: Prominent technology companies hailing from the heart of Silicon Valley are changing the way consumers shop — and the ease and efficiency with which these companies sell their products is prompting the auto finance sector to up its game. Amazon pushes related products to consumers when they purchase a product on its website. Facebook markets to members’ interests and likes. Google leverages browsing history data to better align ads with user profiles. To top it off, these marketing initiatives all happen in the comfort of consumers’ homes. Lenders big and small, direct and indirect, are beginning to catch on, and have started to adapt similar marketing strategies by using customer information to cater to specific demographics to rewrite the golden rule. Forget what mom said — rather than treat others like you’d want to be treated, treat customers the way they want to be treated. However, incorporating tech-savvy marketing strategies into auto lending operations comes with its own challenges. [caption id="attachment_18781" align="alignright" width="300"] © Can Stock Photo / mikdam[/caption] Personalization Is Key If there’s one piece of the sales and marketing puzzle that auto lenders are fitting into their strategies, it’s personalization — and that starts with knowing your customers. “We want to know exactly where our membership is coming from,” said Ivan McBride, Pentagon Federal Credit Union ’s vice president of automotive lending products and sales. “What are the products they’re interested in? What’s driving the traffic on the site? Where are they located? What are their shopping habits?” Understanding the interests consumers have in common enables Pentagon Federal to “drive our marketing dollars in the best way possible,” he added. For Chase Auto ’s Chief Marketing Officer Melinda Welsh, that targeted demographic is women. Welsh noted that women are responsible for more than half of new-vehicle purchases and service work done at dealerships. Still, auto finance marketing campaigns or products rarely cater to or represent females. “We, as an industry, can impact that by having products and advertising that are more geared toward women,” she said. As the head of the bank’s direct lending business, Welsh is one of the driving forces behind the pilot of Chase’s new female-oriented car-buying product. “We built it using women as our focus groups, rather than men,” she said. Meanwhile, Navy Federal Credit Union is looking to target young people. According to a Navy Federal survey published in April, “50% of those that plan to purchase or lease a vehicle in the next 12 months are Generation Z and millennials,” said Consumer Lending Product Strategist Jennifer Felts. Navy Federal uses specific imagery and messaging in its advertising and marketing campaigns to appeal to its military-affiliated consumers. “The younger generations are all about experiences, so [marketing] will [show people] camping outside or at the beach, or a young military couple starting out in their fun car,” Felts said. Wells Fargo Auto , too, groups consumers based on commonalities and adapts services based on data. “We’re developing what we’re calling ‘customer personas,’ which is really taking a look at the different ways that consumers interact with us from a credit perspective,” said Eric Halvorson, head of customer excellence at Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo will consider the behaviors it can expect from consumers in any given credit tier and decipher the best way to service those personas. “How do we approach those customers in a way that is solution-oriented?” he said. “How do we leverage our existing technology and look at new ways of connecting with customers?” The answer, it seems, can be found through harnessing customer data. [caption id="attachment_61988" align="alignright" width="300"] © Can Stock Photo / yellowj[/caption] Leveraging Data-Driven Marketing Pentagon Federal Credit Union created a digital team in second-half 2018 tasked with tracking online activity and translating that data into actionable marketing strategies, McBride said. The team tracks the website pages consumers are clicking on, where they spend their time, and what’s driving applications. “Those pieces are critical to measuring how to optimize our site, as well as providing appropriate content to our membership,” he said. Ally Financial Inc. is leveraging data in a way that more closely resembles the models used by tech companies. Collected data spans multiple dimensions, such as payment activity, loan versus lease, new versus used, number of months left, and payoff requests, said Chief Marketing and Public Relations Officer Andrea Brimmer. “Combining these elements along with third-party data can create very powerful personalization opportunities, as well as propensity models to help predict future needs,” she said. Once the data is collected, it is consolidated and organized into “one view of the customer,” Brimmer said, noting that data from the company CRM, website, account activity, and call center is used to “provide a complete picture.” Then, automated “trigger campaigns” are created to ensure that Ally is meeting its customers “at a time of opportunity,” she said. “The messaging is very specific to the data we collect,” Brimmer said, giving examples such as offering a “special lease buyout” to a customer whose lease is about to end or offering a bank product — like a savings account — to customers after they have visited the bank’s pages. Ally leverages data-driven marketing tactics on its website, too. “Each experience has multiple content wells and modules that are dynamically served to each customer based on what we know from the data,” Brimmer said, noting that it could be tips and tools, special offers, or products where they have shown interest. “This will continue to grow, resulting in thousands of possible experiences, driving continued advancements in personalization,” she said.

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