Maximize Bank Marketing Results With CRM Retargeting

From the beginning of a relationship, banks and credit unions capture and store customer data within a CRM database. This data is often enhanced with transaction history, purchase behavior and contact history and used as the foundation for building models to better target communication through direct mail and email marketing.

But what if you could leverage your offline CRM database for digital marketing campaigns as well, transforming your data into anonymized online segments through a process called data onboarding? These segments would then receive messages as a follow-up to your direct mail and email campaigns, improving all direct marketing results.

In the whitepaper, "Data Onboarding: The Key to a Successful Marketing Kingdom," Epsilon and LiveRamp discuss the benefits of integrating offline CRM data with online digital marketing. "Using CRM data to market effectively across channels is essential for marketers who want to reach their target audience multiple times with engaging, relevant and consistent messaging," says Auren Hoffman, CEO of LiveRamp.

What is CRM Retargeting?

Unlike regular retargeting (covered in Bank Marketing Strategy last October), CRM retargeting uses your internal offline customer and/or prospect database to reach individuals and households online, not just after they visit your website. By 'onboarding' your offline data, you can reach your customer and/or prospect segments with highly targeted display ads appropriate to their purchase history and interests.

CRM retargeting provider ReTargeter founder and CEO Arjun Dev Arora says, “With CRM Retargeting, marketers can seamlessly integrate display ads with their existing email and direct mail initiatives to create effective cross-channel campaigns with ease.”

Simply put, it's the marriage of the precision of using direct mail or email combined with the rich content and context of display - bridging the worlds of offline and online marketing for more successful customer communication. Since not every customer visits your website regularly (if at all), CRM retargeting is a great way to re-engage these customers and welcome them to key areas of your site.

How Does CRM Retargeting Work?

CRM Retargeting (also referred to as Data Onboarding) matches your internal CRM data with online registration information from hundreds of websites to allow marketers to reach a customer (or prospect) as they search the web as a follow-up to an offline campaign as shown below.

While there are several approaches to this matching process, here is how LiveRamp (Direct and Digital Marketing Agency New Control's primary CRM Retargeting vendor) does it:

We provide LiveRamp with a client's encoded CRM file safely through a secure upload portal
LiveRamp matches our client's offline customer and/or prospect data keyed off either an email or postal address to an anonymous online audience via cookies with extensive coverage and high accuracy
LiveRamp places the matched online audience on our client's existing DSP or DMP and the campaign runs in conjunction with a direct mail and/or email campaign
Our client's customers see a relevant and timely message supporting other media communications
There is no buying or selling of data, cookies do not contain any PII, and no audience information is passed to a third party (thereby adhering to privacy regulations)

Source: LiveRamp (2013)

It is important to note that onboarding data is anonymized -- aggregated based on customer segments (such as customers without a specific product) who will receive a specific message (special offer to open an account). And while each physical address can't be matched to a digital online counterpart, the ability to have customers or prospects who have been marketed through email or direct mail see your display ads as they search the web and brought back to your sales site is a powerful enhancement to your marketing efforts.

What Are The Benefits of CRM Retargeting?

How powerful could CRM retargeting be? According to a recent study by Oracle, 78% of people will research a product over at least two channels before committing to a purchase. Serving a retargeted online ad to those that have receive direct mail or email will remind them of your brand and the product/service being marketed. Retargeting also can reinforce a desired action from the customer without leading to direct mail or email fatigue.

By adding an additional channel to your targeted direct marketing program, you are more likely to reach your targeted audience with their preferred channel. And, each time your audience sees your retargeted ads, your brand gains more traction and recognition. The results is higher click-through rates and increased conversions.

Should Banks and Credit Unions Do CRM Retargeting?

Banks and credit unions have the most thorough and up-to-date customer databases of any industry. In addition, many financial institutions have prospect databases for their primary trade areas that have almost as much valuable data which is the perfect foundation for CRM retargeting.

With most marketing budgets of financial institutions being kept flat or even reduced over time, the importance of using relatively inexpensive marketing tools that can improve ROMI has never been greater. In addition, with every basis point of response rate and account opening rate for direct mail and email programs being scrutinized, the value of a tool that can improve the returns on both channels is well times.

Best use cases for financial institutions include:

Leverage CRM retargeting as an enhancement to a direct mail and/or email cross-sell campaign, generating a higher response rate for every channel (see below)
Use CRM retargeting to quickly respond to trigger marketing opportunities. Due to the speed and channel benefits of CRM retargeting, this is an excellent way to connect with a customer that has a lifestage, behavioral and/or purchase level opportunity
Test attribution models using direct mail, email and online display advertising
Leverage CRM retargeting to enhance the power of a prospect direct mail campaign, matching postal addresses to online databases

CRM Retargeting FInancial Case Study

New Control tested the value of CRM retargeting with a client wanting to generate new checking account customers from both current non-checking account customers and pure prospects in current branch trade areas. Rather than simply using saturation mail or traditional targeted direct mail for this effort, we assisted the client by developing three different communication strategies for the proposed target audiences:

Direct mail to prospects (50% of targeted audience also included CRM retargeting)
Direct mail to current non-checking customers where email address was not available (50% of targeted audience also included CRM retargeting)
Direct mail and email to current non-checking customers where email was available (50% of this audience received an email follow-up with the other 50% receiving only direct mail. Both of these sub-audiences had a 50/50 slip of CRM retargeting)

The results of this test showed that the most powerful combination from a ROMI perspective was the audience that received direct mail, email and a CRM retargeted display ad. The segment with the lowest ROMI was the prospect segment that received just direct mail, while the volume of accounts generated from the customer group receiving direct mail was the highest of all combinations. The customer segment with direct mail and email was the second most powerful ROMI.

Overall, CRM retargeting improved the ROMI in every case where used due to the lower cost of engagement and the power of the other channels. CRM retargeting used alone was not effective with any segment in our test.

Selecting a CRM Retargeting Partner

When selecting a CRM onboarding partner, the following questions should be asked:

Scale: Look for a partner that has the largest scale of the existing match networks. The best partners should be able to match 30% to 40% of your offline database with online cookies.
Accuracy: You should be looking for the strongest 1:1 matching between the offline data and the online network. Inference or model matching may provide a higher match rate, but the accuracy of the match will be less. In financial services, accuracy of the match avoids issues down the road.
Security, Compliance and Privacy: Make sure the partner selected has demonstrated experience in handling sensitive CRM data and that they adhere to strict data privacy standards.
Integration: Your partner should be integrated into all of the Demand Side Platforms (DSPs), Data Management Platforms (DMPs) and online measurement tools.
Speed: Top CRM retargeting partners have engineered systems that allow for matching and marketing within hours. This is important when you are trying to do trigger marketing programs where minutes count.

“CRM Retargeting represents a leap forward in terms of serving the right users the right ads at the right time,” said ReTargeter Director of Marketing Hafez Adel. “It offers the unparalleled ability to leverage a business’s existing CRM to create a compelling new engagement channel that works for both brand advertisers and direct response marketers alike.”