By John J. Coffey, C.P.A. and Gene Palm, www.profitres.com, originally published November 2006, ABA Bank Marketing

Automating Your Marketing is a Reality!

Your life as a bank marketer is busy and you wear many hats.  Wouldn’t it be great if there were a way to automate your marketing efforts so you can know what to sell to whom and when?  The good news is that this is not a fantasy.  It’s a reality that exists today as a “matrix mail” software application that works with your MCIF or CRM.

Briefly, a matrix mail application allows you to determine your entire year's marketing plan up front for targeted customers, and to determine the frequency of the contacts to these customers.  Once the matrix is defined, it literally runs automatically each month at the touch of a few buttons!  With a matrix mailing strategy in place, you can set up a sequential marketing plan with multiple contacts delivered to your customers through direct mail, E-mail, online banking and even the bank’s ATM network.

What makes a matrix mailing unique is that it includes sequential contacts.  A typical direct mail program includes the selection of qualified customers and a one-time contact (or mailing).  A matrix mailing includes the selection of initial qualified customers, multiple contacts over a set period of time and repeated qualifications for each contact.  For example, you might mail checking, CDs, and auto loan offers to a target group (or segment) over a six-month period, but they will only get each of the offers if they do not own the product offered at the time of mailing.

Categories of Matrix Mailing

There are two major categories of matrix mailing – acquisition and retention.  You can use acquisition matrix mailing to promote products to your customers to create multiple relationships and increase product penetration.  In fact, the most popular reason for conducting a matrix mail campaign is cross-selling your customers additional products.  For instance, you can develop a matrix mailing program for your new customers or for other targeted customers in order to increase the overall product penetration of your customer base.  One of the best ways to increase and measure customer relationships is to create a segmentation strategy for your entire customer base and send contacts to a portion of each segment throughout the year.

You can use retention matrix mailings to retain customers who have the highest risk of ending their relationship with you – such as single-service auto loan customers.  Regardless of the amount of their loan, if they do not own additional products, they will have extremely low loyalty to the bank.  Fortunately, matrix mailing can greatly reduce the risk of losing these customers to attrition.  For instance, a single-service customer who has an indirect auto loan and is within six payments of paying off this loan is at high risk of leaving your bank.  The loan mature date can be used as a “trigger point” or “triggered event” in the selection criteria of a matrix mailing program to target high risk customers and send a sequence of mailings offering new loans and encouraging them to maintain their relationship with additional products and services.

Developing a Matrix Mail Program

There are four steps involved in developing a matrix mail program.  The first step is to develop the plan on paper and ask, “What targeted segments do I want to market to?”  The best way to start is to determine whether your strategy is based upon demographics, profitability, product usage or triggered events.  The second step is to ask, “What products and services do I want them to purchase?”  The third step is to ask, “What is the sequence of these contacts, and over what time period should they receive the contacts?”  Finally, the fourth step is to ask, “Who qualifies for the targeted segments and for each contact within the sequence?”

Activating the Program

The sequential nature of a matrix mail program is critical to the success of this strategy.  In a comprehensive matrix mail program, there are multiple segments with different priorities, each with their own unique sequence of contacts.

It is important to know that the matrix is a “smart” program.  Based upon predetermined rules, if the customer has already purchased a product, then they can “skip” the contact and receive the next contact in the sequence.  In addition, because all your segments are set a priority, a customer can “switch” from a lower priority segment (for example a cross-sell segment) into a higher priority (maturing auto loan segment) and then return when they are finished with the higher priority segment’s sequence.  You can also insert “skips” into your sequence to limit the frequency of contacts to a customer and enter rules that prevent them from receiving the same contact twice over the next year or more.

The effort of planning and automating your marketing campaigns in advance can really pay off using matrix mailing.  Although it takes a great deal of planning up front, you will rest easy that when you’re really busy, your matrix mailing program is fulfilling you annual marketing tactics as planned and contacting your customers for you.  That’s one less hat you have to wear!

John J. Coffey, C.P.A. and Gene Palm are the principals of Profit Resources, a consulting company that specializes in MCIF technologies.  © Profit Resources, Inc. 2006.  Jeri Shobe is a Database Marketing Consultant for Insight Database Marketing Solutions.