Citibank’s Impressive Follow-up Sales Effort

By Jim Bruene Posted on
Categories: Citibank, Sales Techniques

Citi_free_ipodCitibank has woken my sick-in-bed wife the last two mornings, calling to remind me to submit my paperwork to fund the new checking account I established online two weeks ago.

She’s not so thrilled with the bank, but I’m impressed with its tenacity.

Here is the scorecard of bank followup efforts:

  • Email = 1 (about 2 weeks after application…almost missed it, thought it was a phish)
  • Mail = 1 (technically not a reminder, it was the sig card and new account kit)
  • Phone = 3 (first about 1 week after application, then number 2 and 3, about 2 weeks after application

It’s an impressive follow-up effort. I’ve applied for a number of accounts over the years and I can recall receiving only one telephone call, from Salem Five back in 1995, and that wasn’t even an application, just a sales lead. The last time I tried to start a checking account, with Washington Mutual, I never heard from them, not so much as a single email or letter thanking me for my application. As far as I know it’s still sitting in limbo on some backup tape.

Sorry for the delay Citibank, I really do want that iPod, so I will be sending my $2500 deposit ASAP.

Action Item
If a company with as much experience as Citibank has found it to be profitable to make follow-up phone calls on unfunded new accounts, you should consider doing it as well. However, you may have more luck than Citi does using email followups. Citibank’s brand in an email message is practically worthless these days after the pounding it’s received from phishers.

—JB

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Intuit’s RockYourRefund.com Makes Tax Prep (almost) Fun

By Jim Bruene Posted on
Categories: Intuit, Website Usability & Design

Step 1: It’s tax time
Step 2: Then it’s play time

Intuit_rock_your_refundSo starts one of the most interesting financial services websites to come along in a long time. Leave it to Intuit to come up with a way to make submitting your tax return seem almost fun. It’s RockYourRefund.com website is basically a jazzed up portal into TurboTax for the Web, a service that’s been around for more than five years.

Analysis
Sometimes it seems futile trying to make boring financial services interesting. Well if Intuit can do it with tax prep, you can do it with your financial products.

Take a minute to look at it yourself, but the premise is you get a 10% coupon at Best Buy or up to $200 off a trip after you’ve completed your tax return online via the TurboTax website. Cost for the online service is $5.95 for federal plus $9.95 for state tax returns.

Action Item
This approach would work wonderfully with bill payment. Offer coupons and offers that users would receive after paying their bills. A benefit for saving time and money using your super-convenient epayment service. (For more information on how to build a killer bill payment service, see Online Banking Report #80, 81, 82, 86, and an update on the market in #115 published three days ago. )

— JB

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Improve Bank Website Usability with Popup Sales Assistance

By Jim Bruene Posted on
Categories: Sales Techniques, Website Usability & Design

National_interbank_popup_1 Even with popup blockers wreaking havoc with this marketing technique, it still makes sense to program a popup when users abandon an application or any other important sales page. It’s also possible to program a popup after the user lingers in one area for a certain amount of time.

The popup should ask if assistance is needed and provide at minimum a telephone number and email address. Here’s an example from National Interbank.

— JB

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“Security Freeze” is the New Buzzword in Bank Marketing

By Jim Bruene Posted on
Categories: Security & Privacy

LockSecurity freeze is the latest buzzword in the world of privacy and online security. It was used today in the title of an article in The Wall Street Journal’s Personal Journal section, Freezing Out Identity Theft.

Here’s how it used in the first sentence of the article:

In an effort to combat the rapidly escalating outbreak of identity-theft crimes, a handful of states including California and Texas have passed legislation that allows consumers to put a "security freeze" on their credit history.

Action Item
Use this phrase in your marketing to reassure wary customers. For example,

  • "Once you report any fraud, phishing, or identity theft, we will put a security freeze on your bank accounts against any unauthorized withdrawals."
  • "If someone tries to guess your password, we’ll freeze your account against any more attempts."

And eventually as you develop more advanced security preferences, customers will have the ability to put their own selected security freezes or locks on their accounts. For example, users that always access from one computer, could lock-out any access attempts from other IP addresses (see Quova for tools in this area). Or the customer could lock their account against point-of-sale transactions in other states and countries.

To learn more about how to promote online security and customer peace of mind, check out Marketing Security: The sensitive issue of publicizing security and authorization enhancements from our sister publication, the Online Banking Report.

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Security Applications may jump-start Mobile Banking

By Jim Bruene Posted on
Categories: Mobile Banking, Security & Privacy

With the ubiquity of personal computers in the United States, the text messaging market has been slower to develop here than abroad. And since most banking interactions can wait until you are comfortably situated in front of your home/work PC, mobile banking applications have not been a high priority.

However, there is a new application that may jump-start mobile phone banking initiatives. Security.

With public confidence in the security of online banking waning, telephones, especially cell phones equipped with text messaging, offer an excellent option for secure two-factor authentication.

Here’s how it works:
1. Log in to the bank the old-fashioned way with username and password
2. A few seconds later, a four-digit number is text-messaged to your cell phone, or voicemailed to your land-line phone
3. Enter the four digits and start transacting

Text messaging can also be used for alerts, reminders, and other services.

But are U.S. users ready for advanced mobile phone features? It turns out the answer is a resounding YES. Would you believe 100 million U.S. users tapped into advanced features during the past three months. That’s a 58% penetration of all 174 million mobile phone subscribers. And two-thirds of the 58% sent or received text messages (37% of all subscribers) .

This fresh market data is courtesy of M:Metrics, a new Seattle-based telecom researcher who based these estimates from usage data complied across 35,000 U.S. mobile phone subscribers.

Not surprisingly, younger users embraced text-messaging the strongest. The penetration rate was above 50% in both the 18-24 year-old (68%) and 25-34 (52%) groups. The lowest penetration was 14% in the over-65 group.

Here’s more details on the advanced usage and percent penetration across all 174 million mobile phone subscribers:

Used at least one service          100 mil  58%
  Sent or received text message     65 mil  37%
  Used mobile email                      24 mil  14%
  Accessed news/info via browser   22 mil  13%
  Downloaded ringtone                 22 mil  13%
  Received text-message alert        15 mil  8%
  Used instant messaging                15 mil  8%
  Sent photo message                     12 mil  7%
  Downloaded display graphic          11 mil  6%
  Downloaded mobile game              6 mil  3%

Source: M:Metrics, March 2005, n=35,381 for quarter ending 31 Jan 2005

Read the full release.

—JB

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Virtual Open House for your Bank

By Jim Bruene Posted on
Categories: Advertising & Promotion, Website Usability & Design

Open_houseHow many times per month would you look at your bank’s website, other than online banking, if you didn’t work there?

Zero would be pretty close, I’d wager.

Case in point: I have far more interest than the average consumer, but I can count on one hand the times I’ve looked at my bank’s website during the past seven or eight years since its been online.

Sure I login most weeks, but my visit consists of finding the login button as soon as it loads, then moving into online banking to take care of my business. (Don’t tell my website usability collegues I said this, but it might be worth moving the login button around from time to time to "force" users become engaged with your homepage.)

Zero visits per month makes it tough to introduce new products, promotions, and features. Or to get customers to use self-service.

Action Item
To encourage visits, how about an old-fashioned Grande Re-opening or Open House celebration? Make it an annual event on the anniversery of your website launch. Publicize it with signs in the branch. Issue a press release. Drop a statement insert.

Decorate your homepage with balloons or something festive, and just like a real-world open house, offer virtual donuts (Krispy Kreme downloadable coupon), free coffee (Starbucks coupon), and door prizes after customer fills out an online entry form.

To encourage visitors to click further into your site, you could sprinkle freebies deeper in the site, or use an online scavenger hunt. And the great thing about this open house is there’s no cleaning up afterwards.

If you’d like to explore more about the interactive bank marketing ideas, check out the Interactive Financial Marketing Database from our sister publication, the Online Banking Report.

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HSBC Right-Sizes Website Fonts

By Jim Bruene Posted on
Categories: HSBC

Hsbc_fox_utility_boxDo you get complaints that the copy on your website is too small?

First, make sure that you have not disabled the customer’s ability to control font size from their browser toolbar. This allows your savvier customers to easily change font sizes whenever necessary.

However, for the rest, who haven’t a clue that it’s even possible to change font size, consider adding a utility to your navigation menu that automates the process.

HSBC’s UK website features the above utility box on most interior pages, with the exception being the homepage. Not only can users easily increase/decrease text size (note the use of user-friendly language), they can also print the page or click through to the customer service contact center (itself a model of user-friendliness).

—JB

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Southwest’s Ding Marketing Direct to the Desktop

By Jim Bruene Posted on
Categories: Advertising & Promotion, Desktop Presence

Southwest_ding_icon Southwest Airlines, the cheeky U.S. discounter, has just launched a desktop alert system, aptly called Ding, that bypasses the entire spam-clogged email system and delivers alerts to the Windows system tray. It works much like WeatherBug, the popular weather application with more than 10 million users. Southwest_desktop_alerts

When a new fare becomes available, Southwest plays an audible tone and inserts an envelope over the Ding icon in the Windows system tray (see graphic right–click to enlarge). Users can click on the icon to launch the Southwest website and act on the special offer.

Analysis
You’d have to be a real Southwest frequent-flyer nut to want the airline dinging you with messages every day. But since most companies make 80% of their profits from 20% of their customers, this is probably a savvy move from the airline.

Certainly, Southwest knows what it’s doing. And since they do not sell tickets via other online travel services, they especially need this unique corridor to their best customers.

This approach could do wonders for a bank’s online delivery. Instead of trying to wind your way through your customer’s clogged in-box with alerts and marketing messages, drop an account balance alert onto their desktop every day. See Online Banking Report #85, Grabbing Desktop Mindshare, for more information on delivering financial services directly to the desktop.

—JB

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More Online Fraud Statistics from Gartner

By Jim Bruene Posted on
Categories: Metrics & Market Research, Security & Privacy

Fruad_solutions_grid_from_gartnerFraud-fighting vendors, Quova and Cyota hosted a webinar today featuring Avivah Litan, from Gartner.

A couple interesting Gartner stats that you can use in trying to gain additional resources to boost your authentication procedures:

  • Within 3 years (YE 2007), 60% to 75% of U.S. banks will use more than username/password at login. That’s up from zero today.
  • In the year prior to Gartner’s April 2004 consumer research, a projected 1.8 million consumers gave up their account info to phishers; this group was three times more likely to have been victimized by online fraud.

You should be able to view an archived version of the webinar at Quova within the next day or two.

—JB

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More on E*Trade’s Two-Factor Authentication Launch

By Jim Bruene Posted on
Categories: E*Trade, Security & Privacy

Etrade_two_factor

Today’s American Banker (subscription required) reported that E*Trade will give security tokens to its high-roller customers, those that trade more than 5 times per month or who have more than $50,000 in their accounts.

As we reported in January, E*Trade has been testing the service with several hundred customers.

The quote of the day is from famed Gartner analyst, Avivah Litan:

However, banks face little risk from trying the technology, which has significant potential, she said. "If they get low adoption, they’re not spending very much money. If they get high adoption, they sell a lot more services. I could see people switching to E-Trade if they offer this type of security."

Analysis
The days of simple username and password access are numbered. Don’t be the last one on your block to install a security system, that’s a sure way to become the target of cybercriminals, and even worse, scathing press reports when customers are victimized.

—JB

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Quantifying Online Interbank Transfer Volumes

By Jim Bruene Posted on
Categories: Epayments, MasterCard

We’ve been tracking the developments in account-to-account transfers closely, in preparation for an upcoming Online Banking Report on the subject. It’s tough to get a handle on the actual dollar volumes, so we were pleased to see American Banker’s Daniel Wolfe quantify the market size.

In Friday’s article (subscription required), MasterCard’s TowerGroup payments analyst, Beth Robertson is quoted as saying that in 2004, $730 billion was transferred via account-to-account transfer (i.e., a funds transfer from an individual’s account at one financial institution to the same customer’s account at another). That amounts to more than $7000 for each of approximately 100 million U.S. households. All but a billion or so was initiated off-line.

But the online portion is growing. CashEdge the leading supplier of online account-to-account transfers, expects to process $6 billion in 2005, that’s about $200 annually for each of the 30 million or so U.S. online banking households. However, fewer than 50% of those households have access to online account-to-account transfers.

—JB

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Phishing Vaccine for Email in UK

By Jim Bruene Posted on
Categories: Security & Privacy

Uk_safe_word_click_to_enlargeIn the United Kingdom, the government has launched an initiative to inform its citizens of phishing and other fraud dangers. One of its key services is an email and/or text message service that informs users when new fraud threats are identified.

To fight the problem of having their own emails spoofed, they require users to select a "safe word" that will be used in the subject line of all emails.

Analysis
Not only is this an effective way to fight phishing, it helps personalize your messages, improving their chances of being read.

— JB

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