Is banking ever fun? Not really. The best you can hope for is that it’s "pleasant."

How about online banking? It might have been classified as fun the first couple times you tried it, but it’s not fun anymore unless you happen to have lots of money piling up in your account.

Is it possible to keep it fun? Yes, but you’ll have to continuously innovate. As Seth Godin points out in Free Prize Inside: The Next BIG Marketing Idea, "The price of WOW keeps rising." In other words, what impressed your customers today, no longer impresses them tomorrow.

One innovation that we’d like to see more widely used is rewards programs for online delivery. It doesn’t have to be as expensive as frequent flier programs, more like the free Cokes you can win from time-to-time under the bottle cap.

Examples
1. ING Direct has a monthly raffle for its customers who have opted to receive email statements (which automatically shuts off the paper). Every quarter one of its 2 million customers wins a plasma TV, another wins a laptop, and a third wins a digital camera or portable DVD player. The total prize pool is about $5,000 per quarter, which amounts to one cent per customer per year, less than 1/500 of the cost of mailing a monthly statement.

2. PFF Bank & Trust (Pomona, CA) is running a bill payment usage sweeps during the first three months of the year. The promotion is advertised with eye- catching graphics on its home page. Every time a customer pays a bill they are entered into the sweepstakes for a cool electronic "toy," January is the iPod (of course), February is a digital camera and printer, and March is a 19" LCD television. The total prize pool is just $2000 for the entire promotion.

— JB