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The CMO is faced with a constant challenge to prove the value of their marketing efforts. The channels we use continue to grow, the technology continues to innovate and the consumer expects more personalization and customization of offers than ever before.
To be successful, CMOs must collect, segment, analyze and visualize the data to be able to create efficiencies in their marketing efforts, to personalize and customize offers and to report to management believable numbers around adoption, balance growth and profitability.
To do this collecting, segmenting, analyzing and visualizing, the CMO must integrate multiple repositories of data. It is obvious the most important repository of data is your core system. But the sources of data a CMO needs also come from many vendors outside of core.
Consumer Loan Tracking
To properly measure consumer loan adoption, a CMO needs to have access to the loan origination software. Here she/he can see the number of applications generated, where the application is in the underwriting and processing cycles, the number of loans approved and funded and the average time from application to funding. Since the CMO is responsible for the success of the campaign, she/he also needs to know how many loans were not approved and why and how many loans were approved but not funded. Also, marketing needs to understand the dropout rate of members during this process and precisely where they dropped out. This knowledge of drop-outs is a key indicator of where there is friction in the application process and creates an opportunity to see if this friction is necessary. We know that success of a lending campaign is co-dependent upon expert execution by the loan origination software, the lend team and the risk tolerance of the ALM Committee.
Mortgage Loan Tracking
Like consumer loans, mortgage loan-tracking starts with the data inside of the mortgage loan origination software with the same kinds of criteria from consumer loan monitoring. The unique issue marketers have with mortgage loans is with those loans sold to the secondary market. It is important the marketer knows the member has this relationship with the credit union even though the credit union is no longer carrying this balance. But also, during those periods of refinance when mortgage rates decline, knowing what mortgage balances are held versus sold is critically important. The CFO may not want to re-price the portfolio by marketing a refinance offer to member with held mortgage balances but they would really like to create new balances and profits, held or sold, from members whose mortgages were sold to the secondary market.
New Member Acquisition
Typically one of the most important deliverables from marketing is member growth. But, like loan growth, the success of a new member campaign is co-dependent on the new member process, operations, branches, call center and online channels and the ability of staff to cross-sell these new members. This requires a lot of system integration. If the credit union is an indirect lender, the indirect member must be segmented and looked at with different expectations than a member that joined the credit union through proactive choice. Seldom can marketing take credit for the indirect member but they should take credit for the direct member. But just adding members for the sake of getting new members is seldom a sustainable strategy. What the credit union wants are engaged members, members that are contributing to the cooperative, not just cherry-picking our very best rates. Therefore the CMO must know what products members are adopting and why, what kind of balances they are bring to the credit union and are we successfully onboarding the member to maximize the balances and products acquired. These analytics require visibility with the indirect lending engine, the new member application process and the ability to track this new member through the entire new member process and onboarding. CMOs need to know why members are coming to them, for which products and if our cross-sell efforts are yielding the results the credit union needs to grow profitable new members.
Reporting Profitability
CMOs are required now to now just report SWAGs when it comes to profitability. Boards and management expect real numbers that are consistent with the general ledger (GL) that the CFO is delivering. To properly understand profitability marketing data needs to integrate with the GL so that the ROIs that marketing delivers are consistent with the numbers finance has. This integration must happen between multiple vendors as demonstrated above with some “hard wiring” into the credit union’s GL. There are vendors who facilitate this kind of “hard wiring” but, you guessed it, they need to be integrated…
Here’s the Rub
All of this measurement and tracking efforts require system integrations with multiple vendors and all of these system integrations and the maintenance of these systems take up significant IT bandwidth and investment.
To learn more, please visit www.cufxstandards.com. This article was published by permission of the author, Rich Jones.
