Banks, credit unions, wallets / card providers and other financial institutions find it hard to win new customers and grow customer value.
The entry of fintech companies has raised the bar for the whole retail finance market. New and old brands alike need to up their game in the competition to win and keep customers. But acquiring lots of new accounts is just the first step. Those new customers need to be active – depositing their earnings, using their card or digital wallet, buying new products and services or generally spending. How to grow regular active engagement and brand loyalty is just as important.
Consequently, financial brands are already offering incentives and rewards to attract new customers and build loyalty. Yet, today’s offers often fail to stand out and excite.
Engagement is worth much more than cashback. And as behavioral psychology tells us, delayed rewards fail to reinforce the behavior they are intended to incentivize.
The alternative for many finance companies is to issue vouchers and offers for third-party products through the mobile app or website. However, these require the customer to discover the offer, click to accept it, then go find the related store, product or service and make the purchase through an additional sequence of steps.
These programs are complex and often confusing. They result in low uptake and fail to deliver on the original objective of growing engagement and recurring spend. There is no instant gratification. Consumers want something more engaging, better integrated with their card or wallet, better aligned to their interests, and in today’s connected world, a fully realized online experience. Vouchers don’t cut it anymore.
Benefits with real value
It can cost upwards of $500 to acquire a new customer, only to lose them again or see them quickly become inactive. Yet it can cost as little as $5 per month to drive active engagement with customers worth many thousands of dollars to your business.
Bundling a popular subscription service as part of your finance product offer grows engagement and value by over 32%, whether that is a fitness service to keep insurance customers healthy or a security service for high net worth banking VIPs.
Reward, motivate or sell
Add powerful incentives that encourage the desired behavior from customers. Imagine if you could:
- Offer Amazon Prime shopping when a customer takes out a new mortgage
- Gift a Netflix plan for customers with active accounts for all the family
- Give customer a week of Disney+ when they top up their wallet with a defined value of spend on specific things
- Give Spotify to listen to in the new car purchased with that car loan
- Encourage customers to save or buy more – discount 10% on a wide range of subscription services, with every $5000 deposited each month
In addition to linking your subscriptions to reward customer behaviors, you can sell the full range of subscription services to generate incremental customer revenue. Your customers would rather discover new services and buy from you, in one place, than have to visit multiple vendors to sign up and manage their subscriptions. Make customers’ lives easy and put yourself at the heart of their subscription world.
Explore the Digital Vending Machine®
Give your customers a reason to love you!
It’s easy to give gift cards, discount vouchers or cashbacks to reward loyalty and behavior. But redeeming vouchers is often hard to track, making it hard to measure success. Many customers find codes and cashbacks confusing and simply don’t bother, which results in no benefit and no increase in motivation, engagement, or loyalty.
By simply offering the benefits directly, managing the customer signup and entitlement lifecycle, you are front and center of your customers’ daily lives. Subscription bundling allows you to seamlessly transition free promos into paid subscriptions drawing directly from your customers account. You take a share of each paid subscription your customers take out.
Learn more about how banks, credit unions plus card and wallet providers can win from the rise of the subscription economy.
