Just-in-Time or Hit-and-Miss? How Credit Data Can Help Lenders Improve Marketing ROI

In a competitive environment where consumers have more choice than ever, greater access to information on competitor products, and an easier ability to switch providers, organizations must pay attention to where their marketing efforts can yield the best results.

Just-in-time marketing can help increase customer engagement where it counts. Real-time credit data assists in mitigating some of the friction consumers experience when trying to acquire a product. Lisa Perri, Senior Consultant, Product Management, explores how these practices can assist marketing teams in increasing response rates and marketing return on investment (ROI).

You’ve heard the voice of the customer… how do you respond?

In our digital world, marketers don’t need lengthy surveys, long-term brand-tracking exercises or focus groups to get insight into what customers want. Instead, they can determine demand based on consumers’ digital behaviour — whether that’s browsing a site for a particular product or clicking an ad placed on a social media site.

With so much engagement happening online, the voice of the customer can be heard, but are marketers responding in the right way? Spending excess time and money on getting prospects to their websites, social media pages and other digital channels is part of any marketing strategy. But knowing how to convert that traffic into engagement, and engagement into sales, can be the key to making the most of your marketing investment.

From mass market to maximum impact

Whatever the nature of your campaign — upselling or cross-selling, balance transfer or limit increase — you’re likely to see greater response rates if you present relevant offers when customers are actively engaged with your organization, and therefore, more likely to buy.

To achieve this, forward-thinking marketing organizations are turning to a well-known manufacturing practice: meeting customer demand ‘just-in-time’.

A study by Accenture explores some aspects of this new marketing paradigm where the goal is producing only marketing that’s needed — at the right time, with the right message or offer to convert a sale¹.

But this isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. Mid-sized organizations without extensive marketing resources may struggle to focus already-stretched budgets in the right places. Whereas large organizations may overload customers with so many ‘personalized’ offers, they end up presenting the opposite: A slew of offers from all areas of the business (home loans, personal loans, credit cards, and so on). With each area running a campaign at the same time, how do you determine the best offer to make to an individual customer?

Making better offers faster, to the right customer

To respond quickly with an appropriate offer, you need to know more about a consumer than what they’re looking for. Accenture notes less than 18% of the consumers marketers reach are “in-market” — that is, they’re the right customer for a particular product or service offer.

For net new prospects interacting with your website, their credit scores and relevant alternative data could be used to present offers based on a set of predetermined criteria. For existing customers, a combination of credit data and information on their products and relationship with the business to date can assist with a more proactive approach — presenting offers when the customer logs in to their online profile, for example, or calls in to the contact centre.

In both cases, having a real-time lead on the customer’s risk metrics means you’re able to make better decisions faster based on the rules you’ve set for that offer. And because the customer can move seamlessly from offer to application, they’re less likely to drop out later in the process.

Taking a holistic approach to make real-time marketing real

According to the Accenture report, organizations which practice just-in-time marketing report higher levels of growth than their peers. These organizations aren’t inherently more digital, nor do they necessarily spend more on analytics. However, they do incorporate digital and analytics capabilities into their marketing operations — using feedback from customer service, for example, to develop campaigns and offers.

The Accenture study notes companies achieving better results from just-in-time marketing strategies are those that excel in three areas:

• Customer knowledge, based on consumer data
• Channel capability, enabled by a nimble, multichannel marketing infrastructure
• Real-time marketing flexibility to tailor value propositions to customers

Consumers want offers that are both relevant and easy to acquire
Marketing teams that listen to the voice of the customer, develop appropriate campaigns, and reduce consumers’ time and effort to respond to those campaigns, are likely to see better results and a greater return on investment.

TransUnion Solutions
To assist organizations in using credit and other data in their marketing campaigns, TransUnion has developed Find My Offer. This powerful offers engine integrates with any marketing channel to help businesses present relevant offers at the right time, enhance customer engagement and increase return on investment.

With Find My Offer, you can enable relevant changes to your inbound channels. This functionality can be integrated into existing banking or decisioning platforms to create a holistic omni-channel consumer experience by promoting targeted offers consistently across channels. Find My Offer empowers you to qualify your audience against multiple criteria, match offers by best fit, and can help improve your customer’s experience and engagement.