Look at how someone is caring for their house plants, and you’ll soon know if they’re a green thumb growing a blossoming lily or if that once leafy fern is in its dying days. 

Like a house plant, your banking and lending customers must be cultivated to flourish. Especially now with loan growth drooping as quickly as the leaves of a dried-up plant.  

Demand for loans is expected to slow down in the year ahead as we face a potential looming recession and rising interest rates. Banks and lenders are turning to Salesforce Marketing Cloud technology to personalize and segment their customers to stand out in the crowded loan space. 

Here we explore ways to survive and thrive during this era of slower loan growth by leveraging Marketing Cloud’s capabilities. These marketing tactics are applicable for all types of loans, from mortgages to auto, by bringing value to the customer and making it easy for them to apply for a loan. 

1. Customize accessible data

The most accessible place to start looking for opportunities to grow loans is with your existing lending customers. Your first step should be finding where things like pay-off requests and maturity dates are for loans, and if this data exists, setting up a process to collect the data using Salesforce CRM and a connected web form.  

You can also look for growth in loan balances within your own non-utilized HELOC balances. This can be an easy journey in Marketing Cloud that helps you and your customers take advantage of using open balances before rates go up.

2. Personalize the homepage

Ninety-one percent of consumers view digital banking as an important factor in choosing where to bank. And where is a consumer most likely to go for digital banking? The bank’s homepage!

Banks get thousands of views daily on their homepages as users log into their online banking platforms. The homepage is prime real estate that few banks utilize to their fullest potential. With Marketing Cloud Personalization, you can use online and offline data to personalize your home screen to your individual customers needs. This can help increase loan click-throughs by making sure customers see the right offer at the right time.

3. Track loan calculator data

It is estimated that more than 2 million consumers in the U.S. search for financial calculators every single day. Type in ‘loan calculator’ on your Google search bar, and you’ll get millions of search engine results from various banks. 

But while many banks have loan calculators on their sites, many are not relying on them to capture and track customer data and using that data to personalize customer interactions. Marketing Cloud Personalization enables banks to understand loan calculator usage better and then react to these engagements by setting up follow-up customer communications with an email, phone call, or relevant content. 

4. Gamify your communications

Gamification is a marketing approach where you offer your customers or prospects elements of a competition or an award based on the actions they perform. For banking, gamification could be used to attract new customers, increase customer loyalty, or upsell loan services. 

Gamification makes the loan process a bit more fun and engaging for the customer and differentiates the bank from the competition. Using Marketing Cloud, you could provide badges to recognize a loan applicant’s achievement or offer redeemable points in return for watching loan education videos.

5. Gather data for progressive profiling

Progressive profiling is the process of gathering data points on an individual and building that data over time. Marketing Cloud makes it easy to use progressive profiling to create conversations about lending with your customers.

For example, you could ask a prospective home loan applicant a few questions about buying a house and incentivize them to answer in exchange for a free cup of coffee. Follow with having the applicant fill out a form to access an eBook about home buying. You will start to build a customer profile with this data that can be used to personalize future interactions while also helping provide value to your customers.

6. Scale advertising across search, social, and display

Advertising Studio is an add-on to Marketing Cloud that drives advertising across search, display, and social media at scale. This tactic uses a form of progressive profiling and segmentation to align your ad with the right person on the right platform. For example, sending an email to a loan applicant and, when that is not effective, serving up a Facebook ad or a Google display ad. 

You can find new customers with lookalikes who behave like your current high-value customers using Salesforce, Facebook lookalike audiences, and Google similar audiences. This targeting may seem a bit ‘big brotherish,’ but customers, especially younger ones, know how technology works and have come to expect this approach from marketers.

You can also use this same data to make sure customers are not getting bothersome advertising. For example, say a customer decides they would like to get a loan and fills out an application. It would be great to suppress that customer from an advertising campaign as it makes sure the customer is happier and that you don’t waste advertising dollars on an ineffective interaction.

Accelerate loan growth with Marketing Cloud and Silverline

Marketing Cloud can make your marketing spend go further and drive loan growth by leveraging the power of personalization and segmentation. From strategy and implementation to managed services, Silverline can guide you through every phase of your Marketing Cloud journey and enable continuous value with the Salesforce platform. Find out how we can help your organization.