Personalizing at Scale
Michelle Markham is marketing manager at SkyOne Federal Credit Union.
Michelle Markham will explore how SkyOne Federal Credit Union uses Customer-Led Growth (CLG) strategies to personalize marketing efforts while reducing costs. She will highlight how SkyOne leverages Extole to combine personalization with scalability, offering tailored outreach to each customer.
See the key chapters from Michelle's talk, and dive in where you'd like.
What does Customer-Led Growth really mean?
How Extole is Driving User Acquisition
Transcript
Currently in this industry both for banking and credit unions. It’s one of the most difficult things to acquire new customers in our case for credit unions new members and the reason behind that is people tend to be set in their ways, or they feel comfortable, they feel confident with their current financial institution for opportunities where Extole has come in and provided a platform to reach out to your current client base already and you’ll see me refer to in the credit union world, we refer to our customers as members because each member of the credit union owns a share. It’s member owned credit unions versus stockholders owning banks. So with that, with our members, our members are the best resources. So in terms of understanding this landscape, you know where to go to to grow acquisition and new membership growth is right there with your members. So Extole has provided a wonderful platform for us where we’re able to penetrate our current membership and grow through that regard. So personal touches. It’s very important today, in this day and age, to have that personal touch during growth. The consumer is ridiculously savvy. They know when they’re being, you know, marketed to and advertised to and I don’t really see that as a challenge. I see that as an opportunity for any brand to be able to speak to their actual target audiences through that personalized touch where Extole comes in. Would help with that for us, understanding which of our members have been super advocates, advocating for our business, continuously referring new members to our business and to our organization. They’ve been a partner versus just a vendor relationship in terms of helping us create new acquisitions for Sky One.
How SkyOne is Making the Most of Customer Led - Growth
Transcript
Now that we kind of understood. How difficult it is to grow and customer acquisition, member acquisition, where Extole has just been this incredible partner in creating key strategies for us to grow our membership base at scale is just one off the CUSP is they have a referral program that is robust and what I mean by robust is that it is not manual. It has this platform that we can scale and versus where we were prior to joining Extole. We had to do everything on a manual basis. You know, from emails to dripping those emails manually finding members that would you know, be willing to refer to what we found in the referral program is that we understood behaviors. We understood who to target, the automations in itself, you have a partner with Extole, meaning that they will find opportunities together with you understanding what your KPIs for your organization are and in that, we created several referral programs. So there is the Evergreen but we’ve also used bursted offers, where we’ve doubled our offer at times when we knew we were going to have to do a sheetment, or times that we knew that we were going to lose memberships through attrition at certain times of the year, so we would effectively plan for those first and they’ve proven to be successful to offset what we already had allotted for to lose in that year for various reasons but primarily is treatment. We’ve also included opportunities where we’ve partnered with other vendor partners and utilized Extole program. For example, just last year, Q4 we piloted along with CU travel, which is a wonderful platform in itself, where you needed to be a credit union member in order to use CU travel site, their platform, in itself is, if you are a credit union member, you have access to their site, and you’re able to get reduced hotels bookings, less than other like Kayak, Expedia, for example and just that unique partnership Extole willing to use how can we use the platform? How can we create a welcome offer? And then, in addition working with a different vendor, that’s Extole and Sky One relationship, where we’ve always been willing to test the real what can we do within Extole, we’ve also created like, welcome offer. You know, just hey, do you want to give us a try? And then we’ve used an excellence platform, again, automations, you’re able to share through social channels, you’re able to do emails, you’re there, able to calculate and estimate when to follow up. And then, of course, the reward in itself. All of this is automated, included with this partnership, other programs that we’ve created for strategy to grow our membership at scale is we refer a refer concierge program. This was a unique program in the credit union world. We have business development officers that work with our select employer groups. They have their own membership base, the employer groups that they work with specifically and for them to reach their sales goals, they have this opportunity to refer themselves. So for example, I opened my membership account to Sky One with one of our business development reps and I really liked working with that individual. So now you know, we worked with Extole. How can we continue this advocacy for you know, Sky One, as well as help the business development officer build their book of business. So that came the birth of our concierge program. So this was amazing. You know, we have three videos out there sharing their links, the same concept as the Evergreen referral program. However, it was not only referring members to join Sky One but doing it through that individual’s link, so that they, you know, they have their goals to meet. And so it was an amazing program that we came up together with Extole and we’ve also done things where we’ve done advocacies for our teachers. We, you know, the California State PTA is one of our groups that we work with, you know, how did we, you know, advocate for teachers through bonus programs. We had people nominate their favorite teacher and then that teacher won an award through this program. Innovation is very key with the Extole Sky One relationship and we continue to push each other to see how we can expand the platform, as well as the relationship to grow our membership at scale.
How to Maintain the Personal Touch
Transcript
In this climate you’re going to hear often, how do you maintain personalized touch in a digital world? This is where credit unions I think, in fact, I know, have the advantage over banks and other FIS because that is just the foundation of the credit union world. It’s by the people. For the people is our motto. All credit unions were started to give an advantage to employees so that they can have lower rates personalized service that in itself, being the core of Sky One and being a credit union transfers into the relationship with Extole and referring friends and family. And outside of our referral program, it just extends. If you come into a branch, or you talk to one of our live agents in through chat, or if you call our contact center, you have to maintain this personalized touch and this was very important to us and why our relationship with Extole has seen great success, because they understand that. And moving into 2024 and competition is fierce and our economy is changing from the pandemic and how we’re now in this place where people are very selective of where they want to conduct their business and so how you maintain that is knowing your customer, knowing our members. It is very, very important for us to understand that we won’t ask people or offer people any product or service that isn’t aligned with where they are in their financial journey today. Extole has been a wonderful partner in understanding our members, who is engaged, who is the most engaged. They give us that vantage point of who to continue to, dare I say, market to but to offer the product and service that’s aligned with them. Very excited to see what we’re going to come up with in 2024 and beyond, with Extole and how we continue to maintain that personalized credit union touch.
Cutting CPA with CLG
Transcript
Obviously our key metrics is organic membership growth our consumer loans deposits but where specifically Extole and Sky One work together is that organic membership growth portion excited to share that we had opened 508 new memberships last year in 2023 with our partnership all through Extole, all through the various programs that we did and our cost per acquisition was out of $161 our average cost per acquisition at Sky One is currently well over $200 this is including our program costs with Extole. Very excited to see that it’s one thing to be able to create personalized touches and these innovative programs that we did but at the end of the day. We also have to create results here at Sky One and we’ve been able to do that and continue to do so with Extole that part of the partnership is so important.
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The Importance of Programs that are Truly Sustainable