attention

It’s easy to overlook the humble email. When you’re serving your commercial banking customers, that doesn’t leave much time. So, there it sits, one line in your inbox. In the flurry of new ways of marketing — Social media, viral content, video, interactive entertainment, the email seems like an “also ran.” That’s a shame, as we’re big fans of its simple beauty (and you should be, too).

Used well, email is an elegant way to market to large numbers of people. If you’re providing financial services, it’s also a fantastic method for building trust with your commercial banking customers. Here at RBC, we think the email is something to be celebrated and enjoyed, so let’s explore using it to market your commercial banking operation.

Why the email is more than just something to delete… So, why do we love the email so very, very much? Glad you asked.

It’s a low-impact way to get attention. The email is one of the more innocuous ways to grab attention, and it can be one of the most useful. You only need to craft a great email once (and hey, we can help with that). Then you can land this wondrous creation in people’s inboxes and enjoy the responses it brings. Email is less “in your face” than other types of promotion or advertising, so it’s perfectly suited to commercial banking, with its sensible and sober approach to managing money.

You can share really useful stuff that matters to people. Emails aren’t all about selling. In fact, if you make them too “salesy,” there’s a good chance they’ll get caught in a spam filter or simply deleted. No, the art of the great email is to build trust over time, and you do that by adding real value.

When you’re marketing to commercial banking customers, they need information and support. Give them insights into their industry, provide financial calculators and favorable terms. Share advice on good financial management and business admin. Providing tools and other useful services means they’ll think favorably of your bank. That really helps when it comes to trust and brand recognition.

Emails are great for embedding messages and links. A good email is never “just” an email. It likely contains engaging imagery and links to further useful information. You can make emails interactive and fun, provide access to your commercial banking products and services, share news and online information, and showcase everything your bank does.

They’re really (really) cheap to send. The cost of sending an email is, effectively, zero. This makes them one of the most cost-effective marketing channels. Yes, you’ll need to pay to develop really good email copy, but that’s likely to be much less than the cost of other types of marketing. And once that copy is created, it’s there for you, whenever you want to run your next commercial banking marketing campaign.

You can reach lots of people. When you’ve been building an email list over time (and you are building an email list, right?) you’ll have thousands of people you can contact. With clever mail merging and personalization, you can tailor your email to each individual business recipient, increasing the chance they’ll open and interact with it.

Now, we know the email isn’t perfect. People get far too many emails, so yours needs to stand out, and that means influencing your readers to open your messages. We can help with that — A combination of the right content, delivered at the perfect time, with a compelling subject line can significantly enhance your open rates and help you sell more commercial banking products.

Get in touch with us today, and let us start a quiet revolution in your bank. We’ll change how you think about and use email to spread the word.