Banking

Want to increase your commercial banking sales?

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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.

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Why You Need Red Barn Consulting to Get Your Banking Website ADA Compliant

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You know, when it comes to ADA compliance, you can’t afford to take any chances. If you’re in the banking world, you know how important it is to dot the i’s, cross the t’s, and make sure everything is in order. What you might not know is there’s something big coming down the pipe — Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance.

Put simply, it means your banking website and online presence needs to be fully accessible for people with visual and hearing difficulties. That means it has to be easy to use, and be compatible with all the various software and hardware they use to access the internet — Think screen readers, braille interfaces, specialized keyboards, speech recognition, and the like.

The ADA compliance issue is pretty serious too — The Department of Justice is insisting all banking organizations meet their guidelines by 2018, with the threat of large fines if they’re not. We definitely don’t want that to happen to you.

It’s why our leisure reading includes such gems as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 so we understand exactly what guidelines your website has to meet.

We admit it, here at RBC, we’re a little bit geeky (and a little bit cheeky). It’s why we’ve read through all of the new specifications and requirements in detail — There are over 70 of them! And it’s why we’ve got a solid, proven action plan to get your banking website to be fully compliant, fast.

When it comes to the guidelines, we find headings like “Perceivable,” “Operable,” “Understandable,” and “Robust” delicious. In face, we savor them, and more importantly, we know what they mean to keeping your banking business out of trouble.

That includes:

  • Reviewing every aspect of your website to ensure it’s accessible to everyone.
  • Prioritizing, recommending, and making changes to keep you compliant.
  • Ensuring all your images, media, and other visual elements have text descriptions to help the visually impaired.
  • Amending your media player so users can pause, rewind, and fast forward video and audio content easily.
  • Your text and background have a good contrast to each other to make everything easy to read.
  • Reviewing your media to make sure it’s compliant (e.g. checking your audio content has text substitutes, captions, and sign language).
  • Checking your website is completely usable with just a keyboard (Mice are a no-no).
  • Making sure your navigation, menus, and other interactive elements make sense and area easy for everyone to use.
  • Testing out your website in a variety of different browsers so it’s usable by every member of your audience.

I mean, just look at this stuff… Do you really have time to go through everything in detail and make sure your banking website meets every single requirement? Probably not — But we do. Plus, we actually find it kind of enjoyable. We’re strange like that.

We’ve already helped banks like Litchfield Bancorp and Collinsville Savings Society, and we’re here to help you.

Get in touch today and we’ll explain exactly how we’ll make your bank website ADA compliant. Get yourself some peace-of-mind.

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The Department of Justice is looking at your website – are you ADA compliant?

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Compliance. It’s a word that finance managers are all too familiar with. We know it might cause a slight sinking feeling, but compliance guidelines exist to protect everyone — You and your customers.

That’s why it’s vital to understand the impact and implications of the new Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) guidelines issued by the Department of Justice. In short, it’s about making sure your banking website and online presence is easy to access and use for visual and hearing impaired customers (and that’s good for everyone).

It matters for two pretty big reasons:

  1. It shows your commitment to all your customers and making their banking experience as easy as possible.
  2. It protects you from legal action — Businesses with websites that fail to meet ADA / DOJ requirements have been fined or sued (ouch).

The problems visual or hearing impaired people have with using websites.

For most people, using a bank website is easy (especially if they don’t forget their password!) They visit the site, enter their login details, get into the online banking app and pay their bills, check their statement, and manage their finances. If you’re blind or visually impaired, that gets a lot more difficult.

They may need specialist tools like braille or tactile interfaces, screen readers, voice activated navigation, and specialist software. When they arrive at a banking website they may run into more frustrations because the site isn’t coded properly to work with their hardware and software.

If your customers are hearing impaired, they will run into problems with audio content, or if they needed to call a service center to get issues sorted out.

It’s these problems the DOJ\’s guidelines are trying to solve, and they’re serious about it.

How do you know if your website is ADA compliant?

The simple truth is, if you need to ask whether your website is ADA compliant, it probably isn’t. For example, does your website:

  • Allow navigation completely by keyboard (not using a mouse)?
  • Have rich alternative descriptions for any pictures or visual elements on your website?
  • Explain what’s happening in customer service videos, purely through audio?
  • Provide sign language interpretation for audio content?

These are just four examples from the over 70 requirements the DOJ has. Ultimately, it comes down to the question: Is your banking website completely usable by all of your customers, regardless of their ability or disability?

Why your bank website needs to get compliant

Your bank website needs to be compliant by 2018. If it’s not, you’ll run into several big problems:

  • You could get sued or fined by the DOJ for non-compliance.
  • You could fall foul of equal rights laws.
  • You could get negative publicity and a bad brand reputation.

In short, getting compliant isn’t an option if you want to stay in the clear.

Relax, we’ve got this

We understand just what it takes to get your banking website ADA compliant. We also understand you just don’t have the time. That’s why we’re here to help — We’ve already helped banks like Litchfield Bancorp and Collinsville Savings Society, and we’re here to help you.

Get in touch today and we’ll explain exactly how we’ll make your bank website ADA compliant. Get yourself some peace-of-mind.

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Getting Your Banking Website ADA Compliant – What Does It Take?

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As we covered in our last article, getting your website ADA compliant by 2018 is critical if you want to avoid problems (read; big, big problems) from the Department of Justice. Here’s a quick refresher.

Essentially, the DOJ wants all banking websites to be fully accessible for visual and hearing impaired people by 2018. If your website isn’t ready, you could run into issues with fines, getting sued, equal rights laws, and bad public perception. You don’t want that to happen, and neither do we (really, we like you).

So, what does the DOJ mean when it says you have to get your website ready? Glad you asked.

Making your website accessible — What the DOJ wants

The DOJ has several requirements under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. That’s a bit of a mouthful so we’ll break it down. This comes in two delicious compliance favors — The changes the DOJ requires, and what that means in terms of getting compliant.

Changes required by the DOJ under the ADA

There are over 70 (really!) specific requirements so we’re just looking at the high-level areas. Here are the direct quotes on what each one involves.

  • Perceivable – Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive.
  • Operable – User interface components and navigation must be operable.
  • Understandable – Information and the operation of user interface must be understandable.
  • Robust – Content must be robust enough so it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.

Now, that list doesn’t look very easy to understand (we know!) so here are some examples of what they mean in practice.

Perceivable — ADA Compliance

  • Provide text alternatives for any non-text content — Having text descriptions of any images or interface components, making sure there’s a good text alternative that can be read by screen-reading software.
  • Captions / sign language for prerecorded content — Videos and other media will need to have captions and / or sign language so hearing impaired people can get the information they need.

Operable — ADA Compliance

  • Keyboard navigation — Your website should be completely usable and navigable using just a keyboard (i.e. There’s no requirement to use a mouse to access any specific part of your banking website.)
  • Accessing media — Users should be able to easily pause, rewind, and interact with all the media (video, audio, and other) on your banking website.

Understandable – ADA Compliance

  • Language of the webpage — The language on a specific webpage can be easily updated according to a user’s needs.
  • Ease of use — A website must have consistent navigation and be easy to read and use.[/cs_text]

Robust – ADA Compliance

  • Make sure all of your website enhancements for ADA work with all client browsers or other ways people access your website.
  • Make sure your enhancements work with the various specialized hardware and software that visual and hearing impaired people use. (e.g. screen readers, braille interfaces, speech recognition etc.)

You probably don’t have the time to do all this (I mean, there are 70 requirements, and they’re not exactly… simple). That’s why we’re here.

Relax, we’ve got this

We understand just what it takes to get your banking website ADA compliant. We also understand you just don’t have the time. That’s why we’re here to help — We’ve already helped banks like Litchfield Bancorp and Collinsville Savings Society, and we’re here to help you.

Get in touch today and we’ll explain exactly how we’ll make your bank website ADA compliant. Get yourself some peace-of-mind.

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How to Get New Bank Customers with Beautiful Content like Blogging

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We all know that switching to a new bank can be…well, painful. The more accounts you have, and the more you automate the banking experience, the higher your retention rate. That’s great for your existing customers, but it doesn’t help when it comes to attracting new people to your business.

Most banks offer similar products and services, so creating a unique value proposition isn’t easy. What’s the secret sauce? How do some banks increase their retail numbers without putting lots of pressure on their service teams?

It’s all about telling a story and making it personal. Your customers and prospects want to feel like you’re speaking to them, that you “get them.” It all comes from your content – Understanding what you write and where you publish it are important, knowing WHO you are writing for is critical.

Let’s dive a little deeper…

Know your Target Client Profile (TCP) – What’s the demographic of your current customer base? Who are the potential customers you want to add? Where do they live? What is their socioeconomic background? Are they business customers? Retail? It’s critical to have a deep understanding of exactly who you want to reach – Their interests, aspirations, lifestyle choices, financial understanding and more.

Think like your TCP – Your content needs to be relevant to your TCP. What is most important to them? What’s going to grab their attention? How will it help? Will it answer their questions? Does it provide genuinely useful information? What will they read? How will they read it? When will they read it? A 20-year-old and an 80-year-old are going to have very different needs and ways of accessing content.

Create great thought leadership and product content – Thought leadership content is where your customers will get the most value. It’s about giving them insight, valuable information, and resources to help them understand and manage money better. When you combine that with information on your products and their benefits, you create a solid content strategy.

Share short, sweet, accessible, and relevant product information on your website – Your website is the place for your product information – make is easy to find and mobile friendly. Your bank’s website should also highlight your staff with pictures and bios. It helps your customers to relate to you, and people buy from others they know, like, and trust.

Blogging is the Grand Poohbah of content – Every bank should have a blog – It’s where your thought leadership and awesome content lives It’s where your staff can shine, and it’s what you will share on social media.

Keys to Blogging Success

  1. PLAN – Have an editorial calendar based on your TCP and your value proposition – Who are you going to write for, and what are your going to write about? Create five or six content areas where that you’ll develop. They might be: Your culture and team – Stories about your employees, what makes them tick, and what they bring to your business. Retail customer information – Speaking to your retail customers directly about the things that matter to them. Retirement planning, mortgages, insurance, loans, real estate, the economy, tips for protecting your home in winter, safety, etc. Financial education and guides – Creating guides, checklists, tools, and resources to help you customers get the most out of their money. Business customer information – Talking to business owners about what matters to them including business bank accounts, small business financing, insurance, etc. Community – The work you’re doing in the local community including sponsorship and other activities. Financial news – Talking about the economy, the stock market, and other interesting areas.
  2. SHARE – Build your brand and expand it through stories. The more people who see your name and your team, the quicker they will connect.
  3. CONNECT – People leave banks because they don’t feel the love. Intriguing content that speaks to them helps them feel connected, which makes them more likely to switch.
  4. REPEAT – For content to really hook your prospects, they need to see it over and over again. Be constant and consistent. Post regularly, share on social media, and get your name and brand out there.

Good examples of banking blog content

Here are some ideas on the type of content your retail audience would find useful:

  • Financial planning and budgeting — Financial planning in everyday life and making sure you’re saving enough. Budgeting for big life events.

• Dealing with loans and overdrafts — Responsibly managing credit and debt, including understanding interest, minimum payments, and credit limits.

• Investing — Ways to invest money including bonds, the stock exchange, index trackers, mutual funds, and other investment products.

• Retirement planning — How to plan for a good retirement including IRAs, 401Ks, and other pension plans.

When you can bring together great content with a good understanding of your audience and share your content in the right way, you’ll start to create momentum. You can capitalize on that, use it to win you new customers, and keep them happy.

If you need help writing your content or want to bounce some more ideas off us – give us a shout – that\’s what we\’re here for![/cs_text][/cs_column][/cs_row][/cs_section][/cs_content]

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Creating New Banking Customers – The Art of the Email Drip

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If you oversee the marketing or sales for a bank or credit union, you’ve probably placed your fair share of ads in local newspapers, had some promotions on the local radio show, and launched a fabulous Facebook page. Hopefully, you’ve gotten some feedback, adjusted your strategy, and carried on. One marketing avenue you might have overlooked is the quiet, simple, inexpensive, humble email.

It’s true that email marketing sometimes gets a bad rap – Many are afraid of clogging their client’s inbox, being lost in a sea of spam, or getting an “opt out” notification. Fortunately, there’s a solution – Send emails that aren’t all about selling. Instead, focus on building trust, showing expertise, enhancing reputation, sharing great information, and being useful to your customers. Sneak in a subtle call to action here and there by all means, and you’ll find it effective. That’s why “Email Drip Campaigns” work really well for banks, credit unions, and financial institutions.

Why email drip campaigns work

Email drip campaigns are more successful than standard email campaigns because they’re not directly selling something. People are put off by overly “salesy” messages, so drip campaigns avoid them. An email drip campaign will:

  • Share genuinely useful information with your customers and potential customers.
  • Reinforce the name and brand of your bank or credit union with your customers.
  • Show that you understand the needs of people who may require your services.
  • Alert people to news, information and other content that could be useful to them.
  1. A customer or potential customer provides you with their email address, and agrees to get emails from you.
  2. You create a strategy for sharing useful banking and financial information with email recipients and create a series of emails.
  3. You send out emails on a periodic basis according to your strategy and timetable.
  4. Customers and potential customers read these emails and choose to act on them.

We call these “drip campaigns” because they’re designed to work over time — A slow reinforcement of your bank’s brand, expertise, and authority showing how you can help out your personal and business customers.

The type of information your bank could share

Here are some examples of the type of content that does well in email drip campaigns:

  • Simple advice on household budgeting and how to make money go further.
  • Financial planning for vacations and special events, especially at seasonal times of the year.
  • Clear information on investments and how customers can start making their money work for them.
  • Information on the housing market in your local area and whether it’s a good time to buy or sell.
  • Explanations of good money management, including credit and debt.
  • Business centric articles on succession planning, the economy, company culture, and more.
  • Advising people on savings, insurance, and other key areas.

Of course, you can mention your products and services in these emails, but that’s not the point of sending them out. Instead, you’re providing genuinely useful, actionable information to help your customers make better decisions. As a result, they’ll trust you more, and people simply prefer doing business with organizations they trust.

The information you provide doesn’t need to be limited to your emails either. You could have a blog on your website that the email links through too, and where you expand on key information. That also has the benefit of “search engine optimization,” meaning the content could show when people search online.

If you want to learn how to create an affordable lead generating magnet for your bank or credit union – why not give us a call? It’s what we do – We’re lead generating machines here at the Red Barn.

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