Eliminate your customer blind spots

Many marketers envy the ability of financial institutions to know who their customers are, where they live and how they transact with them. But despite the abundance of information at their disposal, banks and credit unions still have blind spots, especially when it comes to attracting new customers and knowing how to connect with their existing ones.

Wouldn’t you like to know where your customers are coming from during the day? Or whether they are visiting a competitor? And what about all of those sponsorship dollars banks and credit unions generously spend every year; wouldn’t it be great to know if the people attending all of the sporting events, concerts, festivals and museums that carry your name or flash your signage are the same consumers you’re trying to engage with?

With mobility analytics you can answer all of these questions. It works by combining spatially-enabled data, collected from privacy-compliant, location-enabled mobile devices, with geodemographic insights and lifestyle segmentation. We have more than 20,000 variables to help describe consumers' demographics, financial profiles, media preferences, spending behavior, attitudes, values and more. The insights are invaluable to organizations looking to support their marketing and real estate related decisions.

Here are five high-impact applications of mobility analytics that all banks should take advantage of:

1. Find new ways to grow your branches. It’s one thing to know who enters your branch, but what about all of those people who walk past your front door who you don’t have a relationship with? Using mobility analytics you can learn who those people are and see how they compare to your existing customers. With these insights you can identify the best prospects and develop a strategy to attract them to improve branch performance.
2. Develop a customer conquest strategy. Using mobility analytics you can see if you are losing some of your ideal customers to your competitors. Our data will allow you to compare your customers to those who are visiting branches run by a competitor to see if they are attracting the types of people you’d like to serve. By understanding what types of customers are going to a competitor you will be in a better position to develop product, service and marketing strategies to win them over to your bank or credit union.
3. Optimize your distribution strategy. Study the traffic patterns of your customers to see how far they are willing to travel to your branch. With mobility data you can see if customers prefer to do their banking closer to where they work or if they’d prefer a location closer to home, thereby ensuring that your branches are conveniently located and designed to serve your best customers’ needs.
4. Improve your out-of-home marketing. You may not interact with your customers every day, but you can still make sure your brand is top of mind. Using mobility analytics you can identify the neighborhoods where the majority of your customers travel to help you find the best locations for billboards and other out-of-home advertisements.
5. Efficiently allocate your sponsorship dollars. Find out if the events and venues you are sponsoring are attracting the most desirable and high value consumers you are trying to reach. Mobility data is uniquely positioned to answer these questions because it provides visitor data for spaces that typically don’t collect transaction data, such as a city park or public festival. By connecting these results with a segmentation system you can see who’s visiting these spaces and see how they align with your target market.

For all of the information banks and credit unions have access to, they still have blind spots—but perhaps not for much longer. We’ve built a new tool that makes it easy to leverage privacy-compliant mobility analytics and link those data to rich third-party databases to finally give these organizations a 360-degree view of their customers they’ve been looking for.

Mark Bell is a Director of Business Development at Environics Analytics who focuses on the financial services sector.