Direct action: ten simple tactics to punch up your direct marketing and improve its effectiveness.

• Author: Tooker, Richard N.
• Position: Direct Marketing

The use of direct marketing by retail banks has grown by double-digit annualized rates for the last couple of years. Yet, a substantial number of regional and community banks still rely mostly on mass media to communicate with the marketplace--including their own customers. If these banks are using direct marketing at all, it constitutes a relatively small slice of the marketing budget.

Why don't these banks use customer direct marketing to maximum advantage? Here are some possibilities.

Business silos tend to get in the way of the customer-centric mentality required to effectively manage customer relationships. If the asset and liability sides of the bank go to market separately, customer focus suffers.

For nearly a century, banks necessarily have been concerned with awareness and positioning. Product and service parity, largely a legislated circumstance, has nor fostered the competitive differentiation that is at the heart of successful direct marketing in most other businesses.

Direct marketing is often viewed as an acquisition tool, exclusively.

There are still some technology issues to overcome, particularly in a consolidating market. Two merging banks may each have workable marketing database solutions, but sometimes the two platforms can't communicate. The programming effort required to merge them is always a secondary objective behind the integration of back-office systems.

Often it's because banks tried it and it didn't work. Brand-oriented marketing personnel sometimes do not have the experience and skills to effectively use the medium. Direct marketing is a collection of specialized disciplines, different in substantive ways from brand advertising.

Because brand-conscious marketers haven't come to grips with the way brand and direct can work synergistically and symbiotically. Savvy marketers know that direct customer communication is at the heart of the brand experience.

Here are 10 quick-and easy approaches to customer direct marketing that banks--of all sizes--can implement.

1. Send a welcome kit. When new retail customers make their first visit to the bank, they rarely buy everything they're ultimately going to need. Usually, the immediate need--especially if they've recently moved to a new city--is checking. They'll buy a CD when an old one rolls over, and they'll ask for a loan only when they need the money. Knowing that, a follow up mailing that provides account information and a way to buy easily is a smart selling...