A Plan of Action

It’s that time of year when marketers everywhere are sitting down to build next year’s marketing plan. They’re pulling out their strategic plans and identifying the goals they’re going to tackle for 2012. And they’re asking these questions: What is it that our members want and need from us? What can we do to get them to use our products and services more? We understand that you know your members intimately, but if you’re anecdotally defining their needs, it may be time to verify your beliefs through marketing research.

You can use marketing research to assist you in accomplishing your most challenging goals, including:

• New membership growth
• Increasing wallet share and retention
• Improving member service
• Assessing member loyalty
• Measuring member overall satisfaction
• Identifying new products or services

You have the ability to reach your goals by finding out what your members are thinking and doing through the use of member surveys, focus groups, member analytics and website analytics.

• Member surveys are a great tool to provide insight into member loyalty and to help improve member satisfaction. Member surveys can be done via mail, telephone or online. Although online surveys are growing, mail surveys still tend to have the highest return rate.
  
  
• Focus groups allow you to dig deeper into your members’ thoughts and desires about their banking needs and your credit union. Credit unions typically utilize focus groups when they are exploring a big change like introducing a new name or brand. This type of research can be expensive, but the insights you gain are well worth the effort.
   
• Member analytics are a wonderful tool that provides an in-depth analysis of your current membership. The reports provide a thorough understanding of your membership, which in turn gives you insight into wallet share growth, retention strategies and member loyalty. When developing marketing strategies, a comprehensive understanding and knowledge of your membership is a valuable tool. This is also a great place to start when you build a member loyalty program or a rewards program.
   
• SEO and website analytics are tools used to effectively drive traffic to your website and to help you evaluate the behavior of website visitors. By tracking visitor behavior with website analytics, you can put more emphasis on the keywords and sources that bring the visitors you want to your website.

According to CUNA, one in three credit unions conduct member surveys in-house, especially those with assets of $50 million or below. For the credit unions that have the staff time, expertise and software available, this can be a very cost-effective way to manage your research.

For those that don't, most marketing research providers can customize their services to match most budgets and they have the tools and resources to accurately and informatively analyze the data. They also can provide your credit union benchmark data from other credit unions to compare to your results. If you decide to outsource, Marketing Solutions has marketing research experts that can work with your credit union on all or just a portion of your research endeavors.

Before you venture down this road of marketing research, keep in mind that you shouldn’t ask what your members want if you don’t intend to act. Their answers might make you realize that some of your products and services aren’t as popular as you think or that your member service isn’t reaching its potential. Your credit union needs to be prepared to really assess and explore survey results and be willing to shift its strategy where needed to not only help you reach your goals, but to give your members what they want and need.

Related Services:  Marketing Research Services, Online Services