To generate sustainable loan growth, banks must rethink how to communicate with potential borrowers. Today’s consumer is more informed than ever, with more lending options from which to choose. With the speed and convenience of digital, consumers are now in the driver’s seat when choosing their lenders. Banks must look beyond conventional bank marketing tactics and focus on strategies that engage prospects, account holders, and achieve lending goals.
Loan Growth Strategies That Make Sense
A great way to start is to reframe “potential borrower” as anyone who pre-qualifies for a loan, credit card, or other product with your bank, whether they are currently interested in borrowing or not, and to engage them immediately and relevantly. That’s why a holistic loan marketing strategy — one that both actively reacts to individuals currently shopping for loans, as well as proactively creates interest among those who are not — makes so much sense in today’s economic climate.
For example, actively responding to a credit inquiry with a prequalified loan offer will help you to stay engaged with current account holders. An offer made while a consumer is researching a product or service has far more relevance and saliency than one made outside the shopping window. As a study from the Journal of Financial Services Marketing found, this type of marketing contributed to a 20–30% increase in customer engagement because marketers reached the right individuals with the right messages at the right times.
Conversely, proactively placing multi-product, recurring, prescreened loan offers at the fingertips of pre-qualified loan candidates can instantly transform non-shoppers into borrowers. It delivers the ultimate friction-free consumer lending experience, while increasing the bank’s loan volume, reducing loan acquisition costs, and streamlining loan processes. Give consumers easy access to multiple, preselected loan products and watch response rates and your total loan portfolio skyrocket.
A Three-Part Strategy for Loan Marketing Success
- Set up an alerts program to receive notifications from multiple credit bureaus whenever a credit inquiry is submitted for your account holders. A credit inquiry is your “buying now” signal—and the window to win is short. The CFPB notes that auto-loan rate shopping most likely to capture the loan before a competitor does.
Monitoring these inquiries and then countering with a quick, preapproved offer via the channel to which shoppers are most likely to respond — whether mail, email, or phone — will help you stay one step ahead of the competition and win market share. - Adopt a turnkey program that sends prequalified loan offers for home equity, auto, credit card, personal, and other loans through multiple channels — online, direct mail, mobile, email, branch, and phone — to account holders who meet specific underwriting criteria to access anytime, anywhere. It’s about creating seamless, convenient experiences. You can do this by putting loan offers at consumers’ fingertips to accept anytime, anywhere.
- Quickly provide pre-qualified loan offers via direct mail, email, and phone while they’re shopping for loans. You will be creating quality customer experiences that can strengthen account holder loyalty, reduce attrition, and extend your brand.
In a perfect world, your account holders would never even think about inquiring about a loan from a competing institution and you’d have the resources to get in front of every prospect. But economic and technological times have changed across multiple channels, with myriad borrowing options now available. You can, however, effectively compete for your share of consumer loans with a three-part strategy that includes alerts, proactive engagement, and quality customer experience.
Ready to put these strategies to work? Vericast helps financial institutions turn credit signals and first-party data into timely, compliant, multi-channel prequalified offers that drive acquisition, deepen relationships, and accelerate sustainable loan growth. Connect with Vericast to see how an always-on loan marketing approach can help you win more of the loans your account holders are already shopping for.
