When It Comes to E-Services, Give Members What They Want

Greg Crandell, Vice President, DigitalMailer
June 10, 2005

Promoting e-services to members requires knowing what to promote, and to whom. When fashioning marketing campaigns, credit union marketers regularly ask themselves the best way to get “the right offer, to the right person, at the right time.”

This, in a nutshell, is the “promotional conundrum.” But one should ask: If we confront this challenge at the time of promotion, why don't we take it on at the time we are crafting the service? Who will use the service as it is configured, and who will use it if we configure it differently, or in multiple ways? Answering these questions will provide better services, as defined by your members, as well as better promotional opportunities.

Answers to the above questions are available! Credit unions have started using online surveys to ask members about proposed e-services to find out: 1) Will they use them? And 2) What benefits are most important to them? Asking these questions of members leads to both more focused services, and more focused promotion of specific e-services.

What Did They Learn?

For those credit unions that surveyed members before launching the e-service, they learned:

• Some members were interested in speed and an absence of paper
• Others were interested in the long-term “archival” feature of the service (these credit unions then extended the length of time that stored statements would be available).
• Which members valued access to check images via their e-statements.
• What percentage of members would never adopt e-statements
• What percentage of members needed to be further educated on the safety of Internet-based applications before they would adopt the service
• One credit union even decided to postpone e-statements when they learned too few members were interested

For those credit unions that asked their members after launching e-statements, most learned more about why their initial marketing campaigns were, or were not, effective. They discovered some of the same things their counterparts learned when surveying in front of the launch, but they also learned which features and benefits needed to be highlighted in future efforts.

What does this mean to credit union managers and marketers looking to launch new services, or to re-focus services, or their promotion?

Develop a Member Focus

Asking your members their opinions about new or contemplated services should be a key part of any new e-service development, but so should the effort to look at and consider the e-service from the perspective of your members. What’s the best way to do this? Why not do what many successful marketers and managers have done for years? Shop your own products and use your own service channels.

When e-services fail to catch on with more than “early adopters” or “early majority users,” the reason is often tied to usability or access. Too often we don't sit on the other side of the desk (in this case websites) to view our internal efforts through the our members' eyes.

So next time you are looking at launching a new or updated e-service, look at it from your members' perspectives and ask them what they want, need, prefer, and will use.

DigitalMailer employs active white-list management and opt-in email practices that help credit unions use the Internet to communicate with their members. Please contact Greg Crandell gcrandell@digitalmailer.com for additional information or visit www.digitalm ailer.com.