COLUMBIA, S.C. — A campaign to boost usage of e-services not only hit the mark with clever marketing, but taught organizers some lessons about digital outreach.
Carolina Collegiate FCU launched its "Banking in Your Boxers" campaign at the start of this year's fall semester to promote the $84 million credit union's self-service features, including remote deposit capture, bill pay and more.
A large portion of the credit union's member base is associated with the University of South Carolina, including students, faculty, staff and alumni, many of whom are in a demographic that is keen to use mobile services.
The spots were created with help from Greenville, S.C.-based Your Marketing Co., which has worked with a variety of credit unions in the area, and they were aimed at making sure the university population understood how easy those e-services are to use.
More than 2,500 new devices have been enabled since the campaign went live, out of a total membership of 11,300, according to Helen Beam, EVP and COO at Carolina Collegiate. More than 7,000 have used e-services to transfer money since the campaign began, and about 1,300 have begun to use remote deposit capture.
Branch transactions are also down, said Beam, and the credit union is in the midst of upgrading its online/mobile loan applications to make the process easier and more user-friendly. Lending has not been impacted by the campaign, Beam noted.
"This has been so phenomenal," she said. "It's fun, our members like it and it is helping them to move toward the electronic service usage. The big thing with the e-deposits is that our membership, being of higher education, we have people spread out everywhere. So we can migrate them from mailing in those checks and not knowing when they got here to just taking a picture of their check and getting it automatically deposited the same day."
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The credit union also had mannequins in its branches wearing "Banking in Your Boxers"-branded boxer shorts. Those have been so popular that CCFCU is even considering making the garments available for sale.
In addition to running ads on the CU's website and social media profiles, CCFCU also used online streaming radio service Pandora —
In addition to Pandora, Carolina Collegiate also used Google pre-marketing, YouTube pre-rolls and more, and all-told credits about 300 applications in November to digital marketing.
Both McDonald and Beam said that a clever campaign tied with a digital focus was a winning combination for the credit union.
"We're happy with the results," said McDonald. "I think what we could've done differently is make sure that wherever we're sending them was mobile friendly and ready for them to go there. I think we've missed some opportunities over the last few months by not having a better mobile loan application."
"Banking in Your Boxers" will still be part of CCFCU's marketing efforts in 2015, but it will take a back seat to other campaigns — at least for a while.
"We could've been running this for two years and people still wouldn't have seen it somehow, so we always need to circle back and make sure that message is still out there," said Beam.
