GURNEE, Ill.-Incentives are what really drive e-statement participation, suggests Abbott Laboratories Employees Credit Union, which recently persuaded more than 4,800 members to opt for paperless accounts.
The credit union did so by focusing enticements on front-line staff as well as members-including a unique promo that made members marketers for the credit union. For those reasons the credit union has been identified as a Credit Union Journal Best Practice for 2008.
The $480-million Abbott Laboratories ECU here, which goes by the acronym ALEC, had its best results with employee incentives. In a late summer promotion that rewarded member service representatives and other front-line staff with $1 for each new member they encouraged to take e-statements, ALEC added 1,700 new e-statement accounts in less than two months, explained Joe Trosclair, SVP of service and sales.
"We went from 25% of our virtual branch users taking e-statements to 40% in a short amount of time," said Trosclair. "That represents 14% of our total membership. It was a great return on our investment."
So was an earlier e-statement pitch that put a dollar in "the pot" each time a member took an e-account. At the end of the two-month promotion, one member was awarded all of the money, which came to $1,200. "That worked very well for us and was a low-cost way to get more e-statements," Trosclair said. "We signed up 1,200 new e-accounts in two months."
Trosclair said the credit union learned that both approaches work, and plans to use the same two campaigns again next year. What ALEC also discovered-after running a third e-statement effort that gave away a laptop computer as a grand prize-is that member incentives that offer a "fixed prize" are less effective.
"The laptop promotion only attracted 500 new e-accounts," Trosclair said. "I think it's harder for members to wrap themselves around the idea of a single, fixed prize, like a laptop. They just won't talk to other members about it like they will a pot of money that's growing through greater participation."
ALEC's thinking behind offering a grand prize that builds is that members become "marketers" for the promotion.
"Members encouraged coworkers to take e-statements and build the pot," said Trosclair about the "Spread the Word" campaign. "That worked particularly well in our single-sponsor environment, where members often work side by side."
Last year ALEC added Fiserv's NotiFI solution to allow the CU to send notifications electronically.
"We estimate that we're saving $15,000 a year by going to e-statements," added Trosclair, who said ALEC saves about $3 for each member who uses e-statements after backing out costs for NotiFI.
The credit union chose NotiFI because it integrated with its current Fiserv online banking and bill pay systems and allowed for single sign-on. "Members complain all the time about having too many PINs and passwords," offered Trosclair. "Now they sign on one time and can check their balance transfers, their funds, and look at e-statements."
NotiFI also offers cross-selling opportunities, including an application that helps define the right products to offer members.
"There is a lot of marketing capability in the product," Trosclair said. "We can cross-promote our products through e-statements, so we are not giving up statements as a marketing opportunity. That's important to a single-sponsor credit union since we are not advertising on billboards, radio, and TV like a community credit union."
One of the key benefits of electronic statements is the ability to cross-sell using the tools built into the NotiFI application, explained Mark Atchison, vice president of offerings development for the Fiserv Credit Union Division. "ALEC can design up to 10 electronic inserts to be included with each statement, and define the criteria for delivering those inserts to individual members. For example, they could promote a CD to all members who have a savings balance in excess of $5,000, while simultaneously promoting a club savings account to members residing in a particular zip code. When a given member accesses his statement, he would receive electronic inserts based on his individual parameters. To help ALEC see the results of each promotion, the system provides ad tracking reports online." Fiserv is based in Brookfield, Wisc.
For info: www.alecu.org, www.fiserv.com.
BEST PRACTICES
Abbott Labs ECU, Gurnee, Ill.
Category: Paperless Accounts
Provider: Fiserv
