FAIRBORN, Ohio-To retain members and grow, Wright-Patt CU believes credit unions must move closer to one-to-one marketing-which is why the credit union recently upgraded its MCIF to provide near real-time data.
"Our system is updated from our core processor on a nightly basis," shared Chris Gardner, e-marketing and segmentation specialist. "When we come in every morning, we have data as of the close of the previous business day. In the past we had only monthly file sets, which meant that in the middle of March I'm still working on Jan. 31st data."
To keep up with members' changing behaviors in the volatile economy, the $1.7-billion credit union has to be able to read the market and react to members' needs faster, explained Marketing Director Tracy Fors. "That's just a priority. It's coming down much more to customizing your offerings. Look at what the larger package goods industries do, like Nike. You can actually customize your own shoes down to the color, shoe lace, and the signature on the back of heels. We are becoming a society that is all about me."
To meet the needs of all those individualists, it also means the credit union must rely on and incorporate psychographic data. WPCU pulls that information from its core Symitar system on member demographics, age, income, and from data purchased from Nielsen Claritas. That information is dumped into WPCU's Marquis ExecuTrax MCIF system and, via a "mathematical formula," segments members into certain categories, Gardner explained. "Some of the data looks into the types of music you listen to, the types of stores you shop, more lifestyle preferences. That helps us not only select the right product mix to market to certain members, but also determines where to place our messages and the words to use in them."
Fors says the approach allows the credit union to make analytical and educated assumptions about members to get them the right offers to meet their lifestyle and financial needs. "In the long run, it's about not wasting our time and or our members' trust by sending them offers that don't meet their needs," she said.
