Some banks are using the flexibility of Internet technology to address a longtime quandary: Freebies and special offers attract new customers, but not necessarily profitable ones.
Rather than offering everyone on the Web a particular product pitch or bonus, marketers are refining pitches in response to their research about what channels bring the best prospects. The idea is that some Web surfers are more likely than others to turn into profitable customers, and certain third-party links are more effective than others in drawing the profitable surfers.
Using this notion of a hierarchy, some banking companies have gone so far as to post several versions of a home page, each with a different offer, depending on how the prospective customer arrived at the site.
For example, NetBank Inc., an Alpharetta, Ga., Internet bank whose online promotions are particularly aggressive, offers a $75 bonus to some customers who open new accounts, a $50 bonus to some other people, and no bonus at all to the rest.
People who reach NetBank through a click-on advertisement on the “checking and ATM” page of BankRate.com (where NetBank is one of many advertisers, and not the most prominently featured one) or through Microsoft Corp.’s MSN Money site get the $75 offer. Those who reach NetBank through ads on Yahoo Inc.’s site get either the $50 offer or the $75 one. Those who reach NetBank any other way do not get a bonus offer.
“These sites really are bringing in good customers,” said Eve McDowell, the managing director of marketing at NetBank. “Not all of our customers came through those promotions. Many do. We test what works best to bring in the different types that we want.”
The different offers are meant to cater to the different mindsets people have when they view an ad and follow a link to NetBank’s site, Ms. McDowell said. “We call them jump pages. We have, for a very long time, tried to customize those jump pages for the ad.”
People who go directly to NetBank’s home page do not see any incentive for a checking account, in part because such an offer could distract people from NetBank’s other products, she said.
Other companies pitch some offers to all and some to specific subsets of Web surfers. At www.bankone.com, a site J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. has maintained since its acquisition of Bank One Corp., the home page offers $125 of Target gift cards to people who open certain accounts through Bank One branches.
What visitors to the home page do not see, however, is an offer for a $15 gift card for Walt Disney Co. stores, which can be seen only by people who visit www.disney.com and click on the Visa card offer on the bottom of that page.
Tom Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase and Bank One, said the reason for the offer is simple: Any Disney fan could become a Bank One customer, not all of Bank One’s prospective customers are Disney fans.
“You already know, if you’re on the Disney site, that the person looking at that site has an interest in Disney,” and $15 offer could sweeten the deal enough to lock in a new customer, he said.
On the other hand, people who come to the Bank One site to sign up for a credit card may not care about Disney merchandise, so the gift card offer could be a distraction, Mr. Kelly said.
Similarly, Bank One buys ads on MSN Money, but it advertises only loan products there. “Advertising checking accounts on MSN might not be as effective, because we only have branches in 14 states,” Mr. Kelly said.
The only way to receive certain offers — from Bank One and other companies — is to click on specific Web advertisements that do not appear on the sponsor company’s main site. Even the most thorough search on the banks’ Web pages won’t turn up these offers.
Further, Alenka Grealish, the manager of the banking group at the Boston market research firm Celent Communications LLC, said that if an offer does not appear on a bank’s main site, the bank can save money, because it does not have to pay the reward to everyone.
Banks can use targeted offers to reduce the clutter on a home page that can distract consumers, Ms. Grealish said. “We’re just so barraged with things nowadays that increasingly, we’re intolerant of extraneous stuff.”
Michael Weider, the chairman and chief technology officer at Watchfire Corp., a Waltham, Mass., vendor of a Web site efficiency service, pointed out a catch. Someone who reaches a site through an ad, decides to comparison-shop, and then types in the site’s URL the next day may not realize that the offer is available only through a specific ad, despite the words of caution in the fine print, he said.
With the juicy offer absent from the home page, “it’s a little bit unsettling when you come back to the Web site,” Mr. Weider said.
