Tag: prospecting

"Out with the old and in with the new" is often used when talking about a fresh start or change we make in life, such as getting a new job, breaking bad habits or making room in our closets for a new wardrobe. But the saying doesn't exactly hold true in terms of business growth. While acquiring new customers is critical, increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by up to 95%.1 So, what can your organization do to improve customer retention? Here are three quick tips: Stay informed Keeping up with your customers’ changing interests, behaviors and life events enables you to identify retention opportunities and create personalized credit marketing campaigns. Are they new homeowners? Or likely to purchase a vehicle within the next five months? With a comprehensive consumer database, like Experian’s ConsumerView®, you can gain granular insights into who your customers are, what they do and even what they will potentially do. To further stay informed, you can also leverage Retention TriggersSM, which alert you of your customers changing credit needs, including when they shop for new credit, open a new trade or list their property. This way, you can respond with immediate and relevant retention offers. Be more than a business – be human Gen Z's spending power is projected to reach $12 trillion by 2030, and with 67% looking for a trusted source of personal finance information,2 financial institutions have an opportunity to build lifetime loyalty now by serving as their trusted financial partners and advisors. To do this, you can offer credit education tools and programs that empower your Gen Z customers to make smarter financial decisions. By providing them with educational resources, your younger customers will learn how to strengthen their financial profiles while continuing to trust and lean on your organization for their credit needs. Think outside the mailbox While direct mail is still an effective way to reach consumers, forward-thinking lenders are now also meeting their customers online. To ensure you’re getting in front of your customers where they spend most of their time, consider leveraging digital channels, such as email or mobile applications, when presenting and re-presenting credit offers. This is important as companies with omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain on average 89% of their customers compared to 33% of retention rates for companies with weak omnichannel strategies. Importance of customer retention Rather than centering most of your growth initiatives around customer acquisition, your organization should focus on holding on to your most profitable customers. To learn more about how your organization can develop an effective customer retention strategy, explore our marketing solutions. Increase customer retention today 1How investing in cardholder retention drives portfolio growth, Visa. 2Experian survey, 2023.

Whether your goal is to gain new business or create cross-sell opportunities, being proactive in your credit marketing approach can help drive higher response rates and more meaningful customer experiences. But without knowing when your ideal customers are actively seeking credit, you may risk losing business to lenders who have already engaged. So, how can you identify new opportunities when they occur? Given that 91% of consumers say they’re more likely to shop with brands that provide relevant offers, you’ll need to reach the right consumers at the right moment to increase response rates and stay ahead of competitors. Event-based credit triggers can help you identify new tradelines, inquiries and certain loans nearing term to locate highly responsive, credit-active individuals. By receiving updates on consumers’ recent credit activities, you can make firm credit offers immediately so you never miss an opportunity. Case Study: Deliver timely offers with credit trigger leads Vantage West Credit Union serves over 170,000 members across Arizona. With their members looking elsewhere for their mortgage needs, Vantage West aimed to drive as many of these members back to the credit union as possible. To do this, they looked for a solution that could help them identify and target members who are in the market for a new mortgage. By augmenting their prescreen process with Experian’s Prospect Triggers for mortgages, the credit union was able to quickly pinpoint consumers that not only met their credit criteria but were also likely to respond to their credit offers. Within two years of implementing Prospect Triggers, Vantage West funded an additional $18 million in mortgages and is continuing to grow by making timely offers to credit-active prospects. Prospect Triggers is available for banks, credit card issuers, mortgage lenders, retailers and automotive lenders. To learn how Experian can help bring precision and profitability to your credit marketing campaigns, read the full case study or visit us. Download the case study Visit us

The Marketing Rule of Seven means it usually takes at least seven impressions before a consumer is compelled to act. When extending firm offers of credit to consumers, lenders have long relied on direct mail and more recently email to reach their intended audiences. But what if there are more ways to deliver a credit offer? Let’s explore how digital display retargeting can help you maximize your campaign performance and profitability. What is digital display retargeting? Digital display retargeting allows lenders to present a firm offer of credit on digital and mobile to complement a direct mail or email prescreen campaign. This solution takes credit marketing to a whole new level — instead of relying solely on direct mail or email, lenders can amplify firm offers of credit on channels like social media or authenticated websites to maximize their reach. With spending more time on these channels, digital display retargeting can provide them  with an additional opportunity to respond. Reaching the right consumers with the right offer While echoing the same credit offer on multiple channels can help elicit higher response rates, how do lenders decide to which consumer to extend that offer to? Experian’s credit database provides lenders with fresh consumer information to help them determine what kind of credit offers may be most appealing to each unique individual. Through Amplified Prospecting, lenders can then gain accurate consumer identification and matching in digital display channels to ensure offers are reaching consumers most likely to respond. Maximize your campaign reach With the combined strengths of Experian’s consumer credit data and Amplified Prospecting, lenders can extend firm offers of credit to prescreened consumers across multiple touchpoints, helping them to achieve greater visibility and higher response rates. To learn more about how Experian can help you level up your credit marketing campaigns, visit us today. Learn more

Artificial intelligence is here to stay, and businesses who are adopting the newest AI technology are ahead of the game. From targeting the right prospects to designing effective collections efforts, AI-driven strategies across the entire customer lifecycle are no longer a nice to have - they are a must.  Many organizations are late to the game of AI and/or are spending too much time and money designing and redesigning models and deploying them over weeks and months. By the time these models are deployed, markets may have already shifted again, forcing strategy teams to go back to the drawing board. And if these models and strategies are not being continuously monitored, they can become less effective over time and lead to missed opportunities and lost revenue. By implementing artificial intelligence in predictive modeling and strategy optimization, financial institutions and lenders can design and deploy their decisioning strategies faster than ever before and make incremental changes on the fly to adapt to evolving market trends.  While most organizations say they want to incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning into their business strategy, many do not know where to start. Targeting, portfolio management, and collections are some of the top use cases for AI/ML strategy initiatives.  Targeting  One way businesses are using AI-driven modeling is for targeting the audiences that will most likely meet their credit criteria and respond to their offers. Financial institutions need to have the right data to inform a decisioning strategy that recognizes credit criteria, can respond immediately when prospects meet that criteria and can be adjusted quickly when those factors change. AI-driven response models and optimized decision strategies perform these functions seamlessly, giving businesses the advantage of targeting the right prospects at the right time.  Credit portfolio management  Risk models optimized with artificial intelligence and machine learning, built on comprehensive data sets, are being used by credit lenders to acquire new revenue and set appropriate balance limits. Strategies built around AI-driven risk models enable businesses to send new offers and cross-sell offers to current customers, while appropriately setting initial credit limits and managing limits over time for increased wallet share and reduced risk.   Collections  AI- and ML-driven analytics models are also optimizing collections strategies to improve recovery rates. Employing AI-powered balance and response models, credit lenders can make smarter collections decisions based on the most predictive and accurate information available.   For lending businesses who are already tight on resources, or those whose IT teams cannot meet the demand of quickly adapting to ever-changing market conditions and decisioning criteria, a managed service for AI-powered models and strategy design might be the best option. Managed service teams work closely with businesses to determine specific use cases, develop models to meet those use cases, deploy models quickly, and monitor models to ensure they keep producing and predicting optimally.  Experian offers Ascend Intelligence Services, the only managed service solution to provide data, analytics, strategy and performance monitoring. Experian’s data scientists provide expert guidance as they collaborate with businesses in developing and deploying models and strategies around targeting, acquisitions, limit-setting, and collections. Once those strategies are deployed, Experian continually monitors model health to ensure scores are still predictive and presents challenger models so credit lenders can always have the most accurate decisioning models for their business. Ascend Intelligence Services provides an online dashboard for easy visibility, documentation for regulatory compliance, and cloud capabilities to deliver scores and decisions in real-time.  Experian’s Ascend Intelligence Services makes getting into the AI game easy. Start realizing the power of data and AI-driven analytics models by using our ROI calculator below: initIframe('611ea3adb1ab9f5149cf694e'); For more information about Ascend Intelligence Services, visit our webpage or join our upcoming webinar on October 21, 2021.  Learn more Register for webinar

The current pandemic will affect the way financial institutions lend and provide credit. Shawn Rife, Experian’s Director of Product Scoring, discusses the ways that financial institutions can navigate the COVID-19 crisis. Check out what he had to say: What implications does the global pandemic have on financial institutions’ analytical needs?  SR: In the customer lifecycle, there are 4 different stages: prospecting, acquisitions, portfolio management, and collections. During times of economic uncertainty, lenders typically take additional actions to ensure that there’s a first line of defense against delinquencies and payment stress. Expanding their focus to incorporate account review/portfolio management becomes particularly important. During this time, clients will be looking for leadership, early warning signs, and ways to recession-proof their portfolios (account management), while growing and maintaining their approvals in a healthy way (originations). Lenders may be well advised to delay any focus on collections, since many consumers may be facing major payment stress through no mismanagement of their own doing. Another critical component is with the rollout of government stimulus packages, which lenders can use to identify people in stress who could benefit for second chance opportunities they may not have otherwise been able to receive. As more consumers seek credit, from an analytics perspective, what considerations should financial institutions be making during this time?  SR: Financial institutions should be assessing and pre-identifying situations that might place consumers in positions of elevated financial stress. That way, organizations can implement solutions to identify and help at-risk consumers before they fall delinquent. The recent Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) – coupled with Experian’s score treatment, are designed to protect consumers against score declines during times of crisis. Furthermore, lenders can provide forbearance and loan deferment programs to help consumers.  For lenders, credit risk scores, models, and attributes are the best ways to identify – and even predict - delinquency risk. The FICO® Resilience Index can also identify consumers who are particularly susceptible to delinquency risk directly due to macroeconomic uncertainty. This gives lenders the opportunity to evaluate their portfolios for loss and connect with consumers who may be in need of further support. What is the smartest next play for financial institutions?  SR: For financial institutions, the smart play is to add alternative data into their data-driven decisioning strategies as much as possible. Alternative data works to enhance your ability to see a consumer’s entire credit portfolio, which gives lenders the confidence to continue to lend – as well as the ability to track and monitor a consumer’s historical performance (which is a good indicator of whether or not a consumer has both the intention and ability to repay a loan). How will the new attribute subset list benefit financial institutions during this time?   SR: Experian’s series of crisis attributes is an example of attributes that can be predictive in times of a crisis. These lists were designed to follow the 3 E’s – Expand, Enhance, and provide Ease of use. Enhance – With these attributes, lenders aren’t limited to traditional data. These attributes allow lenders to look at the entirety of a consumer’s credit or repayment behavior and use more data to make better lending decisions. This becomes crucial in a challenging environment. Expand – This data can also help lenders identify consumers who are in the market for products and services, even if there the lending criteria becomes more stringent. This can open doors and new opportunities for 40-50 million new customers, particularly ones that may not fit initial lending criteria. Ease of Use – Experian has put together the most predictive elements that can identify consumer resilience and potential financial stress in this challenging economy. Experian is committed to helping your organization during times of uncertainty. For more resources, visit our Look Ahead 2020 Hub. Learn more Shawn M. Rife, Director of Risk Scoring, Experian Consumer Information Services, North America Shawn Rife manages Experian’s credit risk scoring models, focused on empowering clients to maximize the scope and influence of their lending universe - while minimizing risk - and complying with ever-changing regulatory standards. Shawn also leads the implementation of Alternative Data within the lending environment, as well as key product implementation initiatives. Prior to Experian, Shawn held key consumer insights and predictive analytics roles for Consumer Packaged Goods and internet companies. Over his career, Shawn has focused on market segmentation, competitive research, new product development and consumer advocacy. He also holds a Master’s degree from Harvard University and a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Economics.

You know what I love getting in the mail? Holiday cards, magazines, the occasional picturesque catalog. What I don’t open? Credit card offers, invitations to apply for loans and other financial advertisements. Sorry lenders, but these generally go straight into my shredder. Your well-intentioned efforts were a waste in postage, printing and fulfillment costs, and I’m guessing my mail consumption habits are likely shared by millions of other Americans. I’m a cusper, straddling the X and Millennial generations, and it’s no secret people like me have grown accustomed to living on our mobile devices, shopping online and managing our financial lives digitally. While many retailers have wised up to the trends and shifted marketing dollars heavily into the digital space, the financial services industry has been slow to follow. I’m hoping 2017 will be the year they adapt, because solutions are emerging to help lenders deliver firm offers of credit via email, display, retargeting and even social media platforms. There are multiple reasons to make the shift to digital credit marketing. It’s trackable. The beauty of digital marketing is that it can be tracked much more efficiently over direct mail efforts. You can see if offer emails are opened, if banners are clicked, if forms are completed and how quickly all of this takes place. In short, there are more touchpoints to measure and track, and more insights made available to help with marketing and offer optimization. It’s efficient. A solid digital campaign means you now have more flexibility. And once those assets start to deploy and you begin tracking the results, you can additionally optimize on the fly. Subject line not getting the open rate you want? Test a new one. Banners not getting clicked? Change the creative. A portion of your target audience not responding? Capture that feedback sooner rather than later, and strategize again. With direct mail, the lag time is long. With digital, the intelligence gathering begins immediately. It’s what many consumers want. They are spending 25% of their time on mobile devices. Research has found they check their phones and average 46 times per day. They are bouncing from screen to screen, engaging on desktops, tablets, smartphones, wearables and smart TVs. If you want to capture the eyeballs and mindshare of consumers, financial marketers must embrace the delivery of digital offers. Consumer behaviors have evolved, so must lenders. Sure, there is still a place for direct mail efforts, but it would be wasteful to not embrace the world of digital credit marketing and find the right balance between offline and online. It’s a digital world. It’s time financial institutions join the masses and communicate accordingly.