Meeting customers where they are today on the channels that they prefer is the first step in driving more meaningful engagement. First Merchants Bank was seeking a solution beyond traditional channels to onboard and engage with their customers that was familiar and preferred. After evaluating potential solutions, they tapped Relay to help improve the 5% engagement rate that they were seeing with their email campaigns. Fast forward a few months, and First Merchants Bank launched Relay Customer Feeds to a segment of their new customer population and are seeing 10x more engagement than email using the solution to onboard and engage with their customers.

Learn more about how they achieved these incredible results and how other financial institutions can do the same in our webinar, “The Feed Effect: Emulating the Successes of the Scrolling Format for B2C Onboarding and Engagement.” For highlights from the conversation, you can read the rest of the blog post below, otherwise, tune into the entire conversation using the link here.

Jim Marous, banking and CX expert from the Financial Brand, facilitated an engaging and insightful conversation featuring executives from First Merchants Bank, Victoria Linssen, VP Senior Director of Digital Marketing, and Susan Conyers, First Vice President, Senior Director of Integrated Lines of Business, along with John Thomas, Chief Strategy Officer at Relay. Suffice to say, the webinar was chock-full of incredible insights, from the specific impact Relay Customer Feeds are having on engagement at First Merchants Bank, to how financial institutions of any size can implement and utilize a tool like the Relay Feed to meet their customers where they are today and see results like First Merchants Bank.

At the top of the conversation, Victoria and Susan shared the roles that they play at First Merchants Bank and how they partner on initiatives “that look at our business objectives and match up digital marketing technology in ways that we can reach our customers in more meaningful, relevant, real-time and personal ways than we ever have before.” Victoria emphasized that in the evaluation of technology options, she was looking for a tool that “can help us connect with our customers: finding new customers, deepening relationships with existing customers, and getting engagement with customers.” Victoria shared a graphic demonstrating the overwhelming amount of technology solutions on the market today, creating a seemingly daunting task for someone in her role to choose the best available solution.

Enter Relay. Victoria was sold when she saw a case study that featured a banking client similar to First Merchants Bank and the results that they had using Relay Customer Feeds specifically for onboarding. In order to sell within the organization, Susan noted, “I think we became a lot more open-minded about innovation in this space and communication and marketing to our customers. We’ve all seen the numbers about how much it costs to acquire a new customer. We really are looking at how we not only acquire them, but then keep them and make them great profitable customers who are loyal but then also advocate on our behalf.”

To date, First Merchants Bank has seen 50-70% engagement using Relay Customer Feeds compared to 5% engagement on their email campaigns. As Victoria noted, “we set up the feeds so that when someone was approved initially for a new checking account online, for either our consumer customers or small business customers, to send a Relay Customer Feed as a compliment in addition to email.” The Relay Customer Feed is an additive channel, not a replacement for existing channels, and helps enhance the utilization of other digital tools like the app or portal. Victoria attributed the success of the channel to “having the information come to the customer within a few hours of having their account opening on their mobile phone, in a format that was right there at their fingertips, and provided them with information that they needed right away.”

To share the Relay perspective, John Thomas spoke about the feed interface and why it has enabled such success for a bank like First Merchants. In explaining how Relay is improving the engagement game: “What makes Relay different is we’re the first logo in a new box, which is this concept of a scrolling non-app-based B2C feed. It’s a format that everybody out there knows, but it’s a format that banks have not been delivering to their customers previously. I can tell you with certainty there are more and more logos in the banking industry that are jumping on board with B2C feeds.”

To learn more about Relay Feeds and how they can generate results like you saw here, reach out to us at sales@relaynetwork.com

To receive a Relay Customer Feed to your own mobile device, use the link here.