When the Federal Reserve recently raised the federal funds rate, and set off a rise in short-term interest rates, it signaled that more increases were on the way. While the impact may be felt differently by an individual bank or credit union, there’s no doubt that financial institutions must prepare for the “new normal” of rising interest rates — especially when it comes to marketing.

A Challenge for Some, an Opportunity for Others

Seeking to temper signs of inflation in the economy, the Fed recently raised the federal funds rate from 1.5 to 1.75 percent. That immediately triggered an increase in the prime rate, which, according to Investopedia, “represents the credit rate that banks extend to their most credit worthy customers.” Borrowing costs for all other consumer credit is pegged against this number.

How do you focus limited resources on those opportunities that will drive profitable growth in a competitive marketplace? How do you identify those opportunities within your customer base and within your market?

In today’s highly competitive financial marketplace, you need a competitive edge built on strong analytics, sound strategies, and well-executed tactics. Analytics becomes “actionlytics” when the right data is integrated with your marketing and sales strategy effectively to achieve desired results.

Let’s explore the top three elements that are key to equipping your team with the actionable data they need to grow your business.

No one likes to be “sold.” Your current and prospective customers can identify a one-size-fits-all selling methodology from miles away, and it immediately creates distance and distrust. Treating every customer the same, regardless of the customer lifecycle or their individual needs, is a guaranteed way to limit potential revenue and profitability. If you want to be effective, you need a more segmented, targeted, and personalized approach to sales.

As the financial industry continues to change, customers are demanding a better, more customized banking experience. They want to be treated as individuals (right now, less than 30 percent of consumers believe that offers from their banks are customized for their specific needs). For this reason, financial institutions have begun to develop strategies for identifying and meeting unique customer needs while optimizing their market share, value and profits.

This challenge requires financial institutions to leverage data to better serve customers. Luckily, banks and credit unions have a wealth of customer information at their fingertips to help them understand current and prospective customers’ needs — and you can use this data to improve customer experience and boost sales performance by implementing data-driven sales and service initiatives. In this post, we’ll lay out some proven strategies that will help you turn your customer data into actionable analytics.

If you’re like most financial institutions, visibility into your customer’s profitability is limited. Core data alone just doesn’t show you the full picture. As a result, you likely don’t have the right information to assign costs to their accounts and come up with a specific net profit for that relationship to get a full view of your customer. In this post, we’re offering some ideas for tapping into the data to see your customer.

See the True Value of the Relationship

Years ago, customer profitability was based on industry standards but now, with the latest technology, you have access to the data to make this bank-specific and tailor those benchmarks to your institution. By bringing in information on costs, fees, and rates from your core system — along with the ability to create soft costs parameters such as overhead, data processing, and loan loss provision — you are able to gain unprecedented insight into your customer’s profitability.