Beating the Batch Prescreen with Real Time Engagement
Financial institutions (FIs) know that credit card origination is a great line of business to generate revenue and new customers. Once a consumer has a card in their wallet, they will often hold that piece of plastic for 10 years or more, and tens of millions of consumers will never (!) change their preferred card.
[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1533323509974{margin-bottom: 0px !important;}”]So how can FIs, retailers and others acquire more of those loyal and profitable customers? For years they have years relied on batch prescreen, supported with direct mail outreach, to target new potential customers. But with the shift in consumer expectations and the proliferation in digital financial management, do batch prescreen and direct mail still make sense?
Batch Prescreen: A Wide Net With Big Holes
Batch prescreen does bring in new customers – but it leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to offer acceptance rate and timing. In a typical batch campaign, an FI will see less than one percent offer acceptance. That doesn’t scale well, and it can be very expensive to capture the very few folks who respond.
The other significant drawback to batch prescreen/direct mail is that it takes a lot of time and resources. From initial batch audience selection, to direct mail outreach, to consumer review and potential offer acceptance, FIs are looking at months to potentially bring in a customer.
In that time, circumstances can change, making the customer no longer eligible for a card. It also represents a long-tail acquisition play, which can be hard to forecast as macro socio-economic circumstances change.
What if there were a better way? A way to directly engage with customers, at the point when they’re most likely to accept an offer?
Prescreen-of-One and Prequalification: Targeted and Timely
Fortunately for FIs, that approach does exist today. There are two complementary solutions that enable FIs to drive improved acceptance rates, deliver better customer experiences and fully leverage the digital channels that consumers use most. These approaches also allow FIs to reduce acquisition time, decrease required resources and drive down costs.
Those solutions? Prescreen-of-One and Prequalification. Prescreen-of-One is an institution-initiated process to present targeted, relevant and personalized offers to consumers. Prequalificaiton is a consumer-initiated approach that lets at-large populations find the offers available to them.
Used together, these approaches can help slash customer acquisition time from months to milliseconds, dramatically improve acceptance rates and drive increased revenue. Check out our infographic to learn exactly how effective these approaches are!