The right resources, education and promotion make a difference in product adoption

Throughout my career in consumer marketing, including 13 years at Fiserv, I’ve worked on a variety of product launches in diverse industries. Careful planning has always been key, including a very intentional effort to get consumers and the company’s internal associates excited about the new offering.

Getting it right really does matter. Our Fiserv team has helped about 2,000 financial institutions launch products and solutions to members and customers. Among institutions launching digital products such as CardHub from Fiserv and Zelle^®, those leveraging marketing resources from Fiserv had higher consumer adoption rates, according to our internal analysis in 2023. We also discovered that members and customers who are digitally engaged are more profitable for a financial institution, according to a 2022 Fiserv Digital Engagement Study.

So, doing things right on the marketing end upfront is likely to pay off long term.

 

Three pillars, multiple resources

We’ve developed a framework for ensuring that institutions are strategizing and organizing internal resources to launch in the most effective way. There are three pillars to our approach, supported by robust Fiserv toolkits with customizable marketing assets for each category. These tools and resources are free value-added offerings for Fiserv clients and can be accessed through our marketing self-service portal, Impact Marketing.  

1.    Educate your associates. Help your frontline staff, whether in the branch or the call center, to feel comfortable with understanding the value of the products and solutions being offered.

Fiserv provides tools to help you educate your staff pre-launch. Our cheat sheets, which are informative, product-focused, PowerPoint-based decks, are very popular with staff tasked with educating their consumer-facing staff. In fact, a few clients like them so much they’ve put them on their websites for consumer use.

2.    Notify your market. Before your launch, through multiple channels, make sure you are communicating benefits of the new product or service that will resonate with consumers.

For the notification phase, Fiserv has both pre-launch and post-launch messaging available. We’ve tested these messages, and we know the product features that really move the needle with consumers. There’s a variety of different tactics, resources, campaigns and social media tools, even some that are seasonally oriented. We have generational messaging, if that’s your focus, and also offer Fiserv-managed campaigns that feature sweepstakes and charity incentives to generate interest and encourage engagement. We track the qualifying activities and prize fulfillment to make it turnkey for clients.

3.    Promote the product. This phase is ongoing. Never stop making consumers aware of your products and services that can make their financial lives easier.

With Impact Marketing, you can customize the available marketing assets to include your logo, brand colors, address, web URL and anything else that distinguishes your brand identity. It’s a great place to get inspiration for any campaign. I often tell clients: If your boss comes into your office and says you need to do a Zelle^® launch campaign next week, go to Impact Marketing. It’s all there, already laid out for you. 

 

A case study

UMassFive College Federal Credit Union is an institution with 48,000 members and six branches in western Massachusetts. In a 12-month period, Vice President of Marketing Craig Boivin and his team launched multiple products with our Fiserv consumer marketing team – and had great success. They did a fantastic communications job on their own, while also tapping into the resources Fiserv has to offer.

At Forum, the Fiserv client conference, I interviewed Boivin about his credit union’s successful product launches.

Where do you derive inspiration and ideas as you’re developing your marketing plans at UMassFive?

Boivin: I like to go outside our industry and see how other brands, such as Apple^® and Peloton, are rebranding and reframing to resonate with consumers, seeing what types of messaging they use. I also encourage my marketing team to communicate regularly with our branch staff. They work one-on-one with our members every day, and understand consumers’ pain points and challenges, but also their successes and aspirations. You need to be tapped into your branch network to get feedback from your members.

We also rely on the Impact Marketing portal to bridge the gap in the different projects we juggle at the credit union. If there are free resources available, I’ll take advantage of them. Impact Marketing has worked really well for us.

Have you tapped into our Digital Banking Safety Center to educate both consumers and your staff?

Boivin: Absolutely. When we launched Zelle^® to the consumer side, there were a lot of safety-related questions. So, we adopted the digital banking safety campaign from Impact Marketing. We built a landing page and took it to our internal team first to get their buy-in. I think that gave our retail team a little boost of confidence for talking to members about using the new technology. In our post-launch messaging to members through email and social media, we would link back to the Digital Safety Center, and still do today.