Raymond's Blog

Digital marketing success within the banking sector

Personal account statements from your bank are probably not the first things you are willing to share with everybody. Unlike industries interested in your current location, your food preferences or your dream car, the challenge to gather useful banking information from customers through social media is a little tougher. 

Most of the banks developed easy to use web sites, included many interesting features like portfolio evaluation and most interestingly online transactions fees (like “bill pay” through checks) are lower than if you ask for the same service at the counter. For any questions you can use the online messages service and by doing so you avoid the long waiting times with call-centers. Additionally, Android, iPhone and iPad apps allow you to be constantly connected to your bank, check your balance and very comfortably make a quick payment for your rent in case you forgot.

Having all this in mind, a lot of banks managed to reduce the number of employees at the counters, strengthened the relationship with the customers and give them the feeling (especially with the apps) that you are more “close” to your money by having immediate access to your accounts. In that sense it is a big success.  But even though these are high valuable benefits for the bank, it doesn’t give the bank much more information about yourself. So how can a bank learn more about you?

Citibank recently found a way to get access to your personal and your behavioral preferences. The principle is very clever. They launched a Facebook app which allows you to transfer/receive credit card reward points through Facebook!

The question you’ll probably ask is: “Why would I share them?” Well you can for example make a charitable donation.  You explain the purpose of your points’ transfer in the app and sent them to whoever you want who is using the same app. If your target person doesn’t use the app yet, you simply send him/her an invite and by this Citi gains access to even more Facebook profiles of its customers.  Additionally all your Facebook friends will see in their news feed that you made a donation through the app.  

The clue behind the app for Citibank is that in order to allow you to use the app you need to accept that Citi can access your Facebook profile and most of your information currently available on it. By doing this, the bank can internally establish a much more detailed profile about you. It will be easier for them to categorize you in a certain “customer-type” and adapt their services more efficiently to your needs and preferences. At the same time, you build a stronger relationship with Citibank and start seeing the bank not only as a big random company but rather as a convenient and inseparable “tool” in your everyday life.

Future Key Challenges For The Web

To me there are 2 key challenges:

• The use of multiple devices and software accessing the web
• Security
  

For the first one, we can observe in the last years that a huge amount of people (including myself) switched from a Desktop PC to a laptop. This change doesn’t require a lot of changes to websites, since the operating systems on laptops and Desktop PC’ s are mostly the same. But the shift didn’t stop here. Now, people start switching from laptops to even smaller devices like very high efficient smartphones. If we just look at the latest Samsung Galaxy S3, it comes with a 1.4 GHz Quadcore processor!!! However operating systems are still quite different from the ones we are used to use on our laptops. This means, that companies have to develop “mobile websites” of the same website or adapt the website to work properly and fit nicely to the screen of the mobile device. However, do you know how many different mobile phones there are out there? How many different operating software? How many different browsers?

This to me is quite of a challenge. Even if you have the best website programmer in the world and he assures you that he can make your website fit to all these devices and software, I am pretty sure that you don’t have all the devices to test if it’s true!

The second challenge is security. The topic is so big and important that I will try to focus on only two examples, which seem critical to me.

People share more and more information online. If you order something online (and even if it is only a Pizza) you give the website: your credit card number, your phone number and even your home address! How dangerous is that? A local Pizza restaurant that probably didn’t invest a lot of money in the website has all that information. Hello hackers!! 

Another example is Facebook. For many people, Facebook knows everything about them. Where they live, where they go on vacation, who their friends are, which one they like the most and even where you are right now if you just “checked-in”. Since phishing and Trojans are quite common, somebody willing to access all that information about you doesn’t need that much effort to get it. A little more knowledge than average in IT and that’s it.

Regarding those two examples and having in mind that the amount of people accessing the web increases everyday, it will be very difficult to keep you information secure. But if you don’t accept to purchase online, you might not find the product somewhere else. And if you don’t accept to have a Facebook account, your friend will not be able to send you the “event” to invite you to his birthday party.

Make it obvious!

In our everyday life we are unknowingly overwhelmed by information. The quantity has become so important that human beings developed a natural ability of very quickly deciding to accept (and consider) or reject the information in question without making any effort. Information can mean anything going from seeing a car on the street to an ad in a health magazine.

For marketing and especially digital marketing this means that getting people’s attention is a hard task to achieve. As an simplistic example, considering an advertisement, it is no longer enough to put the name of a new product somewhere on the right side of an e-newspaper; if we want it to be successful, it has to be designed in an very outstanding way to raise the chance that the customer will actually start thinking about it (and maybe buy it later on).

Similarly, given the high availability of websites, the information a user will gather on a badly structured website is very low and the chance to revisit this website is even lower. With “Don’t Make me think” Krug explains that the average user will simply not make the effort to try to understand a poorly designed website but will rather switch to another better designed one because it requires less effort. This is where the “usability”, the main topic of the book, proofs its importance.

My biggest takeaway from Krug’s Book is certainly the idea that a webpage should be self-explanatory. I even think that if a user has difficulties getting along on a website about a specific electronic device, it might give him the impression that the device itself may be difficult to use.

The three facts of life:

• “We don’t read pages. We scan them.”
• “We don’t make optimal choices. We satisfice.”
• “We don’t figure out how things work. We muddle through.”

certainly apply to me. I would say this behavior is quite common among web-surfers and the tendency is even going to increase in the near future. Those three facts became like habits and most of the time we are not even aware that we behave like that.

Krug focuses a lot on conventions. Indeed, a structure we are familiar with will allow us to think less, go more rapidly through the website and feel more comfortable even if it is our first visit.

To me the example “NAV for Windows 95/98” with the pull-down menu was quite interesting. As said in the book, not everyone knows what NAV stands for and “what if I use Windows 95”? Is it correct to select “Windows 95/98”? Especially less experienced users will struggle with this kind of decisions and there is no reason why Norton couldn’t make a different option for each operating system (one for 95 and one for 98).

I had to laugh when I read Krug’s way of explaining where to remove needless words!! He’s certainly right that when filling out a survey you don’t need somebody telling you a huge introduction story!! To put it in a context of digital marketing, I would say that if the user sees that the website doesn’t write unnecessary “blah blah blah…” it gives him the impression that the company is taking him more serious. This as a result increases the relationship between the customer and the website/the brand/the product.

The examples in the book about the navigation are very realistic and therefore easy to understand. I am more a person of browsing through a website than using the search box. Why? Simply because the search engine on websites are often very poorly programmed and it takes me more time to go through the hundreds of results than trying to find the right product in the hierarchy. (Unless they use the Google engine applied to their homepage, but you not always know that in advance). But, a click on the name of the page should definitely bring you to the Homepage, Amazon-style tabs and “You are here” indicators are mandatory.  They somehow became conventions and their absence decreases our good will right from the beginning.

When I just surf around the web and come across websites I don’t know (unless I am redirected from Google regarding a specific search criterion) I would say that I leave the page in 80 % of the cases if I can’t get the big picture quick enough. In addition, a name, a tagline and to know where to start are essential features.

Something I didn’t know (but is seemed quite logical to me after I read it) is that it is better to do testing with one user at the beginning stage than having fifty testing users at the end of the project. This was probably my second biggest takeaway from the book. Also the tendency of adding an explanatory sentence as soon as the testing user is in trouble instead of removing some obscurity was something I didn’t think about before.

Putting somebody’s goodwill in form of a reservoir is a very original idea, people should keep it in mind when they build a website. It can drastically change the amount of time spend on a website and increase the probably that the customer will come back.

The use of CSS especially nowadays to make the font bigger or have a printer friendly version available will undoubtfully add value to a website.

The analysis made what could happen when to much information is asked ( keeping you from getting real data, get fewer completed forms and makes you look bad) is certainly something I’ll keep in mind and take very seriously should I ever be a testing user or have influence on the website of the company I am going to work for.

Overall the author made a big effort in trying to focus only on the most important aspects regarding usability and the “Don’t make me think” explications. The way the book is written and designed (with the helpful graphics) is a proof in itself!

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