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Banking and Cards Research
Digging into the Customer Experience: Banking and Credit Cards
Corporate Insight’s Bank Monitor, Credit Card Monitor and Small Business Card Monitor provide ongoing coverage of the products, websites and overall customer experience offered by the nation’s leading banks and card issuers. Our value-added banking and credit card research digs deeply to evaluate the retail and small business customer experience.
| Online Cross-Promotion |
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Promoting products and services to existing card holders via the private site offers a way for financial firms to market their goods to a captive audience, one that already has a relationship with the firm. Cross-promotional ads are those ads that promote additional financial accounts or for fee-based add-ons to traditional card products, and offer ideas for how clients can augment their current relationship with the firm. In this report, we look at the placement and design of cross-promotional ads, along with what products firms are currently promoting. This is our first look at cross-promotion within the credit card space since the summer of 2006. Almost all firms begin their cross-promotional efforts on the private site homepage. This highly trafficked area offers a chance to post ads where virtually every card holder will see them, and 90% of firms take advantage of this by offering at least one ad for an additional product or service here. Beyond this, many firms offer graphic and text-based ads throughout the private site, allowing the issuer to promote a number of different products without overwhelming the user. These base promotional efforts, with one or two ads on most private site pages, are bolstered at almost every firm by a dedicated page of cross-promotional offers. Here, users can learn about what products and services the firm is currently offering, and firms can aggregate a variety of ads, accounts and services in a single place,. Two issuers, B of A and HSBC, actually offer two such pages, offering card holders pages with cross-promotional offers both inside the standard private site and via a newly generated window. As a last part of the private site experience, most users encounter a logout page upon leaving their online account. Several firms use this page as a final place for ads, with 60% of issuers including cross-promotional ads on the page.Seven of the firms we looked at are using private site ads to inform clients about card account add-ons, such as Payment Protector services, while nine of the ten promote additional firm accounts. The most common accounts that firms are currently cross-promoting to their card clients are CDs and checking accounts, though several firms are also promoting automobile loans, investment accounts and, interestingly, additional credit card accounts. |