Maximize the Power of Your Website

In today’s competitive, always-connected financial world, your website’s ability to deliver great member service can spell the difference between “weakest link” and “wow” for your credit union. Yet bridging the gap between realizing you need a more relevant, dynamic digital presence and actually developing one can be a challenge.

Contemplating a website redesign can raise a lot of questions: Which offerings will break through to your different member segments? How can you harness the power of analytics and search engine optimization to delight your current members and attract new ones? How can your website be the engine driving your credit union’s ongoing digital transformation?

And most important of all, how can your credit union address these questions without busting the budget and tying up your marketing and IT resources for months on end?

Developing a Member-Centric Mindset

Fear not, because the answers to these questions are far more intuitive than you might think.

Before we get started laying out a game plan to maximize the power of your credit union’s website, we want to set the stage by sharing a simple but profound insight, courtesy of Gerry McGovern, the world’s leading authority on improving digital customer service: Listening is the new marketing.

It’s a shift in perspective that may change your entire approach to defining and achieving digital marketing success. Adopting a member-centric mindset for your website will be your fastest and most effective route to creating the kind of online presence that will resonate with both your current and prospective members.

That’s because, as McGovern lays out in his book, Transform: A Rebel’s Guide for Digital Transformation, your website’s mission should be to pay attention to your existing members’ needs and questions, not to seek attention for the marketing priorities your management might think are important.

Key to cultivating a member-centric mindset will be realizing that your members are the ones controlling the conversation. And because your CU needs them more than they need you, you must listen to them rather than market at them.

When you embrace the potential of letting your members tell you what customer journey they want to go on—and reward them for their loyalty in choosing your credit union as the vehicle for making that journey—you’ll be building a lasting relationship based on earned trust.

4 Ways to Maximize the Power of Your Website

Guided by this member-centric mindset, here are four strategies and related tactics that will maximize your website’s ability to deepen relationships with existing members and build lasting relationships with new ones:

1.  Make accessing information as easy and pleasant as possible. Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? Just give your website visitors simple, clear paths to the information they came looking for.

But far too many credit unions seem determined to clutter up their websites with too much information competing for too-short attention spans. Research has shown that you have no more than eight seconds to engage your visitors before they become frustrated and move on. Don’t distract that precious attention with irrelevant or expired offers.

• That means less is always more when it comes to your website’s landing page. Take a tip from Google’s pristine, white home page, because it was designed to be a blank slate that puts its visitors in charge by encouraging a sense of discovery and information mastery.
• Keep your site navigation as visible, intuitive and “shallow” as possible. Don’t ask your visitors to click through too many levels to find what they’re searching for. Provide “breadcrumb” navigation at the top of each page that shows your visitors where they are on your site and lets them return easily to your home page.
• Never let design trends trump functionality. For example, many mobile sites now try to save space using “hamburger menus,” the three, nested horizontal lines often placed at the top left. Hidden on an already-small screen, most users find these menus confusing for idle browsing, much less conducting financial transactions.
• Make your links prominent and never have so many that they compete for your visitors’ attention. Avoid links to third-party content that take visitors off your site. If you allow them to leave, you may never see them again.
• Highlight two or three member journeys through your website. One path should make it simple for new members to join and open checking accounts online. Another path should let a visitor locate contact information and branch and ATM locations with just one click. A possible third path might lay out credit card and loan programs in a table that invites at-a-glance feature comparisons.
• Conduct informal user experience testing to ensure that your navigation is as easy and obvious as you think it is. Consider sending your members a short online survey that asks them to prioritize the top tasks they want your website to perform. We guarantee the list they generate won’t be the same as yours.

2.  Embrace analytics to get to know your members even better.

If member-centricity is the beating  heart of your website, then data is its lifeblood and analytics are its brain.

As McGovern points out, the physical distance that digital communication has created between your credit union and its members must now be bridged with data.

That creates opportunities to know your members better through site tracking analytics, behavioral segmentation and the delivery of personalized advice:

• Use demographic and behavioral segmentation to create user personas that will guide you in creating more targeted content.
• Analyze your website usage patterns using Google Analytics or similar site metric measurement software.
• Track and compare the relative effectiveness of various images, content, promotional offers and calls to action.
• Make sure that your website complies with the accessibility standards set by the Americans with Disabilities Act, and track how often your visitors use various accommodations. In addition to keeping your credit union out of legal trouble, you may gain valuable insights into new ways to meet the needs of members who weren’t previously on your radar.

3.  Optimize your website to make it as search-friendly as possible. SEO is a complicated and evolving science, but even without mastering all of its ever-changing intricacies, certain tweaks represent low-hanging fruit when it comes to optimizing your search results:

• Use responsive design to ensure that your website will render correctly and be mobile-friendly on all devices.
• Site loading speed matters as a search criterion, so ask your IT department to measure and maximize it.
• Use a secure https URL and skip the www prefix. Although there are solid SEO reasons behind these changes, the motivations are also marketing-driven. That’s because Google has reconfigured its search algorithm to favor websites that have implemented the Secure Socket Layer and Transport Layer Security authentication and security protocols. In this era of increased cyber security, every credit union should use a secure URL to send the message that it is taking financial security very seriously.

As for dropping your www prefix, it’s simply no longer needed in today’s mobile world. Think of removing it as a de-cluttering effort aimed at highlighting your credit union’s web address

to make it more memorable and speed visitors to your site. Also, make sure every name or spelling that searchers might use to locate your credit union will redirect to your site.

• Give careful thought to the labels you give your product pages, navigation buttons and menus to ensure that they will show up in keyword searches. Be sure to create a sitemap and submit it to all the major search engines to be crawled and indexed. Find instructions for submitting your sitemap to Bing and Google here (other sites will follow a similar process)
• Consider using geo targeted ads featuring location extensions that include addresses, maps and clickable phone numbers. Through Google AdWords, your credit union can tailor an ad campaign using the Location Options feature to target users by geographic radius, ZIP code, city, county, state or local landmarks such as airports or college campuses. Location extensions can also be configured through AdWords to show up in search results, as display ads adjacent to relevant content, or both. And among the social media platforms, Facebook allows for precision ad targeting based on user-specified parameters such as geographic location, demographics, interests and affiliations.
• Look for ways to add search-friendly elements to your site like searchable rate and location databases, a blog, explainer videos and links to social media.

4.  Love your members, and they will love you back. Your credit union has members, not customers, so use your website to welcome them and make them feel special. Point out their perks and privileges. Emphasize how you watch out for them and work to earn their business.

• Remember that your website is often someone’s first impression of your credit union. Make it the digital version of the warm smile and helpful guidance they would receive if they came to one of your branches.
• Infuse your website with a sense of your credit union’s personality and geography. Feature member photography of local landscapes, update members on your community service projects and publicize events taking place in your branches.
• Give your members reasons to check your website often by surprising them with dynamic content, such as new images, games, quizzes, tracking tools and financial wellness diagnostics.

From Basic to Best-in-Class

As credit unions continue to compete with big bank technology budgets on the one hand, and internet-only banks on the other, digital channels are becoming more and more important to gaining and retaining new members. A member-centric mindset, combined with the tactics outlined here, should help take your website from basic to best-in-class in no time at all.

Michelle H. Hillenbrand-Whale is VP/marketing and branch sales at CUES Supplier member Advisors Plus, the consulting arm of PSCU, St. Petersburg, Fla