Cover Story : Taking It Personal

When Charter Bank launched a retention program for its residential mortgage customers nearly three years ago, little did it know how significant this initiative would be in positioning the firm to weather one of the worst housing markets since the Great Depression.

“The housing market four years ago was different,” says Susan Millspaugh, senior vice president of marketing and communications for the Albuquerque, N.M.-based financial institution, which offers banking and insurance products in addition to residential and commercial mortgages to customers in New Mexico, Colorado and Idaho. “People generally were staying in their homes on a national average of about three years.” So Charter would remain top of mind with mortgage customers throughout this time frame, Millspaugh created a three-year messaging program for this audience that incorporated regular data touchpoints to feed the company’s overall marketing efforts.

“My thought process was that we gave great service, we gave competitive pricing and we serviced our own loans. I wanted to keep the Charter name in front of existing clients and new customers, as well as help them think about things like leveraging their homes for help with unexpected problems or [regular needs like funding a child’s college tuition] … really tying the cycle of family life into Charter Mortgage.”

But now that the housing market bubble has burst with such disastrous consequences, Millspaugh’s data-driven strategy offers Charter even more insight and opportunity to meet customers’ ongoing financial needs.

Laying the Foundation
Working with Trekk Cross-Media, a full-services marketing communications agency in Rockford, Ill., Millspaugh developed a communication plan for mortgage customers that included 18 campaigns—one envelope package and 17 postcards—the timing of which is based on the loan close date, explains Laura Terry, Trekk’s president and CEO. For example, exactly one month after the loan closes, new customers receive a welcome kit; this is the envelope package, containing a letter, information related to the mortgage account and several pieces of collateral to cross-sell Charter’s banking and insurance products. Several months later, the first postcard drops with a message encouraging customers to fill out an online survey regarding their satisfaction with the loan process. And the series goes on from there, reaching out to this audience with a new postcard about every other month and gathering data along the way.

Based on feedback from Charter’s loan officers, Millspaugh framed the messaging sequence around the typical key dates in a mortgage customer relationship, such as the anniversary of the loan date, major holidays and times when people were likely to evaluate their financial needs. As the program continued, she then began to tweak the messaging to be more pertinent to what was going on in the current market. “We talked about being able to refinance, gave some information about credit scores and how we could help customers look at them … so we talked about things that were more relevant in the marketplace. I think that’s the beauty of what we’ve been able to do with a continuity program. Not only is it variable, and we’ve seen incredible success from it, but its ability to be changed with the times has been extraordinarily fruitful.”