Your Website Is Your Digital Billboard: Is It Appealing To Your Traffic?
51% of U.S. adults bank online. That is 61% of Internet users. Additionally, 32 % of U.S. adults, or 35% of cell phone owners bank using their mobile phones. This means that, along with being a hub for your product information, your bank or credit union’s website is one of your most important marketing assets. For better or for worse, Paul Cookson said it best:
“Websites promote you 24/7: No employee will do that.”
Let’s discuss the five factors that make a great financial website.
- Convenience
Your customers are busy. They do not want to spend time searching your entire website for what they need. A good website provides quick and easy access to a website visitor. Ensure that your website is organized with the target audience in mind. This includes simple navigation with prominent links and services located at the top and a logical progression to secondary services. Items like “Open An Account” or “Check Our Rates” should be easily seen at a glance.
Quick tip: Test your websites structure with a “3 Click Quiz” by trying to navigate to any service or product within just three clicks from the home page.
With so many customers accessing your website from mobile devices, make sure your website uses responsive programming so that the design and menu easily adapt to smaller screens.
When all else fails, a handy dandy search bar can be a great tool for your customers to find what they need quickly.
- Content
The content on your website needs to be straight forward and easy to read. Especially on a mobile device, webpages with paragraphs of content can be frustrating so try to be as concise as possible, offering website visitors useful information and linking helpful tools or resources they may need. Your message needs to be simple and written with SEO (search engine optimization) in mind so that keywords are prominent and easily searchable.
Quick tip: Test your content on your personal mobile device to ensure that it is easily to scan from a small screen.
- Community
The way your website looks is a testament to your bank or credit union. The design needs to be simple and striking, as well as consistent with your brand. Additionally, the design needs to connect with your community. Be visually consistent with your geographical area and demographics of your target audience to communicate your bank’s connection with the community.
Quick Tip: Consider hiring a professional, local photographer to capture high resolution, horizontal, beautiful photos that can be used for your websites home page, page headers, backgrounds, and reused for your other marketing materials.
One way to capture this and create lifelong loyal customers, is to photograph your customers: A farmer who received an agriculture loan, a mortgage customer next to their SOLD sign, a business loan customer outside their café, etc.
- Contact
Even with the move to digital in recent years, it is still important to offer a personal touch for banks and credit unions. One way to offer achieve this is to feature your organization’s executives and staff on a team page. For local institutions, this may include everyone on staff; larger organizations may want to feature officers of their departments with simple contact numbers or emails. This feature may seem easy to exclude, but offers a very “human” touch that is important to some customers.
Secondly, ensure that your website offers correct and easy to understand map and directions for your location. Especially for organizations with multiple branches, having a map with locations, directions, and a contact number is key to keeping customers happy.
Quick Tip: Don’t forget to test your maps and directions to ensure that first time customers can easily use the directions provided on your website to find your location.
- Consistency
Your website is the central hub for all your product and service information, and needs to be the landing spot for all your marketing communications. Having the same, targeted ads found on your website that are also in mobile and email communications create a consistency that reinforces your message and builds trust. With a software like DeepTarget Web it can be effortless for you to display banner ads that promote your brand and your products to your website visitors. A web channel that is fully integrated with our omni-channel platform provides intelligent banner ad delivery for the website of your financial institution.
DeepTarget can enhance your website by offering a powerful, enabling communications platform to showcase new products or campaigns, use the banners to inform and educate, and of course to build and promote the brand of your financial institution. There is a solution focused on leveraging the websites of financial institutions to engage visitors called DeepTarget Web. We hope you check it out. This can be yet another tool in your digital arsenal to engage your customers and visitors who you should work to turn into customers.
Let’s get started! Connect with and engage your website visitors every day, 24/7 with DeepTarget.
