Fifth Third Banks On Marketing Automation To Grow Correspondent Banking Unit
- Written by Demand Gen Report Team
- Published in DemandGen Reports
Following the recent completion of its joint venture with Advent International, Fifth Third Bank’s strategic launch of the Fifth Third Network, a check image processing business, created an opportunity for increased access to capital and an expanded team to pursue new market opportunities. Already one of the top four image payment processors in the country, the passage of Check 21 legislation allowed the bank to stretch the market for its image-based check processing services from less than 1,500 regional clients to more than 16,000 financial institutions throughout North America.
To support its more aggressive marketing and sales initiatives for the Correspondent Banking division, Fifth Third Bank selected Eloqua for the automation and management of marketing programs. “Eloqua is able to deliver valuable insight on our client base’s Digital Body Language, providing us with additional ways to help drive revenue even in a challenging economy,” Terry Lyons, VP, Fifth Third Bank’s Correspondent Banking Services.
Dianne Hardin, VP of Marketing, Correspondent Banking Services at Fifth Third, said Eloqua’s lead management and campaign automation tools have been great assets as the company markets its services to a broader audience. “We were already a leader in check image processing, but our business had been geographically restricted to a limited region,” Hardin said, explaining that traditional processing required physically moving paper checks from one bank to another.
Since Fifth Third is a leader in the new image based check processing, Hardin said the company has “a significant opportunity to gain market share” from the wider base of 16,000 plus financial institutions. While the company had been doing some email marketing and hosting webinars to reach new prospects, Hardin said the company had “no way to measure the impact” or analyze prospect data.
Fifth Third utilized Eloqua’s SmartStart accelerated launch offering to integrate multiple operational data stores and also brought in Astadia as a consulting partner to help with the rollout of initial campaigns. “Astadia has been an outstanding partner. They obviously know the Eloqua product and helped us build templates which we were able to copy and save to replicate for other campaigns,” Hardin said. “With their help at the front end, we were able to quickly get the campaigns out the door. Now that we have these tools in place, we believe the Eloqua tools will create hours of efficiency and allow us to increase productivity with our existing staff.”
In the early stages, Fifth Third has been focusing on email outreach and some basic lead nurturing campaigns, and Hardin said the company is already seeing an uptick in its results. “Within a week of publishing new web resources, we generated multiple inquires for various areas of the Bank. Within days of launching our first campaign, we generated leads in our expanded target markets,” she said.
Moving forward, Hardin said Fifth Third is planning to get the sales team for the Correspondent Banking group more engaged with the new tools and also “add other media channels and our call center” involved in using the tools and the intelligence from the campaigns. “We want to be able segment database to identify cross-sell opportunities,” Hardin said. “These tools will ultimately allow us to filter down through 16,000 contacts to analyze by multiple criteria which of these institutions are the best prospects for our services.”