Two Ways Your Email Program Is Broken

Look at almost any regional bank or credit union email program and you will find it broken in one of two ways. The two could not look less alike. One is modern and slick. The other is old and manual. And yet they fail for the same reason, and they fail the same way, by never building the rhythm a customer relationship runs on.

Pattern one, the journey trap

The first failure is the one that was sold to you. The enterprise bought Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and the pitch was that the future belonged to triggered journeys. A welcome series. Abandoned account opening. Anniversary notes. Birthday wishes. Card activation reminders. Each fires on its own when a customer event sets it off.

After a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, your team is proud to have launched a library of triggers and journeys. The irony is that the vast majority of customers will likely see very few, if any, of them over the lifetime of the relationship.

Triggered journeys carry four structural weaknesses that never got disclosed.

The first is frequency. A welcome series fires once per person, ever. An anniversary note fires once a year. The output of any single journey is tiny, and the combined reach of all of them still touches only a sliver of the book in a given month. The majority of customers never invoke one, and they hear nothing.

The second is the absence of a learning loop. Each journey is an isolated stream carrying too little traffic to support a statistically valid test. Nor can you conduct cross-journey analysis, since the audiences and the contexts are too disparate. Improving an email program requires sufficient volume to test, compare, and refine. Without that, you're merely making guesses.

The third is that journeys are frozen. Set-it-and-forget-it gets taken too literally, and an onboarding series written today will likely greet a new customer in three years with the exact same words. The sequence does not adapt as the customer's behaviors, needs, or contexts evolve.

The fourth is that journeys are painful to revise once they are live. Rewriting a sequence means fresh production work and several tedious rounds of QA, so most teams leave it alone. What launched two years ago keeps deploying and gradually becomes obsolete.

Pattern two, the one-off treadmill

The second failure has been around forever. Cross-sell promotions, event invitations, product or feature launches, seasonal campaigns, rate change offers, and the occasional survey. There is no steady cadence, no segmentation worth the name, no testing apparatus, no learning loop. Every blast is a project that ends the moment the email leaves the ESP.

This one is easier to spot because it makes no claim to be advanced. The people sending these messages are buried in production. Every campaign is hand-assembled, hand-coded, hand-QA'd, and hand-deployed, which leaves no room to step back, read how the landscape is shifting, and evolve the program in response. They keep doing what they have always done because the everyday demands of the job keep increasing.

The outcome is the same as the journey trap. In the customer's mind, the bank is a place where money sits. In the member's mind, the credit union is the shop that financed the car. Nothing ongoing builds primacy. No sign reaches the customer that the institution knows who this person is or what they value. Worst of all, fintech alternatives built to deliver the value and recognition customers crave may not be far away.

A wave of data shows how much damage a lack of value and relevance causes. Constant Contact's survey of 1,400 consumers found that 56 percent of opt-outs were driven by content that no longer felt relevant, and 51 percent by content that did not meet expectations. McKinsey's research on consumer banking finds the institutional gap is structural. Only 9 percent of banks have the full suite of machine-learning models needed to drive personalized engagement across every touchpoint, and just 8 percent can apply predictive insights from those models to campaign decisions. Most institutions are not built to deliver what customers now expect.

The bar has moved. A customer who compares what you push into their crowded inbox to a megabank's monthly experience, an Amazon order receipt, or a Netflix recommendation will recognize the gap.

What this means

Triggers and journeys should continue to play a role, but a much smaller one. They are useful for genuine moments, a welcome, a fraud alert, a card activation, where automation brings value and relevance.

One-offs should be retired. The format itself is the problem, and no amount of personalization and targeting can transform a project-by-project send into a living, evolving program. Every hour and every ounce of focus spent on the next blast cannot be used to build something future-proof.

What you need instead is a new center of gravity for your email CX. If your program is missing one, it's time to start building.

Sources

Constant Contact. "Do You Know Why People Are Unsubscribing From Your Emails?" Survey of 1,400 consumers. https://www.constantcontact.com/blog/why-people-unsubscribe/

McKinsey & Company. "Getting Personal: How Banks Can Win With Consumers." July 2022. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/getting-personal-how-banks-can-win-with-consumers