How To Acquire New Credit Card Customers: A Strategic Guide

Before implementing any acquisition strategy, make sure you have a strong foundation in place where you can grow a customer base:

1. Develop the best product you can. 

Consumers have an overwhelming number of credit cards to choose from, making it hard for you to stand out. And you’re not just competing with major credit card issuers like Visa, MastercardⓇ and American Express. Your competitive landscape includes popular fintechs, co-branded products and other niche products in market. 

If your product doesn’t measure up to the competitive credit card industry, work with your product team on its value proposition until it has a couple of enticing and relevant features consumers are looking for and will win in your category.

2. Set a competitive budget. 

Create a realistic budget, especially for strategies where you may be directly bidding against your competitors or when you don’t have flexibility to improve a weak product. To do this, you’ll need a clear idea of what is happening in the market, a plan to advocate for marketing spend, and a budget that gives you enough to work with to test and learn – and scale results. 

3. Know who your ideal cardholders are. 

Without a clear idea of who your ideal customer is and what a quality lead for your product looks like, it will be even more challenging to  hit acquisition targets. Instead, you’ll be likely to generate the wrong type of applications that take resources to review (and possibly reject). 

Having a strong base will help you target high-quality leads and guide your strategy as to what channels and tactics you can use to reach them. 

Programmatic ads, paid search, and PPC marketing can all be effective in driving new customer growth for credit cards. We talk more about these strategies in our bank customer acquisition guide. 

Unlike deposit products, however, acquiring new customers for lending products carry a different level of risk. While all financial brands adhere to strict know-your-customer checks, lenders or credit card providers take an extra step in determining a potential client’s creditworthiness before they approve new cards. 

So, there are certain strategies that can help provide that higher level of reaching new, quality cardholders:

1. In-person activations

Some financial brands use in-person activations for cards, where representatives speak with potential customers face to face. Over-the-phone activations are also common and can be effective when existing customers call their financial institution’s support line as an upselling opportunity. 

Businesses with brick-and-mortar components can also rely on in-branch activities to promote their cards, where they can easily pre-qualify and cross-sell current customers.  

Pros:

• Build trust and relationships through face-to-face communication.
• Evaluate potential customers’ creditworthiness on the spot.
• Leverage existing relationships with in-branch activations.

Cons:

• Requires costly investments in staffing, training, and operational resources.
• Coordinating in-person activations can be complex and time-intensive.
• Limited scalability since it only targets customers in specific locations.

2. Display ads within banking apps

Similar to in-person activations, financial services firms with existing customer bases and online banking systems can use in-app display ads to reach customers for digital cross-selling.

Pros:

1. Reach a highly targeted and engaged audience already familiar with your brand.
2. Segment ads to display only to those qualified to apply.
3. Reduce costs because you use existing platforms that don’t require additional funds.
4. Users can easily act on the ads, enabling quicker applications.

Cons:

1. Limits your reach to your current user base.
2. Overexposure to in-app ads may annoy customers who wind up ignoring them.
3. Dependent on how often your customer base uses in-app banking.

3. Email marketing and direct mail

Established financial institutions can strategically reach targeted audiences with credit card offers and initiatives via direct mail and email. 

However, newer entrants should use caution if they are buying contact lists, because it’s hard to verify the quality (and intent) of leads. Even with pre-qualified lists bought from reputable companies, you risk “adverse selection”. These are audiences who may be more likely to default or turn into lower quality customers in the long term. This is because they haven’t established a relationship with your brand and are less likely to be invested in your product or business.  

If you don’t already have a robust list that you can segment for enhanced targeting, you may want to focus on other areas of digital marketing first.  

Pros:

1. Inexpensive because you can target existing customers who you know are qualified.
2. Tailor emails based on your existing customers’ known behavior and preferences.
3. A/B test CTAs and messaging to see what works best.

Cons:

1. Purchased email lists may lead to low-quality, less-engaged, and unqualified leads.
2. Difficult to personalize cold emails to an unknown audience.
3. You risk a much lower return on investment if you’re buying email lists. 

4. Social media

Meta’s digital advertising tools remain a popular option for financial services firms to connect with potential customers via targeted ads. But financial marketers should be aware that Meta removed some targeting options as of June 2024 and have updated their terms to comply with the most recent state, province, and federal laws. 

Pros:

1. Access diverse audiences.
2. Despite restrictions, social media ads still allow some demographic and interest-based targeting.
3. Use more creative media like video, carousel ads, and interactive posts to engage with potential audiences.

Cons:

1. Limited targeting might reduce campaign reach and effectiveness.
2. Overexposure to similar ads may cause potential customers to disengage and block your ads.
3. Typically social media is more upper-funnel awareness that can be more expensive as a pull-through channel and lead to lesser-quality “curious” applicants.

5. Affiliate marketing

Partnering with target third-party marketing sites can be a more effective way to reach a specific segment of your audience, especially in light of Meta’s new targeting restrictions. 

Partnership marketing also strengthens brand credibility and can put you in conversation with your competitors. This makes it a strong acquisition channel for financial services firms looking to increase their credit card customer base. It works best in conjunction with other top-of-funnel tactics for awareness-building. 

However, partnership marketing requires a detailed level of data and reporting to tie leads back to campaigns to know what’s working and what’s not. This can be difficult to do on your own, especially if you’re using tracking and reporting tools that aren’t tailored to financial marketing. 

Pros: 

• Reach highly targeted new audiences who are ready to apply by partnering with the right affiliates.
• Greater opportunity to educate customers and build awareness and credibility.
• With the right tools, you can get clearer ROI measurement than with other digital marketing channels.

Cons:

• Affiliate marketing takes longer than other strategies—it isn’t a quick fix.
• It can also be more costly than paid search and your owned channels when not optimized well.
• The affiliate channel works best when it’s part of a more comprehensive credit card product and marketing strategy.
• Building and scaling a card affiliate program can be resource intensive if you’re not using the right tracking, reporting and affiliate management solutions.

While all five tactics can work well, as partnership marketing experts, we know how effective affiliates can be in credit card marketing campaigns. Not only can affiliates and publishers drive conversions, they can connect you with new-to-you audiences while building brand visibility within a competitive market where it’s difficult to stand out.

Discover how to get started with affiliate marketing for financial services.

Fintel Connect is a full-service affiliate agency, platform, compliance software, and network dedicated to financial services companies in the US and Canada. Our team has decades of experience working in affiliate marketing for highly regulated industries.

Here are three ways Fintel Connect has helped financial services firms improve their credit card acquisition and hit KPIs, such as approval rates.

Raise your lead quality and cost effectiveness with the right mix of partner opportunities

At Fintel Connect, we offer a range of high-quality partners suitable for financial services. 

This means you can access new high-intent audiences and diverse campaign opportunities through influencers, podcasters, publishers, content creators, and vloggers. You’ll spend less time and effort finding the right partners, while effectively scaling your net new customer numbers. 

You can easily find suitable publishers for your credit card program by using financial attribute filters, such as credit score and income.

Unlike other agencies, Fintel Connect helps you get your foot in the door with the right publishers while helping you navigate difficult conversations like budget, commission rates, and data sharing.

For example, we have personal finance publishers who offer their audiences credit score monitoring and reporting. With these publishers, we can help you set up a pre-qualification strategy to improve lead quality:

• As a credit card provider, you share your risk profile and approval criteria with the publisher. 
• The publisher will create content to help audiences filter based on their priorities and credit profiles. 
• This ensures the publisher only targets customers who are more likely to be approved.
• Some publishers we work with, like Bankrate and CreditKarma, even have the ability to pre-quality audiences, which will also raise lead quality. 

This strategy leads to higher approval rates for the credit card provider compared to applications that come through other strategies, like social media or PPC marketing. It also provides a better customer experience, as applicants are less likely to apply and therefore be declined for a card they don’t qualify for.

As affiliate experts, we can also help you optimize cost-effectiveness with new tactics to boost your credit card acquisition. 

For instance, we can help you work with your current publishers to try new campaigns or content, such as a page takeover or a sponsored feature placement to compliment comparison chart mentions. 

Or, we also know affiliates can be a good way to access and test on a small scale new audience segments that you may be missing. We can introduce you to publishers we believe can help you target these new potential customers.

These types of opportunities are possible because of our partner-first approach. 

You’ll have our expert guidance in creating strong and fruitful publisher relationships. For instance, we’ll help you understand the data publishers need to see so they can better optimize campaigns. You’ll also know when the time is right to experiment or pitch new publishers to scale your credit card affiliate program.

Scale your credit card acquisition through superior tracking and data

We know many financial services companies deal with the burden of manually setting up individual tracking links for their campaigns, and can struggle to get and give the granular data needed by both brand and publisher alike. And when you can’t tie results to specific campaigns, you’ll have a hard time optimizing your strategy, requesting more budget, and scaling your program. 

Fintel Connect’s affiliate marketing tracking software is specifically designed for financial services. With it, you can set up your tracking data through light-lift pixel tracking, automated event reporting via webhooks (Postback API), customizable batch file sharing, and more. You can integrate your Fintel Connect data with custom data systems, your CRM, or even your account opening platform. And you’ll also have our support for your technical implementation. 

With Fintel Connect’s software platform and network, you can scale your credit card affiliate program without having to manually set up and manage each campaign, and without sacrificing data granularity.

Fintel’s reports break down your results in one central place for an easy overview of affiliate marketing performance.

You can get live and historic click-level data that your marketing team can use to optimize your spend for every campaign. Publishers can use click-level API reporting to optimize traffic intent and ensure they’re presenting the right products to the right segments. And we use metrics and language you need to track, like approved applications. So your data is exactly what you and your publishers need to see to improve your campaign messaging and the quality of your leads. 

This granular clarity around campaign success means it’s easier for you to advocate for increased budget from leadership. You’ll be able to point to data that shows your campaigns are directly responsible for an increase in credit card customers, not just lead volume. 

The level of detail you can get with Fintel Connect also helps you double down your credit card marketing efforts in campaigns and strategies that you know will have the most uplift. 

Protect your brand—and consumers—through automated compliance monitoring

Building exposure for your credit card products via affiliate partnerships is great, but comes with compliance risks that require mitigation. As you scale your card program, having ways to automate monitoring and content auditing is key. 

We know how hard maintaining marketing regulatory compliance is because we encountered the challenge ourselves when we took on compliance monitoring for our customers. We found that manually tracking compliance is too time-consuming to be an efficient solution, but that few software products had the capabilities financial companies need.

That’s why we built Fintel Check, an automated, rules-based compliance tool that helps financial services firms monitor and track marketing campaigns so they can stay compliant and build trust with their audiences. 

With Fintel Check, you can set the rules according to your compliance needs, then monitor multiple credit card campaigns from one central location. You can change rules at any time to ensure you are tracking up-to-date promotional rates, product and offer details. 

An example of how to set rules in Fintel Check

If you do change details about your product information, you can also use Fintel Check to push automated updates to your publishers, so they are aware of any updates. 

With Fintel Check, you can capture screenshots of the webpages you choose automatically and as frequently as you prefer. We also enable you to capture screenshots only when a page has been updated, so you can maintain a paper trail without overwhelming your team or regulators with dozens of identical records.

These features mean you can stay on top of compliance, maintain a good standing with regulators, and ensure consistent and accurate marketing messaging for new credit card customers with much less hassle. This will help you build a trusted brand that clearly adheres to local, state and national regulations, which is especially important to consumers shopping for credit cards. 

To read more about how Fintel Check can improve your compliance, check out Marketing Regulatory Compliance: A Financial Services Guide.

One of our banking customers was recently working with a credit-score app partner to promote their credit card product. They were collaborating on basic acquisition campaigns, but the bank wanted to stand out against their competitors and raise the quality of their leads.

We worked with this bank to approach their partner about pre-qualification. We knew the publisher’s credit-score app had targeted data about their audiences that would help the bank increase high-value leads.

To make this happen and get a competitive edge on their credit card campaigns, the bank committed to granular data-sharing and gave clarity on their ideal customers, building trust with their publisher. 

Having pre-qualified data sharing allows publishers to enhance targeting and improve performance, which often leads to greater customer affinity and therefore more prominent features.

This is exactly what happened with our client. When they worked with the publisher to implement a pre-qualification strategy, it improved the customer experience and likelihood for approval, resulting in more prominent placements for the bank.

The result—our client’s lead volume and quality grew. The publisher was able to serve more relevant content to their audience, and customers had a better experience as it minimized potentially unsuccessful applicants from applying and impacting their credit score.

Ultimately, this meant that the approval rates for new credit card customers were stronger than the average rate of their other digital campaigns and channels. This new tactic helped our customer reach their immediate approval rate KPIs while also building a continuing case for investing in future affiliate partnerships. 

In a crowded market like credit cards, improving your credit card customer acquisition will take a multi-pronged approach. We know affiliate marketing is an effective strategy for customer growth because our financial services firms continue to use it as a key pillar of their card acquisition playbook.

If you are a financial services company who wants expert guidance alongside an industry-specific network and software to boost acquisition campaign results, contact Fintel Connect today.