Customer Acquisition in Banking: A Strategic Overview

1. The highly competitive financial space means you need to stand out in a crowded market to attract customers, increase market share and make it easy and fast for them to open an account.
2. Ensure you have a solid foundation to grow your customer base. Know who your best customers are, how your target audience makes decisions, and how much you can spend on acquiring new customers. 
3. Use the right mix of strategies and channels to acquire new banking customers. You may need to combine marketing channels, like partnership marketing, digital ads, and email marketing, depending on what works best for your target audience.
4. Affiliate marketing, though a slow strategy that requires patience, can be highly effective for acquiring new, high-quality customers. 
5. Partnering with an affiliate marketing agency specialized in financial services, like Fintel Connect, lets you build trust and awareness through reputable partnerships as you scale customer acquisition with built-in software that simplifies your compliance, affiliate tracking, and reporting. 

Customer acquisition for banks and credit unions comes with unique challenges:

• High competition means differentiating your bank or financial institution is difficult 
• Strict regulatory requirements mean carefully crafting marketing materials to remain compliant
• Potential customers are often more cautious with selecting financial products and services than they are about other consumer products
• A more complex funnel means you’ll need a highly functional and engaging user journey to prevent drop offs

Before investing in any new tactics, we recommend first defining the following to set your strategy up for success:

1. Know your audience. Who are you trying to target, and where are they shopping for financial products? Define your ideal customer and look at the competitive landscape and where competitors are advertising to know where to start. 
2. Define your customer journey. How do people get from hearing about you for the first time to becoming a customer? Mapping their journey enables you to understand key touchpoints in the path to conversion. This helps enhance your marketing efforts, reduce disengagement and improve the overall customer experience. 
3. Optimize your onboarding. The gold standard for onboarding is now five minutes (or less). Make it easy for high-intent customers arriving on your site to know where to go and easily sign up as this will improve customer retention and satisfaction.
   
4. Know your budget. What can you spend to acquire a new account holder? Then, which channels are most efficient? Having a clear overview of what channels or strategies are and aren’t working for you provides a good road map for refining and bettering your efforts. 

Once you square away these basics, you can look to optimize your strategies for banking customer acquisition. 

If you’re a bank looking to promote credit card products, read our strategic guide on credit card acquisition.

The reality of bank customer acquisition is that you will need a healthy blend of various channels (and potentially more) to have a robust marketing effort. After all, it takes multiple touchpoints with a brand before someone may convert to a paying customer.

1. Offline channels

Offline channels for acquiring customers can include anything from direct mailings, billboard ads, local team sponsorships and community partnerships, to physical ad placements. Even some fintechs took advantage of offline channels like direct mailing during Covid to differentiate themselves. However, this strategy is expensive and doesn’t typically deliver an easily measurable return on investment (ROI). 

Pros:

• Build a local reputation and community.
• Nurture current customers and increase customer lifetime value (LTV).
• Reach certain demographics that are less present on digital channels, allowing you to localize your ad and marketing materials.

Cons:

• Difficult to track.
• Not scalable.
• More suited for top-of-funnel awareness rather than a results-driven strategy.

For digital banks, or traditional banks that are focusing on customer acquisition through expanding their digital services, offline options may not be the best way for you to reach your target audience. In 2022, Forbes reported that 79% of adults in the United States like online and mobile banking as opposed to brick-and-mortar. 

When potential customers are looking for digital banking services, reaching them online can mean drawing an easier path from awareness to acquisition. 

2. Programmatic ads

Programmatic ads are digital ads that you place on websites and social media channels through spending on platforms like the Google ad network.

Pros: 

• Good for brand awareness and targeting consumers at the top of the funnel.
• A/B test ad copy and messaging.
• Capture a broad audience across the web.

Cons: 

• Digital ad spend can get expensive.
• You’re likely to reach a broader, lower quality audience.
• They can get lost in the mix and be blocked by ad blockers.

Digital ads are a necessary part of most retail banks’ marketing strategy, but they don’t give you the clarity and control of some other options. 

3. Paid search

Paid search is paying for an ad placement on the results for a given search query. 

Pros: 

• Targets high-intent consumers at the lower end of the funnel, so conversion rates can be high.
• A/B test ads.
• Gather insights for organic keyword opportunities.

Cons: 

• Paid search is competitive.
• Difficult to differentiate your brand from competitors.

While paid search can be good for reaching potential customers, it doesn’t allow you to easily build trust, which is a key factor in banking decisions.

4. Email

Email marketing can be an effective tool either to nurture people who have given you their email as a part of your sales funnel or as a cold outreach strategy. 

Pros:

• Segment audiences and reach them with targeted messaging and digital experiences.
• Easily A/B test emails, usually right from your email service provider.
• Provide clear CTAs for different parts of the funnel. 

Cons:

• If you are buying email lists, it can be hard to determine the quality of those lists. 
• Cold emails are difficult to truly personalize and can be more of a shot in the dark than warm emails.
• Good emails which provide results take time and effort to craft, and you may have a learning curve if you have not previously structured email campaigns.

While most companies have email as a part of their customer communication and marketing strategy, email is not necessarily the most efficient way to broaden your customer base and reach new customers. 

5. Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is the practice of working with partner publications to have your brand’s products mentioned or promoted on their channels. This can be anything from traditional publications, influencers, podcasts, videos, websites, and other forms of media. 

Pros: 

• Reach higher-intent and new-to-you audiences by targeting the right publication partners.
• Create educational content to build trust and knowledge with potential customers.
• Increase credibility with consumers through strategic partnerships.
• Helps create a brand halo effect, enhancing the cost-efficiency of your overall marketing efforts
• Expect results-based referral fee models, which provide clearer ROI measurement on marketing expenses than with other digital marketing efforts.

Cons:

• Affiliate marketing takes time to ramp up and see results—it isn’t a quick fix.
• Affiliate channels don’t work well in isolation, and need to be part of a larger strategic marketing and product effort.
• Managing and scaling affiliate marketing can be resource intensive if you don’t have the right solutions in place.

If you have covered the basics and want to push your results further, affiliate marketing is a proven channel for digital acquisition, if done correctly. It can add reach, drive positive brand awareness and lead directly to conversions.

If you want to learn more about the basics of affiliate marketing, read our guide Affiliate Marketing for Banks: How to Get Started.

Fintel Connect is an all-in-one agency, partner network and management platform, and compliance tool designed for banks and financial services companies in Canada and the US. We help financial institutions of all sizes navigate their affiliate marketing programs to build brand awareness and acquire new customers.

If you are struggling to find high-quality accounts, build or strengthen your brand’s reach, and meet your customer acquisition goals, here are three key ways Fintel Connect can help.

1. Find high-quality leads through our vetted publisher network

If you are having difficulty acquiring high-quality new accounts and experiencing commensurate problems with customer acquisition cost (CAC), it’s possible your marketing campaigns aren’t reaching and effectively engaging your target audience. 

Fintel offers a vetted affiliate network with reputable publishers that are appropriate for banks. We ensure every affiliate meets compliance standards and is the right fit for financial institutions. 

With our experience and know-how, we can help you navigate partnerships with respected publications like NerdWallet and Forbes. We can guide you to prepare for and then make the most of these possibilities, navigating the process with you to make your banking products attractive to top-tier partners. 

The result is more effective lead-generation spend in multiple ways. First, your team puts in less effort sifting through potential publishers because we can guide you to the best partners and help you get your foot in the door. Then, they spend less lead time growing the program with our expert guidance, so they won’t feel the need to compromise on quality or results. 

Want to know more about making connections with publishers? Learn How to Pick the Right Partner for a Fintech Affiliate Program.

2. Grow your financial institution’s reputation with a wide range of affiliate partnerships

If your financial institution’s brand awareness is low, or your reputation isn’t well known, it can be hard to find the right audience. You might find yourself investing heavily to maximize ad exposure, but not consistently hitting the right places for a good ROI. And, you may discover it’s difficult to build credibility and trust from ad spend alone.

Affiliates can play an important role in helping you build that trust. They act as third-party endorsements that educate an existing, loyal audience on your financial product and brand, enhancing your credibility. Fintel helps facilitate these partnerships, introducing you to over 5,000 vetted affiliates in our network, so you can reach different target audiences across multiple channels, from trusted publications and influencers to organic search.

Fintel Connect can advise you on who to work with and help you build the partnerships and campaigns that will raise your profile. For example, we work with financial services influencer marketing, which can be a great strategy for educating, raising awareness, and building brand credibility with potential customers. 

As a full-service agency, we’ll work with you to understand your specific needs. Our expertise extends to all stages of the funnel, so we can help you work through the top, middle and bottom of the funnel, building your pipeline from awareness through to acquisition. And because we can help you craft and navigate the whole campaign cycle, you can focus on driving results, not on upskilling your entire team to become world-class affiliate specialists. 

3. Diversify or scale your customer acquisition efforts with a platform that does the heavy lifting for you

If you are new to affiliate marketing in the banking sector, you may not give it as much attention as your tried-and-true channels—especially as affiliate marketing can take some time to produce results. And if you’re trying to scale your affiliate program, your team may quickly become overwhelmed by the tracking and reporting through DIY efforts or via larger platforms not designed for the financial services industry. 

But sticking only to your preferred channels can limit growth. Fintel Connect can help you start or scale your affiliate program, even if you don’t have the expertise or personnel to get things done in-house. 

Aside from our full-service agency functions, we provide specialized content management features to ensure that product information in your campaigns stays up to date and your affiliate program remains compliant. This makes it easy to inform your affiliates of changes, like a new interest rate, from one central dashboard rather than manually via email. 

With Fintel, you’ll have a tracking and  partner management solution that’s specific to financial services. We can integrate our tracking into any digital account-opening platform to ensure you track quality metrics, like approved or funded accounts. We know that transparency into how your affiliate spend is working is key to refining strategy and hitting targets, and our tracking features reflect that. 

Finally, our industry-specific knowledge means we can help you decide on which services to offer and how to position your brand most effectively. We can help you articulate your value to potential customers, and craft a package which attracts the affiliates you want to partner with. 

This means you can start or scale your affiliate program with confidence and in a data-driven way. Avoid potential elementary pitfalls and focus on making your affiliate program a success with Fintel Connect. 

Want to know more about how Fintel can help ease compliance admin work in affiliate marketing? Read: Marketing Compliance for Financial Services: How to Get It Right.

Live Oak is an online bank serving retail customers and small businesses in the US. They wanted to grow their acquisition efforts and credibility in the market against some of the other big small business banking brands with an online strategy, as they are digital-first and couldn’t rely on physical branches to support their marketing efforts. 

They knew they wanted to target small to medium-sized enterprises and partnered with Fintel Connect to scale affiliate marketing to bolster their customer acquisition efforts. Fintel offered strategic advice and helped them tap into the power of affiliates for banking and financial services. 

Within six months of partnering with Fintel Connect and working with our specialized teams, Live Oak saw 30+ partnerships solidify, including landing in three publications they had been targeting as best-fit, high-quality partners. 

With Fintel, Live Oak also worked to continuously refine strategy and boost results through reporting and optimization. 

The result was a 420% increase in approved account volumes originating through affiliate channels for their business savings account. 

To read more about how Live Oak Bank and Fintel Connect achieved these results, read our case study. 

Customer acquisition in the banking industry takes time, patience, dedicated tracking and monitoring, and a breadth of marketing efforts for a real acquisition engine to come together. For banks, crafting the right message and reaching potential customers means navigating compliance and a very competitive market.

We know that starting or scaling affiliate marketing with the right partner can make a significant difference in acquisition efforts because we see it in our own customers. If you are interested in working with an affiliate marketing company dedicated to financial institutions, contact us today. 

1. What is customer acquisition in banking?

Bank customer acquisition is the process financial institutions use to attract new account holders and customers. It requires understanding your audience, mapping customer journeys, optimizing onboarding, and setting clear budgets. Banks must overcome high competition, a complex funnel, regulatory requirements, and customer caution to succeed.

2. What is the best digital acquisition strategy for banks?

No single “best” strategy exists. Banks need a blend of channels tailored to their goals. Options include programmatic ads, paid search, email, and affiliate marketing. Affiliate partnerships can be particularly powerful for building credibility, reaching high quality audiences, and providing measurable ROI despite slower initial results.

3. What is the average cost of customer acquisition for a bank?

High customer acquisition costs (CAC)  are a common challenge but can vary from $75 to $400+, based your on product, marketing channel used, and how established a financial brand you are. Affiliate marketing can offer cost advantages through results-based fee models compared to expensive offline channels or competitive digital advertising.