Timing is everything

When the Federal Reserve dropped interest rates for the fifth time, Northwest Federal Credit Union (Herndon, Va.) took action, passing the rate reduction on to its members. The Credit Union cut its new auto rates and offered car loans for as low as 3.50 percent. The message: “NWFCU has slashed our new auto and lease rates.”

Within days of the Fed’s move, the credit union rolled out the promotion in its branches and website while the media was still buzzing. NWFCU decided to concentrate on the Internet channel it had been growing since 2000 and queued up a “special offers” email alert. The credit union carefully crafted the email, ran the template through its email spam checker, to give it the best shot at reaching the member, and then sent it to the 32,000 email addresses it had gathered to announce the change. View the email here.

Over the first four days, almost 8,000 members opened the email and read their credit union’s offer. Just under 2,000 clicked-through to one of the four links in the message to learn more about it on the NWFCU website. “Then something good happened,” said Gerrianne Burks, president/CEO of the Credit Union. “The email promotion did exactly what it was supposed to do: raise awareness and bring members to our website. It also resulted in $1.4 million dollars in new loans in less than a week and was definitely worth the effort.”

But what if using collected email addresses upsets members, who might feel they’re being spammed? When surveyed, most say they want to hear more about what’s new at their credit unions, as well as offers that pertain to them.

“We never want our communications to be perceived as spam; therefore, we only send to those members who have opted to receive special offers from us,” said Burks. “And we knew using our collected email addresses was the fastest, most cost-effective way to reach a third of our membership.”

What happened with the 32,000 emails sent from NWFCU? Burks said, “believe it or not, only 35 members out of 32,000 emails (.1%) clicked on the unsubscribe link to avoid future emails from us.”