What do you do when you get an e-mail from your bank? You delete it of course. That’s what the banks specifically tell you to do. For some years now, it has been one of any South African bank’s primary public relations exercises. After all, to save your money from phishing is to save their money. Besides, no company wants a series of fraudulent, online incidents that will cause them to haemorrhage custom.

This moratorium on e-mail (and nowadays) even mobile communication creates an issue further down the line. Of all the standard digital marketing methodologies out there, e-mail must be the simplest and most effective. People don’t read their statements in hard-copy mail format anymore, they simply queue their online statements and pay them one by one (since they’ve opened their online banking.)

Here in lies the rub but possibly also the solution. Although banks simply cannot seem to find a way around the e-mail communication debacle, they have an advantage over other types of business. People spend an awful lot of willing time on their banking websites. Banks don’t have to do anything to get their users online. For this reason, banks should be the forerunners of innovative home and landing page discoveries, implementations and AB testing pages because their websites are, pretty much, all they’ve got. A good idea might be to pick 4 of the major banks and compare the things that they are doing on their websites. As a Digital Marketer, I would find this exercise fascinating because it may give us insight into our own online behaviour.

When you’re constructing an online marketing strategy you use the various “pillars” of online communication to lean against each other. What does a company do when it can’t use all those pillars? It does what the banks do. Smart, short and sassy. That is the trending future and almost certainly the route that “non-lazies” will be taking. It’s a shining example for any digital campaigner.   

Sound Idea Digital specialises in Digital Marketing. For more information, contact 
012 66 44 227 or email to info@soundidea.co.za