Courtesy of Digital Mailer

Have a Strategy: It’s an ongoing process
to educate and enroll your customers in
e-statements. You should have a strategy that:

• Communicates that e-statements are FREE, convenient, FREE, secure, and FREE
• Explains the overlap in paper and
  e-statements (customers must be weaned)
• Outlines e-statement archive plans:
  • How long will they remain online?
  • How can a customer get a copy of an old statement after that time period?
• Offers special promotions exclusively for e-statement users
• Has the ability to convert back to paper if not 100% satisfied
• Addresses security and privacy concern

Share the Benefits: Tell your customers what’s in it for them! Too many institutions seem to believe that customers will opt-in because of the benefits to society (save trees) or the benefits to the institution (save costs). The fact is that people make decisions from a selfish perspective – What’s in it for me? If you don’t communicate a good answer to this question, adoption will suffer.

Multi-Media Approach: How many different ways do you disseminate information to customers? Each and every vehicle should be used to promote your e-statement campaign including, envelope teaser copy, statement stuffers, Website, email, online banking banners/links, postcards, deposit slips, ATM receipts, and so on. Keep in mind that each customer who signs up saves your institution $0.50 or more per month.

Utilize Every Point of Contact for Email Capture: Every piece of correspondence and every contact point, from teller to mortgage loan officer, should ask for email addresses. Build your database now to ensure maximum adoption later.

Free Gift Offers: One of DigitalMailer’s clients averages 300 new e-statement sign-ups each month. But when they raffle a gift with a high-perceived value, they triple their sign-up rate.

Make it Easy: It behooves you to make it ridiculously simple to sign up for e-statements. One of the easiest ways is to send customers an email with a big clickable YES link.

Aggressively Court Online Banking Users: You should be able to convert at least half of your online banking users to
e-statements. And you should also be to get an equal number of non-online banking customers to sign up.

Referral Raffles: Using viral marketing, you can incite your customers to refer others (co-workers, friends and family) by offering a nice raffle prize and indicating that each referral bearing the referrer’s name will count as one entry. Therefore the more a customer refers, the greater his or her chances are of winning the prize.

Survey Customers: Use your Website and the email addresses you have captured to survey your customers about e-statements and other products. You’ll be surprised at what you can learn from a short four-question survey.

Ask: Don’t be timid. After you build a solid case for e-statements, clearly ask the customer to sign up. And continue to ask, at reasonable intervals, until they sign on.