| By Jim Bruene on November 17, 2009 1:47 PM | Comments (2) |
Bank of America's latest online effort is a personal finance educational site at <learn.bankofamerica.com> that includes consumer polls, money savings tips, videos and articles. Bank products are sprinkled throughout but the marketing is relatively restrained.
It's a solid effort. Good, concise copy married to an attractive graphical layout. And for a bank the size of Bank of America, it makes perfect business sense. The site moves a little product, builds the brand, shows off the bank's consumer-friendly side, provides material for PR campaigns, and gains some CRA credit (note 1).
But I'm not sure how much usage it will get other than the curious driven to it from banners within online banking. That's how ended up there today after paying my BofA credit card bill online (see second screenshot below).
Given Bank of America's 30 million online banking customers, they must not be driving much traffic to the site yet. According to Compete, traffic surpassed 100,000 for the first time in October. July was the first month that traffic was registered at the site.
Unique monthly visitors to BofA's personal finance tips site (July through October, 2009)
Source: Compete
Other than enabling an RSS feed for article updates, the site has no Web 2.0 or social media features. No blog. No forum. It's just a very pretty face on personal finance 101 material. It will be interesting to see where they take it.
Learn.BankofAmerica.com homepage (link, 13 Nov. 2009)
Note: I completed the poll on the middle of the page, so the results are shown rather than the poll question.
Logoff screen (13 Nov 2009, 3 PM Pacific)
Note:
1. CRA = Community Reinvestment Act which requires banks to help meet the financial and credit needs of low- to-moderate-income consumers.
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Jim, what do you believe the underlying motivations for this site are? I could see a few possibilities:
1) satisfying a sense of duty (or requests) to provide financial content
2) satisfying CRA requirements, as you pointed out
3) providing finance 101 content that could be linked back to by others, creating SEO benefits
None of those seem super super compelling, though--what is your take on the real reason?
Well, it's clearly not for increasing referrals, that's for sure. I spent some time on the site and not once was I prompted to connect with a professional either in person or online. Also, there's not place where they capture customer information such as giving away free downloadable guides.
Must be CRA requirements.