3 Pain Points That Drag Down Campaigns in Today’s Fluid Lending Market

Highlights: 

• Slow data, missed opportunities, and campaign blind spots can significantly hinder lending campaign performance in today's dynamic market.

• A unified, cloud-based data and analytics solution is essential to overcome these challenges, enabling faster campaign deployment and more precise targeting.

• Leveraging real-time insights from campaign dashboards allows for continuous optimization and secure business growth in unpredictable economic conditions.

There’s an urgency in today’s lending market that’s difficult to overstate. Market conditions, borrower credit profiles, and payment behaviors are rapidly changing. In turn, these sudden shifts can directly impact the quality of your prospecting campaigns and, ultimately, your lending decisions.    

There may be sneaky pain points that could be sabotaging your prospecting process, especially during times of economic uncertainty. You'll need a powerhouse, all-in-one data and analytic solution to help you overcome those obstacles and optimize your process to drive secure growth under any economic conditions. 

What you don’t know CAN hurt you. 

Did you know that only 38% of today’s 42.7 million federal student loan borrowers are current on their loans? That’s according to the U.S. Department of Education, which estimates that nearly 10 million student loan borrowers (almost 25%) may soon be in default after the recent resumption of student loan repayment, potentially making them susceptible to garnishment of their wages, tax returns, and other assets. 

Meanwhile, high interest rates and high prices continue to shift spending and consumer behavior. 

The point is this: A lot is changing. If you’re unable to quickly understand and adapt to today’s fast-moving lending conditions, it can cause you to target the wrong prospects and miss significant opportunities to drive secure business growth. Here are a few examples of problems that could be holding you back. 

Problem #1: Slow data 

“Slow data” can mean many things, but essentially, it occurs when data becomes a bottleneck that drags down prospecting, compromising campaign quality and performance. 

You might not even realize your data is slow. Maybe you’re mired in back-and-forth emails, testing and selecting the right data from a third-party provider, which can take weeks or more. Then, you have to access (via email, download, FTP, etc.), integrate, manage, and securely store that data.  

Or maybe you’re short on analytic resources and struggling to combine data sets or append additional data (say, employment and income data) into your existing prospecting profiles. It’s a best practice that helps you better understand prospects and more precisely segment and target audiences. 

Whatever the reason, the result is a lack of optimization, leading to a slowdown in productivity and performance. 

The solution? View, access, and manage your campaign data—yours and third-party data sources—within a secure, inclusive cloud-based environment. 

Put data at your fingertips in the cloud, including alternative data to help you score consumers who lack traditional credit. You also receive high-performing, pre-configured data sets for prospecting. Apart from eliminating guesswork around the data, you have direct access to powerful prospecting insights that help you connect with the right prospects, at the right moments, with the right offer. You’ll discover exactly: 

• Who to target based on demographics, wealth, and lifestyle

• When to target prospects based on where they are in life

• How to target prospects with personalized offers via their preferred channels

• How to re-target them more impactfully based on their campaign response, or lack thereof  

Problem #2: Missed opportunities 

When other lenders get their offers to market ahead of you, it’s a problem. Timing is everything when it comes to efficiently growing your business.

Say you want to launch an April campaign that aligns with tax refund season. Yet, complications in your targeting strategy delay your launch. Or you launch on time, but your strategy is off, and your offers end up in front of the wrong audience.  

Meanwhile, other lenders launch their campaigns on time, targeting the right segments. As a result, they win the business. It’s a classic missed opportunity, one that can also drive down your marketing ROI at a time when you’re fighting for every marketing dollar.   

The solution? Use a unified analytics platform to quickly and easily access, analyze, and test all the data you need. 

Deploy campaigns faster by providing a comprehensive environment where all resources, including differentiated data, the latest analytical tools, and machine learning, are readily available in the cloud. This enables you to:

• Explore alternative campaign scenarios in real-time, examining how slight adjustments to your audience criteria may affect response rates, open rates, and potential future delinquencies

• Speed campaign deployment by making data available for immediate use within prospecting models and across leading sales and marketing platforms you may already be using

• Build and deploy highly targeted prospecting models in days or weeks (not months) ahead of your competitors

Problem #3: Campaign blind spots 

Quickly getting your campaigns to market is a must; it’s non-negotiable. But having the ability to continuously tweak and improve your campaigns based on real-time responses and outcomes is priceless. 

Let’s say you have limited visibility into your campaign performance, only able to see certain metrics like views, opens, response rates, and conversions. But how “actionable” are these insights? Can they help you quickly identify who and where to target (and avoid) moving forward? Or which offers perform better with certain segments? 

The solution? Access a campaign results dashboard that’s easy to understand and powered by a direct feedback loop to help you intelligently adjust and enhance your campaigns on the fly. 

You need granular consumer data on responders and non-responders, along with additional insights, through data-backed dashboard illustrations. All dashboards are hyper-current, continually updated by a feedback loop of real-time outcomes. You get actionable, “right-now” campaign insights that enable you to: 

• Analyze and visualize consumer activity for both responders and non-responders

• Understand the attributes and credit scores of responders and non-responders 

• Compare your campaign results to your peers and the market to see and correct areas where you are underperforming

• Use your learnings to fine-tune existing prospecting models or develop new ones

Today’s marketplace is moving fast. To keep pace, marketers require high-powered data and analytics that provide deeper, more meaningful insights, along with the speed and agility necessary to stay ahead of competing lenders. Optimization is no longer “good to have;” it’s table stakes in today’s lending market. 

The alternative, doing nothing, is no longer a viable option for lenders seeking to grow their business securely in the unpredictable months and years ahead. 
Watch this video, or View this brief informational sheet, for an example of how Equifax Ignite® for Prospecting –  a cutting-edge cloud-based analytical platform – can revolutionize your campaigns.