SPONSORED CONTENT PRESENTED BY ALKAMI TECHNOLOGY
Despite growing urgency to increase deposits and open new accounts, many banks and credit unions are underleveraging their most strategic asset: actionable customer and member data.
The good news? Data activation doesn’t require a tech overhaul or a surge in headcount. With access to the right behavioral signals, timely insights, and smartly integrated marketing tools, financial institutions of any size can uncover hidden opportunities, deliver relevant offers, and drive measurable growth.
Alkami research shows that digitally mature institutions—those with a data-first strategy—report up to 5x higher annual average revenue growth compared to peers*. Here’s how your institution can build a full-funnel, data-powered marketing engine that scales.
1. Lay the Right Data Foundation
Before a financial institution can deliver personalized experiences, cross-sell with precision, or automate relevant engagement, it must first lay the right foundation—a unified, accessible, and actionable data layer. For banks and credit unions, this means moving beyond siloed systems and incomplete profiles to build a comprehensive view of the account holder. Without that foundation, even the best marketing messages can hit the wrong audience through the wrong channel. Insights derived from transaction data can power marketing campaigns to reflect where someone is in their financial journey—and where they’re going next. Relevance starts with readiness, and data is the infrastructure that makes it possible.
Many financial institutions are already sitting on that rich transaction data that can deliver intelligent insights about their account holders. By cleansing and categorizing data at scale, institutions can unlock meaningful insights, such as:
- Income inflow vs. outflow trends
- Dormant account reactivation opportunities
- Potential accounts to target that may indicate attrition
- Funds exiting to competitor accounts
- Uncovered business transactions in personal accounts
One way to begin is by tagging high-value transaction categories, like investments or automated clearing house (ACH) debits to fintechs, and layering in third-party data to create deeper context.
See the Top 100 data tags used by real Alkami customers.
2. Identify Behavioral Triggers That Signal Opportunity
The most effective deposit and cross-sell campaigns are launched at the right moment—often prompted by specific behavioral signals that indicate intent, risk, or financial life stage changes.
Top behavioral triggers to monitor:
- No active direct deposit (suggests secondary account status)
- Trial deposits or transfers to fintech applications (apps)
- Outbound payments to investment platforms
- External credit card usage increasing
- Business deposits running through personal accounts
- Sudden drop-off in digital engagement (a potential churn signal)
These signals represent inflection points where account holders are more likely to respond to a personalized, timely offer—or more likely to leave if there is no engagement.
“When we wanted to create audiences based on the needs of the market, we would get lists that weren’t accurate due to uncleansed data. We spent a lot of time trying to get the basics. Now with Alkami, we have it all at our fingertips.”
– Emily Stewart, Director of Digital Marketing & Analytics, Meritrust Credit Union (see the case study).
3. Build a Full-Funnel Cross-Sell Engine
It’s a common misconception that modern marketing strategies require expanded teams. In reality, success lies in deploying intelligent automation that streamlines segmentation, campaign orchestration, delivery, and performance tracking—all from a single platform. By connecting data insights with marketing automation, full funnel marketing platforms enable banks and credit unions to automatically optimize campaign audiences with fresh data insights daily, ensuring every marketing message is relevant to account holders’ financial needs.
Three real-world cross-sell campaign wins:
- Target existing investment account holders
➤ One credit union opened 245 certificates of deposit (CDs) in ten months by targeting members who already had investment relationships but hadn’t explored savings options. - Use website behavior to trigger relevant offers
➤ After detecting interest in savings products through digital behavior, one institution launched a targeted campaign via mobile banking—and opened 27 money market accounts in just 30 days. - Engage those with outbound investment behavior
➤ By identifying account holders sending large funds externally, one institution drove 1,828 new CD openings, reaching these users across both their public website and digital banking channels.
4. Reach Your Audience Where It Matters Most
Delivering the right message is only half the equation—delivery timing and channel alignment are just as critical. To fully activate each channel, financial institutions must understand how account holders engage across all channels and use that insight to drive personalized, timely messaging. Channel behavior data insights empower banks and credit unions to create more relevant, engaging, and effective marketing campaigns that drive digital adoption, increase product usage, and strengthen long-term account holder relationships. An omnichannel approach ensures your offer reaches account holders through the channels they trust and engage with the most: email, SMS, in-app messages, online banking, mobile push, and even direct mail for the right generational audience.
Centralizing campaign execution eliminates manual list pulls and siloed delivery systems, while return-on-investment (ROI) tracking connects performance to real business impact.
A recent Alkami-hosted webinar, Winning with Data: Lessons from a Bank Marketing Leader, highlighted how Ohio-based Westfield Bank turned data into a strategic advantage. Chris Van Ausdale, senior vice president of marketing and communications, shared how her small team builds and launches targeted campaigns in real time–without adding headcount.
5. Shift From Vanity Metrics to True ROI
For too long, marketing success in financial services has been measured by surface-level indicators—oftentimes impressions, click-throughs and page views. But in today’s highly competitive environment, those vanity metrics don’t move deposits. Targeted, data-informed campaigns that deliver measurable results can drive account openings, product adoption, and lifetime value.
Modern marketers must pivot from reporting activity to proving impact. That means aligning every campaign with business outcomes—using behavioral data, segmentation, and performance analytics to track conversions that lead to real revenue. Deposit growth isn’t about being seen; it’s about being relevant, timely, and actionable in every interaction.
With real-time attribution, institutions can now track:
- Which campaigns drive account openings
- Which channels deliver the highest deposit volumes
- Conversion rate by segment
- Cost per account opened
- Where marketing dollars yield the greatest ROI
This level of insight elevates marketing from cost center to growth driver—and empowers product and leadership teams to double down on what works.
High ROI Case Study: A $990 million asset bank executed 20 marketing campaigns, covering debit card swipes, eStatements, direct deposits and online banking.
Their marketing engagement efforts resulted in:
- 5 million impressions
- 11,275 conversions
- $585 million in value
- 14X return on investment
Source: How to Turn Bank Marketing Engagement into Profits
6. Scale with Predictive AI for Precision and Speed
Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer optional if an institution aspires to anticipate the needs of their account holders in near real-time. Predictive AI is an essential tool for banks and credit unions seeking precision and efficiency without increasing operational load. Think of it as a way to anticipate life’s significant moments, like buying a car, starting a family, or needing a home equity line, and proactively offering helpful tailored products or solutions. By using predictive AI not just to analyze the past but to predict what comes next, banks and credit unions can meet their members where they are, and where they’re going.
Predictive AI allows marketers to:
- Automatically identify high-propensity audiences
- Optimize campaign timing
- Surface next-best actions for every account holder
According to Alkami research, 88% of financial institutions experimenting with AI report success in areas like data insights, customer service, fraud prevention, and marketing ROI.
Final Thought: Data Activation Fuels Growth
Data activation must be grounded as a growth strategy. The real opportunity for financial institutions lies in equipping digital and marketing teams with the tools and platforms that turn raw data into relevant insights and action. That’s where the data-informed digital banker becomes essential: empowered with real-time insights and intelligent automation, they can anticipate account holder needs, drive product adoption, and deepen relationships at scale. When paired with a digital sales and service platform, this strategy doesn’t just unlock data, it activates it across the entire account holder journey, from onboarding to cross-sell. In a market defined by switching behavior – 50% of digital banking Americans would change financial providers if another company had a much better digital banking user experience** – growth belongs to the institutions that use data not just to inform, but to engage and accelerate. Go beyond personalization to anticipate account holder needs and prove ROI at every stage of the funnel.
Explore how Alkami’s Full-Funnel Marketing Intelligence helps banks and credit unions turn data into deposits. Learn More →
**Alkami Primary Research – surveyed 202 digital banking decision makers at banks and credit unions. Data collected November 5 – December 3, 2024.
**Alkami Research commissioned by The Center for Generational Kinetics that surveyed 1,500 digital banking consumers in the U.S. Survey was conducted online from February 24, 2025, to March 14, 2025.
