Entrepreneurship and strategic marketing

The demographic segmentation deals with dividing customers according to age, stage in life cycle etc. and it helps banks to design production for all types of people depending on their age, income, etc.

Apart from the behavior based segments, the bank can also adopt segmentation, depending on what the bank wants and not what customers want, banks have different value propositions that it wishes to give customers hence it will segment its products according to its value propositions and as customers take them they automatically fall to segments. The banks have three major objectives and these are get deposits and minimize the cost of funds producing quality credit balances at maximum spread income and to generate free income and reduce services expenses. This leads to the following four segments. There are those people who want to invest others want to borrow, others want convenience and on others are fast limited customers. These segments can be used as a basis for the bank to develop long-term strategies, to attract customers to the different segments.

As much as strategies are good, bank should avoid using one strategy for all products or marketing applications effective segments or marketing applications effective segments. A strategy will vary according to what are the marketing objectives. In the case of attracting new customers who have no history with the bank. The bank will come up with a wedge product strategy where they give customers of other banks a chance to sample some of its products or services for the time being and this will enable them to cross-sell more profitable products to them and create a long lasting relationship with them. This is done by direct marketing for example they can send letters to customers requesting them to try products or phone calls.

In making existing customers to be more profitable, the bank should study their behavior carefully and give them the most appropriate product or service that can turn a marginally customers, their lifestyle and the amounts of cash they handle and the needs comes from good data management. When the bank can use the data it has to identify best ways in available banks, database can enable them to know which customers are profitable, marginally profitable and unprofitable.

Apart from keeping existing customers, banks also need get more and more customers by prospecting well and turning these prospects to potential customers. The methods we have seen that are employed here is the direct mail methods and telephone calls. Geographical prospects can also be employed by use of strategic positioning of new branches at areas where trade is high and directing advertisements to such areas to lure more customers into the banks customer base, whichever the method, banks have realized that CRM is very important because it concerns more on customer satisfaction rather than products. Most banks then have realized that in order to understand customers well and this information is in the banks database. There should be therefore good management of data that gives information about the customers and whether they are profitable or not. For good data management, banks should ensure that:
1. They have relevant and accurate data(information) about the customers,
2. Develop daily, weekly, yearly etc analysis of customers’ profitability and
3. Develop tactics on these segments that modify behaviors of both customers and employees to increase sales and revenue while lowering costs.
Banks should ensure good data management by careful collection of customer data, turning this data into knowledge and then using this knowledge to develop strategies and tactics to modify behavior of both employees and customers and prospects to improve long-term profits.
Banks should realize that just aiming at having a large market share is not enough to generate profits. They should also ensure that they do good customer relations management in order to achieve good results. This is by understanding their customer needs well and then the bank will match the customers with available products to ensure maximum customer satisfaction. They should also manage customers well by segmenting them into useful segments based on profitability so as to give them beneficial value prepositions that will make them have good long-term relationship with the bank and hence increase the profitability.

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