Best Practice Sharing

While no two Women’s Market programs are identical, key elements of program design are universal. Panelists shared their program’s marketing strategies (products/services, promotion, channels including on-line and mobile), KPIs, team structures and lessons learned.

Key Points

Marketing

• Design a sub-brand first and then go to market.
• Build a social media strategy from the beginning – developing online and social media presence can be very beneficial to the program
• Women’s entrepreneurship competitions are an effective way to realize multiple benefits – Role models are very important for women.
• The innovation of having a people’s choice award for women entrepreneurs
• Importance of building on the emotional connection that women have – Ads that don’t emphasize or even mention products but that showcase solutions to life’s issues.
• A dedicated brand manager to run the program is important.

Key Performance Indicators

• Develop top-line indicators similar across the bank and include overall revenues, number of customers, number of products per customer and Net Promoter Score. Linking those top line indicators up and down the line.
• Profitability should be measured in terms of total wallet and not just looking at one product, such as loans for example. The marrying of personal and business banking is where the profit lies.
• It is essential to link Diversity and Inclusion indicators

Data

• Importance of data
  • Identifying women at the account opening stage
  • Retrospectively going into your database and figuring out which accounts have women as primary account holder.
• Different benchmarks for women are not necessary, but banks must tag women accounts to ensure they are measuring them.
• Many banks have data quality issues. An investment upfront in ensuring data can be tracked is an important element of program design