Cross-selling for credit unions is almost a time-honored tradition at this point. It's a way to help offer value to members, especially in regard to products and services that they may not have even realized were available.

Discover Successful Credit Union Cross-Selling Strategies

But there is one element that your credit union cannot afford to neglect if it wants to make the most of these efforts: timing.

It's Not Just How You Cross-Sell, It's When

While timing is only one part of a larger story when it comes to cross-selling, it is a major one. If your credit union (CU) promotes an offer for a financial services product too soon, your CU might approach the member before they're ready to take that desired next step. If you approach them too late, it's likely they've already been ready for a while and may have actually gone elsewhere to get what they need.

From that point of view, if your credit union tries to cross-sell a particular product or service to someone, and they don't want it, it speaks less to the quality of what your CU is offering and has a great deal to do with the fact that they may just not need it right now.

The Power of Personalization in Cross-Selling

One factor that many in the financial services industry seem to have lost sight of has to do with the impact that well-timed personalization can make. It's not about cross-selling to members simply because your credit union can. It's about getting a mention of the right product in front of the right person at exactly the right time.

In a lot of ways, that speaks to the foundation of what marketing services are supposed to be about in the first place.

TransUnion, for example, conducted a study of mortgage borrowers to help understand what their behaviors were both prior to and after a new mortgage origination, and whether those behaviors might be able to predict future activity. The organization looked at more than 16 million existing members over two and a half years.

What they learned was that six months prior to a mortgage closing date, there was a significant drop in activity on other types of loans. Once that date occurred, though, people were more likely to take out things like new car loans.

What does this tell us? It would have been a horrible time to try to cross-sell a member a new auto loan in the six months leading up to such a significant financial event. Your CU would have had great success trying right after they got a mortgage loan. 

This also helps to underline the point that personalization matters. If your credit union knows an insight based on someone's previous activity that they're not likely to be in the market for a new auto loan right now, that doesn't mean your CU can't use cross-selling for credit union members at all. It just means your credit union needs to shift which products it's making them aware of based on what your CU knows to be true.

At FLEX, we understand just how effective cross-selling for credit unions can be when executed under the right circumstances. Because of that, we've recently written a helpful eGuide that goes into more detail about all of this and more. If you'd like to take your own efforts to the next level, click the button below to get started.