Leaders in Customer Loyalty, Powered by Loyalty360
Ally Financial: Uniting Communities with Sports Partnerships and Elevating the Customer Experience
Mark Johnson, CEO of Loyalty360, spoke with David Hixon, the Executive Director of Product Marketing and CRM at Ally, about how sports partnerships bring Ally and communities together, using data and insights to support personalization, and leveraging the right metrics to determine success.
Watch the full interview here: https://youtu.be/U5vHWa85-jE
Mark Johnson, CEO of Loyalty360, spoke with David Hixon, the Executive Director of Product Marketing and CRM at Ally, about how sports partnerships bring Ally and communities together, using data and insights to support personalization, and leveraging the right metrics to determine success.
Watch the full interview here: https://youtu.be/U5vHWa85-jE
Good afternoon, good morning. This is Mark Johnson from Loyalty360. Hope everyone's happy, safe and well. I want to welcome you back to another edition of our Leaders in Customer Loyalty series. In this series, we speak with leading brands about what they are seeing and hearing on the frontlines of customer channel and brand loyalty. Today we have the pleasure of speaking with David Hickson. He's the Executive Director of Product Marketing and CRM at Ally. How are you?
Speaker 2:today, david, I'm doing great. Mark, Thanks for having me. It's good to be back with you.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Been a while, but looking forward to the discussion. For sure we start these on a more personal level. We'd like to get to know the individual we're speaking with. Would love to know a little bit more about yourself, your current role at ally and maybe a fun fact or passion you have outside work yeah, I'm as you said.
Speaker 2:I'm the executive director of product marketing and crm at ally. I've been here for almost nine years. My focus is really on our individual lines of business and how we scale them and how we deepen them. My background is heavy, heavy analytics. Before Ally, I was with a marketing agency, a publicist agency, leading an analytics function and, like I said, about nine years ago almost nine years ago decided to jump over to client side and have been loving it over here ever since. Maybe a fun fact about me I am also a huge basketball fan. I am currently the lead statistician for the NBA's Charlotte Hornets here in Charlotte, where I'm located. So I've been with the Hornets for about 20 years and manage all of their in-game data basically for the entire season each year. So big, big, fun side hustle gig for me working for the NBA.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Who do you think, from a statistic perspective, wins the NBA championship this year?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, I think the Celtics win it, but I'd love to see the Knicks win it. The Knicks are fun to watch. This year, a lot of excitement in New York, okay, good.
Speaker 1:Perfect, yeah. Yeah, you forgot the Nuggets, but we'll let that slide.
Speaker 2:They're fun to watch too. They're fun to watch too, especially last night. Yeah, it was a good game last night.
Speaker 1:I have to resort to basketball, since my hockey team is falling apart, but that's a whole different discussion. Yeah, when you look at customer loyalty, what does customer loyalty mean to Ally Financial? How do you define customer loyalty, and what does it mean to Ally Financial? How do you?
Speaker 2:define customer loyalty and what does it mean to your organization? Yeah, it's a good question because I think it's one of those things that can be answered a lot of different ways and I guess the way I would start is to say we do not have a formalized loyalty program at Ally. We have little bits and pieces of things. We've got a card program that's a traditional, you know swipe, the card, gain points, redeem for statement credits and things like that. We also have some relationship deepening offers that maybe I'll talk about as we get deeper into this, but none of it's organized into what anybody here would call a loyalty program. So for us, I think loyalty is more about, frankly, the human side of things, which is more about building relationships, meaningful relationships with our customers, getting to know them, getting to understand what their financial goals are and then trying to meet those goals as they grow with us as a customer. So it's way more for us. It's way more emotional than it is, transactional than it is transactional, absolutely.
Speaker 1:I know you are very focused on partnerships. Partnerships are a big area and growing area of interest for members of Multi360 and brands in general. Nascar is a big partner for you where you have specific initiatives that are focused on the community and building fandom across different audiences. Can you talk a little bit about your partnership approach and maybe even kind of the focus you have around corporate social responsibility and how it ties into your brand partnerships?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think it's not just NASCAR there's a lot of them. It's NASCAR, and it's also a big one. For us down here in Charlotte is the Charlotte FC the team, the MLS team here, but for us it's really about the partnerships and how it sort of connects to our broad commitment to economic mobility in general. Specifically, though, in the hometowns of Charlotte, which are Detroit, or the hometowns of Ally, which are Detroit and Charlotte, and those things come to life in a lot of different ways. But with Charlotte FC we've got a couple of cool programs. One's called Greater Goals. It's basically a free after-school program for Title I schools, where you get together and play soccer and we're there and we show up as a brand and sort of help the community that way. And another one that's really cool is called Pitches for Progress, which is basically we're building I think it's 22 pitches across the Charlotte area in high risk communities. That allows both kids and adults to gather and gives them a safe space to come and play soccer and learn the game and understand who Ally is and why we're there.
Speaker 2:Specifically, though, you mentioned NASCAR. There's a great one there as well too. It's called Fueling Futures, which is a partnership with Hendrick Motorsports. That basically helps students learn the careers that exist in NASCAR, right? So it's not just about driving a race car, it's about how do you build one, how do you market the team, the business side of things. So it's an educational series about all of those careers that are available in that industry and for us it's basically just an effort to connect those partnerships to what we stand for and who we stand for as a brand.
Speaker 1:Excellent. And when you look at the partnerships that you formed with the partners that you have, what do they mean for Ally and how do they connect back to that overall customer experience, customer loyalty and engagement efforts that you're focused on?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a question we get a lot. So how do these partnerships like trickle down to the bottom line right and impact customer growth or customer retention? And we've actually got. We've seen a lot of success here and we've got some great stats around it. I mean specifically maybe I'll speak to our commitment to women's sports, which I think is pretty well known at this point.
Speaker 2:We've done a great job of getting out there for Ally among women's sports fans. So just for that segment of customers they're choosing Ally at the top of the funnel. Go even further. We've seen that once you reach that level of favorability, your conversion rate to becoming a customer goes up by 6x and your cost to acquire goes down by 90%. So think of that as we go through the funnel. We've got you interested in the brand. Because you're interested in the brand, because of the partnerships that we have, it's far more efficient to acquire you as a customer. And then even a step further. We've seen that those folks that are fans of the sports teams that we are partnered with are 16 times as likely to stay versus leave. So there really is a full funnel connection to just real like hardcore marketing metrics as it relates to the partnerships that we have in the sports space. So we've seen a real strong connection not just to the brand but to the business metrics as well.
Speaker 1:Okay, when you look at emotional loyalty, it's top of mind for many brands today. How do you define emotional loyalty? How do you look at emotional loyalty? Obviously, the efforts you have around women's sports, around partnerships, can drive a substantial amount of engagement and emotional and emotive appeal. But what does emotional loyalty mean and how do you foster that ally?
Speaker 2:So I think it kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier. For us, again, loyalty isn't about, you know, go swipe your card and you'll get points. It's more about building a relationship with your customers. I think of it really as the loyalty I have to my friends and my family. That's what we aspire to do with our customers.
Speaker 2:So for us, emotional loyalty is maybe more about celebrating successes and wins for our customers along the way, and I think that comes to life in a lot of really cool ways for us.
Speaker 2:So you know, we have some tools in our in our tool set for customers that allows them to share with us what their financial goals are and what they're saving for, and we pay a lot of attention to that and we celebrate with them when they say they're saving $20,000 for a home down payment and they get to $20,000, there's a whole communication stream that goes out to them to congratulate them and celebrate them, much like you would if your best friend was saving for something and they got there, you'd want to give them a high five and celebrate it. We also do things like in that same scenario where they might tell us what they're saving for Maybe it's a, maybe it's again a $20,000 down payment for a home when they get to 19,000, we'll top it off and give them the extra thousand dollars, like a true friend would, and give them a high five and celebrate, and then even simple stuff like we do handwritten thank you note or, sorry, handwritten happy birthday notes to our customers on their birthdays, and sometimes we throw a gift certificate in there. So I think of emotional loyalty, more so on a human level than I do on a business level, and if we can make it, if we can make it much like it feels like with your friends and family, then I think we're doing it. We're doing it right.
Speaker 1:And it's interesting, you talk about kind of the topping off and why don't we reward certain milestones? There's a book by Adam Graham, I think. Again he talks about that, how it's an opportunity for brands to look at things differently, right? So if you're saving for a home, right and you celebrate that as an opportunity and do it differently from a brand perspective because that can create that emotional loyalty. But again, it's focused on thinking and doing things differently and thinking outside the box. But you know, those are very powerful examples and it's great to hear.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've gotten a lot of when we I mean we do that, all that stuff I just rattled off, we do that as a rule and we've gotten a lot of positive VOC, as you might imagine. When we do it Because it's unexpected, it's a surprise and delight. We're not asking the customer for anything, like I said, it's just a virtual high five and we do that when you look at personalization.
Speaker 1:personalization is also very important for brands today. They want to engage their customers in-store, in-lane, through customer experience and customer loyalty programs. How does Ally leverage some of the data insights that you have that you're so passionate about to strengthen your personalization efforts?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we do a lot of that. Like I said, my background is heavy analytics, heavy data. Part of my team there's probably 20 to 25 data analysts on my team that are in our customer data all day, every day, and we basically build as many triggered programs as we can because they can be so personalized and so relevant. And I could rattle off tons and tons of examples. But we look at things like you know. I mentioned our savings buckets.
Speaker 2:When people set up those buckets and tell us what they're saving for, they might say they're saving for retirement and we'll look at well, what age are you at? You know, how much do you have? How can we help nurture you better to retirement? We mentioned home. If someone's saving for a home, there's lots and lots of content that we can help educate you on how to get there. We look at life stage milestones. You know, when you get married, when you have children, that all means things in your life and your financial life for sure. And then, once we have that data, then it becomes a question of where are you in your own financial life? Do we need to nurture you into that product or are you already there and we need to start talking about conversion. So we have I mean I would say we have more than a hundred individual targeted personalized campaigns that go out every single day based off of triggers like that that drive those personalized messages. That's really the bread and butter of what we do for our customers.
Speaker 1:Okay, and how will the brand, or how is the brand pivoting to meet, you know, customer preferences as they may emerge over time right Economic conditions, potentially, or as they move through their life stages? How do you, you know, kind of meet them where they are in their journey?
Speaker 2:How do you kind of meet them where they are in their journey? Yeah, again, we're really fortunate. We've got a lot of great first-party data that helps us understand that, and I'll give you a very real example again, looking at homeownership, the savings bucket tool that we allow our customers to have and keep in mind, we have somewhere north of 3 million deposit customers that are giving us this information. So there's a lot. But the savings bucket allows for you to do three different things. One is tell us what you're saving for, ie a down payment for a home. Two is how much you're going to need. And three is by when you're going to need it. So you might say I'm saving for a down payment for a home, I need $20,000 and I hope to close in December of this year.
Speaker 2:So if you set that bucket up today and you have a hundred bucks in it, I'm not going to talk to you about conversion.
Speaker 2:I'm going to talk to you about the fact that Ally has a lot of options for homeowners and educate you really on how to get there. What are the types of things you need to do to become a homeowner? It would be way too presumptuous for me to say, click here to apply for a loan. That would be silly. So what we do is we watch that bucket and as time goes on and the bucket gets full and the date gets closer, if we see that that bucket is getting to the point that it's meeting whatever the monetary goal was, then our messaging is going to shift and start talking more about okay, now it's time to get ready to start getting your pre-qualification, or now it might be time to start applying. So those buckets really allow us to see yeah, kind of to your point not just what you're saving for, but in what stage of that life cycle of savings are you, and then the messaging that we put out mirrors that life stage.
Speaker 1:Excellent Big push right now at the state level to adapt data and privacy regulations. There's a big belief that eventually there'll be a kind of a national you know regulation, much like they have in Canada and in GDPR in. Europe. How does Ally you know communicate the transparency around data, data privacy and being a steward of that data?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean. So we that's kind of a that's a daily challenge for us because, right, you want to be, do all the cool personalized stuff that I just talked about, but you only want to be communicated, you know, through email or through direct mail or only through the call center. So we definitely offer the customer any opportunity to opt out of these types of things. And I think I guess the other sort of safe thing that we do is when we're using these triggers more, some than others, like some of the savings bucket stuff, will be pretty overt about it. But if we're using like life stage stuff or you know maybe some of the behaviors of yours that we've observed on allycom, where we like to use this term, coincidentally relevant looking at our brokerage products, that would trigger a marketing stream.
Speaker 2:That's me seeing you raise your hand for being interested in a product. That marketing stream is not going to say, hey, mark, I saw you on allycom yesterday, you must be interested in a brokerage account. That marketing stream is just going to talk about the RTBs and the value props of our brokerage product set. So we try to remove some of that for lack of a better word like creepiness from the data so that it doesn't come off as big brother-ish. So I guess maybe that's how we're trying to water it down a little bit. But, like I said at the top, more than anything we just want to make sure that we give customers the ability to opt out, should they not be comfortable with that type of messaging.
Speaker 1:Excellent, and how do you measure the efficiency, efficacy, return on your customer loyalty and customer experience efforts? What KPIs are most important to you and your brand?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think there's lots of standard stuff Engagement in the communications that we send out, open rates, click rates, all that fun stuff but I think they all ladder up for us. They all ladder up to two big ones. One is engagement in general, and I don't mean engagement in the marketing communications, I mean engagement in the products and the brand of Ally. We've done just an absolute ton of analysis that shows that our customers that are using our tools, that are logging in, that are transacting with us, that are just generally engaged with us as a brand, are far more valuable customers, both from lifetime value to attrition rates and all the standard metrics. We want as much engagement as we can get. So that's one. And then the other is what we, what we call internally, is a multi line of business customer. That's a really big key metric for us.
Speaker 2:So we've got A deposits book of customers is, like I said, north of three million. We've got an auto book of customers it's also north of three million. We've got an invest book that's closing in on three quarters of a million. A credit card book that's over a million. An insurance product, a mortgage product all these individual lines of business and our goal is not to be siloed lines of business. Our goal is to be a one stop shop for all of our customers' financial needs. So there's quite a bit of cross selling going and we pay very close attention to the number of multi line of business customers we have, which is now approaching a million, and that would be really like the North Star metric for deepening and loyalty is how many lines of business are you using with us? Obviously, we've got our deposits book, which is the traditional bank, but we also want those guys to invest with us. We want you to have your home loan with us.
Speaker 1:We would love for you to have your auto loan with us. And so those folks that are using multiple lines of business are our best customers? Absolutely yeah. Are there reward programs in market that you admire from not a functional perspective but also the way it engages with you, and are there things that you would like to potentially take from that reward or customer experience program or process to ally?
Speaker 2:Yep, yeah, I have a couple of examples here, so I think some of it may be obvious to me, obvious to maybe a lot, but what I think of is traditional loyalty programs like American Airlines. I love the American Airlines program. I travel a pretty good amount, so I'm always racking up miles and I love to board a little early and maybe get upgraded from time to time and maybe even take a free trip from time to time. But I will say, that program to me is, as you know, back to some of the stuff you and I've been talking about very, very transactional and very unemotional. Like it does you know, like anybody can join it's, it's a you do this, you get that type of relationship. I love the functionality of it, but it doesn't feel like an emotional connection to me. There are others, though, that are less traditional in my mind. I think of things like the Nike sneakers app. So I'm a, I'm a big sneaker head, and if you're familiar with the sneakers app, it's a. It's basically a, an offshoot of the traditional Nike app that does sort of exclusive shoe drops and things like that. It is not a loyalty program. I'm not part of anything that I signed up for, but I know that, based off of the transactions that I have with them, I get exclusive access to shoes that other people might not get, and I've got friends on the team that you know I'll come running in. Did you see these that just dropped and they're like no, I didn't see them, I didn't get that. I know that I'm getting it, probably because I spent too much money with them, which my wife would say but it feels good, it feels like I'm special and I get to have access to that shoe and then even more so kind of again back to this whole human, emotional element of it all.
Speaker 2:To me, the best loyalty programs again is not a program but it's, I think of, like a favorite restaurant or something like that. I have a favorite restaurant here in Charlotte that my wife and I go to almost every weekend and certainly they don't have a favorite restaurant here in Charlotte that my wife and I go to almost every weekend and certainly they don't have a loyalty program. But the bartenders know me and the waiters and waitresses know me and they know what I'm going to order and the food's really great and the service is really great and oftentimes they'll give me, you know, a free dessert to take home to my kids just because they are loyal to me and because of that I am loyal to them and honestly, that's the type of connection that I would aspire to build for our customers, where there's almost like an unspoken value exchange, not one that I have to sign up for and swipe my card for. That feels more like true loyal to me versus like an American Airlines program. So I know that that's kind of ethereal and sort of in the clouds a little bit, but that's what we would aspire to build. That's awesome, Okay.
Speaker 1:Excellent and last question what can loyalty 360 do to help you and your team with your customer experience, customer loyalty efforts?
Speaker 2:I mean I think probably just more like more things like this. Like it's always good, I pay a lot of attention to the stuff that you guys put out and I think it's just good to understand what other companies and brands like ours are doing what's working, what's not working. I'm always me personally. I'm looking for differentiators in the space. Like I said, I don't want to just go build a points program like everybody else has. I want it to be something different. So really, just what you guys do in terms of socializing what brands are doing, is super helpful and the more the better.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Well. Thank you very much for that. Definitely make sure we're getting the content out that you seek. But the community is. It continues to grow and brands continue to share, so it's great to get feedback from organizations like yourself how we can add to some of that benefit.
Speaker 2:So thank you, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And now we have our quick fire question segment. We ask the individual we're interviewing to keep the one word or short phrase answer. So I don't get in trouble with the content team. The first question we have is what is your favorite word?
Speaker 2:I didn't look at these, by the way. So this is true quickfire I I think my favorite word would probably be helpful, maybe because that's what I want to be seen as and that's what I. That's the type of people I want to be surrounded by. Helpful, okay excellent.
Speaker 1:What is your least favorite word?
Speaker 2:Maybe can't or not. What excites you, building things and achieving goals?
Speaker 1:What do you find tiresome Politics? Is there a book that you've read that you're a big fan of, that you recommend to colleagues or people in the industry?
Speaker 2:Yes, it's called Be when your Feet Are. It's amazing, okay yeah.
Speaker 1:What profession, other than the one you have now, would you currently like to attempt?
Speaker 2:Easy General manager of an NBA basketball team.
Speaker 1:I was going to say NBA somewhere. That's good.
Speaker 2:What do you enjoy doing that you don't often get a time to do. Go away with my wife and no kids, but without them it's fun. Who inspired?
Speaker 1:you to be the person that you are today, my family, my, my family, for sure uh, what do you typically think about at?
Speaker 1:the end of the day, all that needs to get done tomorrow. And last question how do you be, how do you want to be remembered by your friends and family? Kind? That's awesome. Well, david, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us today. It was great reconnecting with you and reconnecting with Ally, looking forward to hearing more from the brand over the next year and again, very inspirational discussion about everything you're doing in the customer experience but, more importantly, the CSR and the sustainability efforts you have. It was great to hear about those for sure. So, thank you, yeah, happy to be here.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me for sure. So thank you, yeah, happy to be here.
Speaker 1:Thank you for having me Absolutely and thank you everyone for taking the time to listen. Make sure you join us back for another edition of loyalty life soon and until then, have a wonderful day.