Fresno First Bank is a community bank based in Fresno, CA. In addition to personal banking services, the company provides a full suite of financial services to businesses based in the Central Valley.
Challenge
Fresno First Bank has a stellar reputation and broad customer base in the California Central Valley. Yet, even with its deep community roots, CEO Steve Miller knew that his bank had an opportunity to grow on its home turf. Couple the local growth opportunity with a new office set to launch in Los Angeles and it became clear that Steve and his team needed to experiment with new growth channels.
“A colleague that’s also worked with RevBoss suggested that we evaluate email marketing as a growth strategy,” said Miller. “We had recently tried a direct mail campaign that had a horrible ROI, so we were a little gun shy.”
After working through his team’s goals (and skepticism) with the RevBoss sales team, Fresno First Bank signed up for a short pilot project with RevBoss.
Solution
RevBoss built the Fresno First Bank program around a few key concepts:
Geographic Targeting. RevBoss started with a “home turf” campaign by sourcing companies and prospects within a 50-mile radius of Fresno. Shortly after launching this effort, RevBoss sourced similar prospects in Southern California to begin laying a foundation for Fresno First Bank’s Los Angeles office.
Colleague Personalization. Since there are only a handful of people that typically make banking decisions inside of an organization, each prospect carries quite a bit of value for Fresno First Bank. To ensure a personalized message for each prospect, RevBoss made use of colleague personalization to 1) indicate to the recipient that Fresno First Bank had done some research in advance of reaching out and 2) to probe for internal referrals to the right person.
CEO Messaging. RevBoss built the campaign to come from CEO Steve Miller and thus had to carefully strike the right “executive” tone. (No CEO is going to send an animated gif in a cold email, after all.) Instead of a 6- or 8-touch email Flow, RevBoss built simple, direct 2- and 3-touch Flows that reflect a busy CEO’s schedule and voice.
Added Miller, “The relationship with RevBoss has been largely hands-free for us. Their Customer Success team quickly worked through the set-up process and the leads started showing up shortly after getting started. The quality and consistency have both been very good.”
Results
“We’ve been more-than-pleasantly surprised by the results thus far with RevBoss.” said Miller. “Within just a few weeks of starting, RevBoss activated a conversation that quickly turned into a new client that has more than paid for our first contract. And we have many more of these opportunities in our pipeline.”
The numbers back up the story — a 17.8% email reply rate and a 5.4% conversion-to-lead rate are numbers Steve and his team are happy to bank on.
