NetBanker 2.0

Email: Bank of America's "Ring in the New Year" credit card balance

Here's a timely email from Bank of America, inviting its credit card customers to start the year off with a 3.99% balance-transfer offer. But the savings won't last long, since the rate resets after August 2007.

Here are the specs:

• Subject: Use your Bank of America® credit card today.
• From: Bank of America [[email protected]]
• To: [email protected]
• Product type: Credit card balance transfer
• Offer: 3.99% through August 2007 (cash advance fee NOT waived)
• Customer type: Mailed to current credit card customers
• Personalization: Full name and last 4 digits of account number

Screenshots:

Email body

Landing page

Bank of America is first major U.S. bank to integrate personal finance into online banking

Bank of America is the first major U.S. bank to provide full online personal financial management (PFM) within its online banking service. It's an important development and one we predicted in our detailed look at online personal finance (Online Banking Report #131/132, published in September). So, in conjunction with our sister publication, we are awarding it the fifth and final OBR Best of the Web for 2006 (click here for other recent winners).

The bank uses its Yodlee-powered My Portfolio account-aggregation service to deliver the PFM functions. BofA is the first financial institution to use Yodlee's new MoneyCenter module since its launch six months ago (see our coverage here).

The bank has chosen to offer the full MoneyCenter suite with Net Worth Summary, Investment Detail, Transactions, Rewards, Email, and Search on the main page (see screenshot below).

My Portfolio also includes basic personal finance functionality, including budgeting, categorizing and a nice array of preformatted reports including:

• Cash Flow Analysis
• Expense Analysis
• Budget vs. Actual
• Credit Card Utilization
• Get Transaction Reports
• Set Budget Goals

See Online Banking Report 131/132 for more details on Yodlee's MoneyCenter.

Analysis
Overall, we believe the new PFM functions are a great addition to the bank's online banking program. However, it still feels a bit "bolted on" to the core online banking service. For instance, My Portfolio does not yet warrant a place on the primary top navigation bar. Instead, users must click on a link in the middle of the main Account Overview screen.

Once the Yodlee-powered service has loaded (which took 10 to 15 seconds in our tests at broadband speeds), it's relatively well integrated. A second My Portfolio navigation bar is loaded under the main online banking navigation. Finally, a third row displays the options available for each function in row two (see screenshot below).

The pages load relatively fast as long as you stay within the My Portfolio area. However, moving back and forth between BofA-served online banking functions and Yodlee-served My Portfolio functions is a bit clunky with the 15-second delay. But the overall experience will be fine once My Portfolio is incorporated into primary navigation.   

The main My Portfolio page is automatically pre-filled with applicable BofA accounts; however, in my case, I was unable to update older credit card information. When clicking Update All Accounts in the upper right, error messages indicated that my Bank of America credit cards could not be updated (see screenshot below).

Holiday marketing continued

As mentioned last week (here), U.S. banks are starting to get more creative with their websites, with 12 of the 30 largest (note 1) injecting a bit of holiday spirit into their websites.

This year, three of the top-30 banks had major holiday themes running on their homepages; in 2004, none did. And today we viewed another nine with minor holiday sprinkles, making 12 in total. Two years ago, four banks had minor holiday-themed promotions.

We expected to see more banks marketing gift cards, one of the hottest holiday gifts, especially during the last few days before Christmas. Only four banks mentioned gift cards on their homepages on Dec. 24 (note 2):

• National City
• BB&T
• North Fork Bank
• Commerce Bank

Here is a rundown of those with major holiday themes:

1. Citibank: Citi had the best overall holiday theme as  it continued pushing its 5% e-Savings Account, with a clever 5% "ornament" hung next to traditional Christmas decorations (see screenshot below).
   
   
2. PNC Bank: Runner-up was PNC with its unique brand of holiday marketing, a tongue-in-cheek look at the cost of the items listed in the popular Christmas song, Twelve Days of Christmas. It's a holiday tradition at PNC which has been tracking the holiday index for 22 years (see screenshot below).
   
   
3. Bank of America: The largest online bank used a holiday theme, and $100 off a Dell PC, to encourage users to join the other 20 million BofA customers using its online banking. Customers hitting the bank's homepage were greeted with an animated banner displaying a wrapped package, which after two seconds changed to the Dell deal (see before and after screenshots below).
   
   Showing before and after package animation:
   
   

Other top-30 banks with holiday-oriented images on their homepages:

• Chase Bank: snow globe with 0% credit card offer
• Wells Fargo: packages
• Washington Mutual: snowball with 30-second credit card application
• Citizens Bank: packages with a debit card rewards promo
• National City: snowflakes with gift card promo
• BB&T: packages with a gift card promo
• Countrywide Bank: snow and packages with a loan promo
• North Fork Bank: Radio City promo with $15 off coupon and gift cards
• Commerce Bank: packages with gift card promo

Notes:

1. According to Online Banking Report's list of the 150 largest U.S. financial institutions as of 31 March 2006 (link here).
2. Searches conducted during late morning (EST) on Dec. 24, 2006, from a southwest Florida IP address. Although gift cards were not mentioned on US Bank's homepage on Dec. 24, we had seen them advertised on previous visits, although not necessarily on ithe homepage.

Bank of America advertises "Your Own Bank" in NY Times

Today's New York Times (p. A8, national edition) has a half-page, red-and-blue ad for Bank of America dominated by the headline:

If you have a computer, you have a bank.

The visual is a generic laptop with a generic browser displaying Bank of America's homepage. Text copy and sub-heads emphasized that 20 million are now using BofA online banking.

The ad-copy emphasized three benefits:

• Instant and free funds-transfer to anyone with a BofA account
• My Portfolio, the bank's account aggregation service
• Security features

Call to action: visit www.bankofamerica.com/yourownbank (see screenshot below).

Screenshot: Bank of America's landing page
(click to enlarge)

Analysis
There are several interesting things about this ad.

1. No offer. The bank, which recently tested the richest new account bonus we'd ever seen costing it as much as $300 per new checking account, offers NOTHING. And this is an ad on black Friday, where stores typically offer monster loss-leaders to lure customers into their stores early on the biggest shopping day of the year.
2. Account aggregation featured: I can't recall the last time a major bank featured account aggregation as one of the three biggest benefits of banking online. Could this mean that BofA is going to begin emphasizing the feature more in its national advertising? If so, it could reinvigorate the service.
3. Customization deja vu : The "yourownbank" landing page is reminiscent of the bank's late-90s website-customization engine called Build Your Own Bank (see 1999 screenshot below). Given the landing page URL, we thought BofA might be pitching customization again, but it's really just a play off the ad's headline, that your computer is now your bank.

Taken together, it's an interesting effort, although it looks more like corporate branding rather than an effort that will generate enough accounts to justify the five-figure tab to the NY Times.

Screenshot: BofA's Build Your Own Bank from 1999
(click to enlarge)

Chase fails to design email for Outlook's preview pane

More than 70% of business-email users view most or all of their email messages in the preview pane.* Depending on screen size, resolution, and window sizing, the real estate available in the preview pane can be relatively small.

When designing messages, be sure to put the most important information in the upper-left corner to maximize visibility in the preview pane.

Here is a poorly designed email Chase sent to confirm posting of a credit card payment. It requires users to scroll right to view Chase's logo and log-in button. Here's how it looks on my 12-inch laptop screen running at 1024 x 768:

What not to do from Chase:

Better design from Bank of America graphics flush left:

(Note: BofA shows the last four digits of your account number; we changed them to xxxx in the screenshot above.)

Action Items
Even though it's just a routing email message, the poor layout makes it look like a phishing message. Chase could clean this up with just a few minutes of programming work. While they are at it, they should add a personal greeting and additional text disclosures to make it look less phishy. 

*For more information, read our Online Banking Report #129/139, Email Marketing for Financial Services.

Bank of America uses radio to drive website credit card applications

At 8:30 AM today, we heard an unusual advertisement on classic rock radio for the Bank of America Alaska Airlines affinity card.

It wasn't the ad itself that was so spectacular, although it's not every day that you hear credit cards being pitched on radio. And it wasn't the offer that made the ad stand out, although 20,000 bonus miles is a pretty good perk.

What made it memorable was the call to action, "visit myalaskacard.com." They didn't even bother to throw an 800 number into the spot.

It's hard to say whether a radio spot will prove cost effective, but using a memorable URL should help. It's far easier to remember than a telephone number, and prospective applicants can be immediately greeted with an effective sales pitch reinforcing the product benefits and bonus offer.

Analysis
However, once again BofA stumbles with its search engine support (see previous article). Searching on Google for "my Alaska card" brings up a single ad for a Web-based portal site, CreditStep.com (click on inset for closeup).

In fact, we tested every variation of "my" + "alaska" + "airlines" + "credit" + "card" and BofA was nowhere to be seen UNLESS we dropped "my" from the search query. Interestingly, Chase was an aggressive advertiser on several of the search terms offering a competing airline card with 15,000 bonus miles. BofA showed up as an advertiser only when we dropped the "my" from the search query.

The lack of advertising against "my alaska card" is especially damaging because the first few organic search results do not link to BofA or Alaska Airlines. Also, if you type a similar URL, such as www.alaskacard.com or www.alaskaairlinescard.com you either end up at a generic link site or an error page. At this point, potential prospects will either apply at the wrong place or give up on the search. 

If you correctly input the exact URL, you end up at the following landing page. It's OK, but should reinforce the impressive benefits of applying now, a free ticket right away and a $50 companion ticket every year on renewal (see screenshot below).

Action Items
Here's what you should do to ensure better search-engine support for your offline advertising:

1. Advertise at search engines on likely search terms that would be used by consumers responding to your advertising
2. Create a memorable URL that is not easily mistyped
3. Register or purchase domains similar to the advertised URL (including common misspellings), or pay the owner to refer traffic to your landing page
4. Design a landing page that boldly supports the benefits in your advertising and includes a prominent "Apply" button

Bank of America's $250+ premium: richest ever?

Bank of America is offering $250 for new customers willing to open a checking and savings account. And customers willing to play the "Keep the Change" debit-card game could easily rack up another $20 to $50 or more in freebies with the bank's three-month, 100% match (bonus averages $0.50 per debit card transaction). See our previous coverage here.

Wow! Even adjusting for inflation, that's about 10x the free toaster deal of the 1960s. Here's the link (screenshot below).

There is only one "catch" to the offer. It applies only to consumers outside the bank's sprawling branch network; however, we were able to see the offer no matter what state we entered into the initial screen.

But as long as you live in Nebraska, North Dakota, or other non-BofA states, it's very easy to earn the $250. Just drop $100 in savings and $25 in checking and the bank will triple your outlay. There's no direct deposit or online bill payment requirement, the norm for most online offers. However, the MyAccess checking account is only free if direct deposit is used, otherwise it costs $5.95/mo.

Credit for first posting the offer goes to SlickDeals.net. We saw it first at BankDeals. 

Bank of America's multimedia no-fee mortgage promo omits key search term

When Bank of America launches a new product, you might as well try to ride on their coattails rather than fight it. One obscure loan-referral website is doing just that.

Bank of America's product-du-jour, at least in our Seattle market (UPDATE 10 Jan 2007: Confirmed as a market test in this article here), is a unique no-fee mortgage that comes with a built-in "refi" option. The refi feature allows users to lower their underlying mortgage annually if rates drop. It's a product that makes a ton of sense for today's savvy mortgage holders, who know when to hold 'em and also when to fold 'em into lower-rate loans.

The bank has been blitzing the market with branch, Web (see End Notes), and radio advertising for the product. Today's mid-day radio spot included a URL in the call to action, <bankofamerica.com/nofeemortgage>. Typing that URL directly into the browser leads to the correct Bank of America landing page (see screenshot in End Notes).

However, for a good portion of listeners that navigate with Google, typing "bank of america no fee mortgage" brought search results that did NOT include the bank as an advertiser although they were the second organic result listed (see screenshot below).

Google search results for "bank of america no fee mortgage"

Surprisingly, the top advertiser, YourQuoteOnline, was running an ad that was rather deceptive (see screenshot above). It fooled me into thinking it was a BofA ad.

A similar search for "Bank of America mortgage no fee" did bring up the bank's Google ad (see below), although it linked to a "$2,000 savings" landing page (see End Notes) instead of the no-fee promotional page. Evidently, Bank of America has not properly coded their search-word criteria to include the more obvious search term or to send searchers to the current no-fee campaign page. The bank is leaving money on the table by allowing some of the traffic generated by its advertising to be funneled off to other companies.

Google search results for "bank of america mortgage no fee"

End Notes (click continuation link for footnotes)

Bank of America adds 760,000 users in third quarter

Although growth has slowed, as it must when you have the penetration of Bank of America, the company still managed to add 760,000 active* online banking users and 430,000 active* bill pay users in the latest quarter. The bank's $15 enrollment bonus surely helped boost the total (see Aug. 11 post).

Excluding PayPal with 31 million active users (includes international accounts, see previous post), Bank of America continues to hold a large lead over the next largest U.S. online banking base, Wells Fargo's 8 million.

Although the bank posted an impressive 6.3 million gain year over year, about 4.5 to 5 million of that appears attributable to the MBNA acquisition (see chart below).

Bank of America Active* User Base
Qtr  Online Banking   Bill Pay
2006 (includes MBNA)
Q3....20.6 million   10.8 million 
Q2....19.8 million   10.4 million
Q1....19.6 million   10.1 million

2005 (excludes MBNA)
Q4....14.7 million    7.3 million
Q3....14.3 million    7.0 million

*BofA defines Active as having used the service in the past 90 days.

On the bill-pay front, the bank processed $49 billion in payments for its users during the quarter, up $2.1 billion over the previous quarter (+4.5%). The average payment amount was $4,500 per active bill pay user, or $1,500 per month with 84% of the payments delivered to the payee in electronic form (ACH).

The bank also reported e-bill delivery volume of 21 million in the quarter from 370 billers.

Thanks to Scott Loftesness at Payments News for digging through the bank's 47-page earnings supplement for these gems (see pp. 18-19).

Bank of America pitches ID-theft protection at logoff

While there's nothing unusual about the product or offer, with 50% market share in online banking, everything Bank of America does at its website is news.

After reviewing my credit card balance online today, I was greeted with a 30-day free trial offer for Bank of America's Privacy Assist Premier, a daily credit-monitoring, three-bureau service priced at $12.99/mo.

Below is the splash screen displayed after logging out from online banking:

We were a bit surprised at the lack of disclosure on this screen; not a single word about the eventual $156 annual cost, to which even the most well-heeled BofA clients may take exception.

Another surprise: Clicking the Accept button simply dropped us back on the home page with not a word of thanks or any confirmation that our selection was accepted.

However, most users will be smart enough to choose Learn More before signing up. On that landing page the cost is well documented appearing in the first bullet point in the shaded box (see below).