Most financial organizations are tracking something. Likes, impressions, website visits, email opens. The question is whether any of it connects to what actually matters: new relationships, deepening existing ones and sustainable growth.
Some metrics are easy to collect and easy to feel good about. Others are harder to pull together but tell you something real. Here’s how to tell the difference, and what to focus on instead.
Metrics to Stop Leaning On
- Follower count. A large social following is nice. But followers don’t open accounts. If your social strategy is being evaluated primarily on follower growth, you’re optimizing for the wrong thing. What matters is whether the people who see your content are taking any action as a result.
- Impressions and reach. These tell you how many times your content appeared in front of someone, not whether it did anything. A campaign that reaches a million people and generates zero inquiries is not a successful campaign.
- Email open rate. Open rates have become increasingly unreliable since Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection changes inflated them artificially. They’re not useless, but don’t let them be the headline number. Click-through rate and what people do after the click tell you much more.
Focus on These Metrics Instead
- Cost per new account. Divide your marketing spend by the number of new accounts opened in a given period. This tells you what it costs to bring someone in the door. Track it consistently and you’ll quickly see which campaigns and channels are pulling their weight and which aren’t.
- Conversion rate by channel. Not all traffic behaves the same. Someone who found you through a search for “best savings account” is in a very different mindset than someone who saw a display ad while reading the news. Tracking which channels actually lead to applications or account openings tells you where your budget is best spent.
- Products per consumer. How many products does the average consumer hold with your organization? A low number usually means your marketing stops at acquisition. The most efficient growth comes from deepening the relationships you already have, not just adding new ones.
- Net Promoter Score. This is a single question: how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague? It’s one of the clearest reads you can get on whether your consumers actually like doing business with you. A declining score is an early warning sign worth paying attention to before it shows up in attrition.
- Marketing’s contribution to loan and deposit growth. This is the one that ties everything together. Of the new loans opened or deposits brought in, how many touched a marketing campaign along the way? It takes some infrastructure to track well, but even a rough picture is more useful than none. This is how marketing earns its seat at the table. A marketing assessment can help you figure out where the gaps in your tracking are.
The Simplest Test
For any metric you’re currently reporting, ask one question: if this number went up, would the organization actually be better off? If the honest answer is “not necessarily,” it probably shouldn’t be leading your reporting.
Good marketing is measurable. If yours isn’t, let’s talk. On The Mark Strategies works with financial organizations to build marketing that’s focused, trackable and tied to real growth.
FAQS: FINANCIAL SERVICES MARKETING METRICS
What marketing metrics should financial organizations actually track?
Focus on numbers tied to real outcomes: cost per new account, conversion rate by channel, products per consumer, Net Promoter Score and how much of your loan and deposit growth can be connected to marketing activity. These give you a much clearer picture than impressions or follower counts.
Why are vanity metrics a problem for financial services marketing?
Vanity metrics like reach, impressions and follower counts are easy to collect and easy to feel good about, but they don’t tell you whether marketing is actually driving growth. The risk is spending time and budget optimizing for numbers that don’t move the business forward.
How do you calculate cost per new account?
Divide your total marketing spend for a given period by the number of new accounts opened in that same period. It’s a straightforward calculation, but it requires consistent tracking across campaigns. Once you have a baseline, you can use it to compare channel performance and evaluate whether your spending is efficient.
What is Net Promoter Score and why does it matter for financial organizations?
Net Promoter Score measures how likely your current consumers are to recommend you to someone else. It’s collected through a single survey question scored from zero to ten. For financial organizations, it’s a useful early indicator of relationship health. Word of mouth is one of the most reliable sources of new business in financial services, so keeping an eye on NPS is worth the effort.
How do you connect marketing to loan and deposit growth?
It starts with consistent campaign tagging, UTM tracking and making sure your CRM captures how new accounts were sourced. You don’t need a perfect attribution model to get started. Even tracking one product category at a time builds useful data. A marketing assessment can help identify where your current tracking has gaps.
