Mortgage Finance Gazette
The number one building society ranked for digital maturity is Cumberland, according to research by Kagool, a digital agency.
Digital maturity refers to how innovative and effective an organisation is, based on their use of digital marketing and technology.
Skipton Building Society took second place, closely followed by Nottingham Building Society and Newbury Building Society. The largest building society, Nationwide, was fifth.
Kagool’s 2018 Building Societies Services Digital Census evaluates how the UK’s top 40 building societies are performing digitally. The research reviewed each building societies’ digital maturity based on eight key aspects which when combined provide their overall digital maturity ranking.
Mobile optimisation: The research says that globally, 98% of smartphone owners use their mobile to search for information. Although most building societies (32) have a website that is optimised for mobile, 20% do not.
Website speed: Online speed is also important as 53% of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. Only 5% of building societies reached the three second target and 37.5% were regarded as poor, taking eight seconds or more. The best building societies for website speed were West Bromwich and Ipswich.
Content: The report said the financial services sector does not prioritise online content with only 7% of FS organisations listing content marketing as key to their digital strategy. Over 42% of building societies scored poorly for content with only one society, Newcastle, scoring full marks.
It is not just written content though as images and video are also deemed to be good for holding customers’ attention. Most building societies use graphics or photography, with 87.5% including images on their sites but only seven of the 40 organisations studied used video content.
Utility: Customers increasingly want to complete tasks online and Gartner predicts that by 2020, 85% of customer interactions will be automated.
Apps account for nearly 90% of mobile media time yet only four building societies provide an app although three quarters have an online calculator.
Scoring top marks here were Nationwide, Skipton and Cumberland.
Calls to action: Calls to action generate business by directing website visitors to complete tasks such as filling in an enquiry form, using a live chat service or downloading a brochure.
Live chat has the highest client satisfaction levels, according to Econsultancy, but just seven building societies provide an online live chat facility.
Scoring 10 out of 10 for calls to action were Cumberland, Saffron, The Cambridge, and Hinckley and Rugby.
Search marketing: There were 504 million financial services searches in 2016. Search engines drive 93% of all website traffic, so search marketing should be part of an organisation’s overall digital marketing strategy. Only one building society scored full marks here and that was Nationwide.
Email marketing: The report says that 73% of marketers rate email as the best marketing channel overall for return on investment (ROI) and 72% of people prefer email over any other communication for business.
But 75% of building societies are ignoring the benefits of email marketing. Just 10 building societies (25%) have an email subscription service and only Newbury, Marsden and Teachers scored the top mark of seven out of 10.
Social media: The research showed the use of social media varies widely across the building society sector. The top performers engage with all of the main platforms, while the poor performers only have a LinkedIn account with little or no activity.
LinkedIn was the most frequently used platform amongst the building societies, followed by Twitter and Facebook. The only building society to score 10 out or 10 for social media was Darlington.
Craig Johnson, head of digital strategy at Kagool and lead author of the report commented: “Cumberland being number one goes to show that bigger budgets don’t necessarily guarantee market leadership.
“Although many of the building societies scored highly there is still lots of room for improvement across the industry if they want to stop new fintech organisations eroding their market share further.”
Download the 2018 Building Societies Digital Census
