"The small business market has always been a strategically important one for Wells Fargo. It's a major driver for the U.S. economy and a large percentage of our clients are small business owners or influencers." -Melanie Donaghy, Vice President & Division Manager at San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co.

Banking Big on Small Business

"The small business market has always been a strategically important one for Wells Fargo. It's a major driver for the U.S. economy and a large percentage of our clients are small business owners or influencers," notes Melanie Donaghy, Vice President and Division Manager at San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co., who heads the bank's Business Internet Services Marketing division. "And we put tremendous value on the opportunity the segment represents. Our breadth of product and service offerings—banking, SBA lending, insurance and more—means that, given the right relationship, we can grow together."

But therein lies the difficulty. As banks continually work to make the world more convenient for customers, personal contact, among the cornerstones of building relationships, has become increasingly rare. While the segment in the aggregate is of critical importance to banks,deploying individual sales representatives to nurture sales relationships is out of the question, and traditional approaches to advertising and direct mail won't cut it.

So how does a bank "stay close" to its small business customers? How does it build and nurture those critical relationships?

Taking a different path
A little less than a decade ago,Wells Fargo made an indelible mark as the first financial institution to take banking online and, shortly thereafter, developed a small business website."At the time, we noticed that small business owners were increasingly using the web as a research tool," Donaghy observes. "We thought that the next logical step was to deliver relevant content directly to their e-mail in boxes. So, in 2000, we developed our e-mail newsletter program. We didn't want to compete with Kiplinger's or Inc.; we knew that business owners were short on time, so we wanted to give them credible, easily digestible content."

Key to the success of the program as a communications tool has been the research Wells Fargo puts behind it. In late November or early December each year, the company surveys about 30% its total readership—approximately 250,000 small business owners—asking questions relating to the newsletter content and to its products and services as well as firmagraphic information. (Out of respect for customer privacy,the surveys are sent out "blind" and recipients have the opportunity to include their contact information should they desire any follow-up.)

"We ask about 24 questions and we try to keep the surveys similar each time, so that we can track the information year-over-year," Donaghy says."What we're trying to do is correlate customers' satisfaction with the publications with satisfaction with our products and services, which appear in sidebars related to each article. We also ask about new services and products we may be piloting and give our customers the option of participating in beta testing."

As a relationship-building tool, Donaghy says the newsletter program and the associated research have consistently helped the bank get more "personal." About three years ago, based on the research, Wells Fargo found that, for example, it was becoming apparent that the newsletter couldn't be all things to all people. Survey feedback led to the single publication being divided into two distinct newsletters: Business Banking Roundup, for relationship-managed customers, who are inherently larger, more sophisticated small business owners, and Small Business Roundup (SBR), for smaller customers. And SBR readers can opt in to get Business Banking Roundup. The content is geared to the level of complexity of each audience.

In addition to its power to bolster relationships, the newsletter program has had a number of ancillary benefits for Wells Fargo. The content is leveraged in a variety of ways. For example, it's archived in a research library on the company's small business website and it's often used for bylines to support Wells Fargo's regional communications teams. It also helps to publicize the bank's recently developed series of small business webcasts.

But the true value of the program is that it provides Wells Fargo with an overall ranking of customer satisfaction-with the newsletters as a CRM tool for the bank's products and services. "As a relationship-management tool,the program has worked to give us annual trends for the past seven years," notes Donaghy. "Understanding those trends has been key to gauging and maintaining levels of customer satisfaction. Here's why it matters the most: Our statistics show that customers who read the newsletters regularly have a much higher probability of staying with the bank than customers who do not. That's how we define a working relationship."