Objective:
In this How-To, we will start our New Customer Onboarding program automation by creating a Welcome Letter for new customers. We will explore the following topics:
- How to create a direct mail letter from scratch within Core iQ
- How to use custom merge fields to dynamically add information into a template
Welcoming new customers to your financial institution is extremely important. Whatever the reason your customer had for opening their account, it’s essential for you to reach out regularly to keep them engaged. That’s why we have developed a basic New Customer Onboarding program, which can easily be automated using Core iQ. We will start this process by creating three templates, the first of which is a Welcome Letter from our Bank President. This will serve as the jumping off point for our New Customer Onboarding program, so let’s get started.
First, we want to navigate to the Communications Template area of the Communication menu. Here, you will find all of the amazing pre-made templates that we have already created for you to use. You will also see that you have the option to create your own custom communication using our Design Your Own template. We will be creating this Welcome Letter using a Design Your Own template, so go ahead and click on the Design Your Own button on the left side of the screen, choosing Simple Letter as your communication type.
From here, you will be brought to the Settings area of your template. This is where you can control all of the important information regarding how and why your communication is sent. We will begin by changing the name of our template to something like ‘New Customer Welcome Letter’. Next, we will make sure that our Communications Category is set to “Courtesy Followups”, and our Customer Receives No More Than Once Within is set to “N/A”.
You can leave the Compliance area alone for the time being, as we will come back to it once our template is ready to send. When all of these settings have been checked, click Save and navigate on to the Front tab.
Here you will see two green areas in which you can add copy to your letter. Core iQ will add all of your important information when it sends these items to print, including the customer’s address and your return address. Anything outside of these areas is used to add your organization’s logo, these addresses, and your letterhead. However, within these two editable areas, you are free to add as much copy as you would like. We have provided a starting version of a Welcome Letter with this tutorial, but feel free to make any edits that you want.
Thank you so much for allowing us to help you with your recent account opening. We are committed to providing our customers with the highest level of service and the most innovative banking products possible.
We are very glad you chose us as your financial institution and hope you will take advantage of our wide variety of savings, investment and loan products, all designed to meet your specific needs.
For more detailed information about any of our products or services, please refer to our website, [Bank_Website_URL], or visit any of our convenient locations. You may also contact us by phone at [Bank_Call_Center_Phone].
[Bank_Name] is a full service, locally owned financial institution. Our decisions are made right here, with this community’s residents best interest in mind. We are concerned about what is best for you!
Please do not hesitate to contact us, should you have any questions. We will contact you in the very near future to ensure you are completely satisfied with the services you have received thus far.
Respectfully,
[Banker_Full_Name]
President
[Bank_Name]
What are merge fields and how can they save me time?
You will notice in our example Welcome Letter copy that there are several chunks of text which are surrounded by brackets. These are called ‘merge fields’ in Core iQ, and they are a powerful tool when it comes to dynamically creating communications to your customers. Merge fields are essentially placeholder text in a template which tells Core iQ to populate a certain bit of information. For example, our signoff for this letter has two merge fields, [Banker_Full_Name] and [Bank_Name]. Both of these custom merge fields will dynamically pull in the relevant information from our Core iQ Admin area whenever this communication is sent out. That means that if information like our Bank President’s name or our contact number changes, we only have to edit that information in one place for Core iQ to fix all of our templates. This could save you hours of edits once you are up and running, so be sure to think about where merge fields make sense in your Core iQ templates.
Finalizing our Welcome Letter template
Once we have our content placed within our Welcome Letter, click Save & Preview at the bottom of the page. We will be taken to a digital preview of the letter which will give you an idea about what will be sent out to your new customers. If we like what you see, then it’s time to send it off for approval. Using the Proofs & Review button on the left side of the screen, we can quickly email a proof to someone within the Compliance department, or we can download a PDF of our letter to print out and view (which we recommend). Once we have made all of our edits to the letter, we can go back to the Settings area to mark our template as Approved. To do this we need to be logged in as someone with the Compliance role checked in their Core iQ profile. Hopefully that person is you, but if it isn’t then you can easily have that permission added within your profile by a Core iQ Admin. Once your template has been Approved, it is ready to be sent out to customers using a Targeted Audience and Schedule. We will address that process in our last article, but now it is time to create an Anniversary Postcard and a Customer Satisfaction Survey.