"Instead of purchasing a product, we partnered with a provider. Merrill Anderson anticipated and helped overcome barriers, and integrated with our operations so well that our financial advisors are surprised whenever they learn that they are not part of our home office."
Kendall Austin Williams
VP, Digital Advisory Product and Marketing Manager
Regions Bank, Birmingham, AL
The inside story behind the success.
On-Demand means only paying for what you use.
Controlling Inventory Risk
Cost-exposure is an issue with every marketing campaign, especially printed campaigns that don't have traceability and metrics beyond year over year results. A larger company needs cohesive marketing that works for everyone and means global decisions, which increases the risk of underutilization by different teams, divisions, or individuals.
Sharing control can cut costs and risk.
Instead of creating a product and creating and holding an inventory of it that may or may not go to use, a digital storefront combined with on-demand digital printing can eliminate inventory risk and provide a greater level of individualization for team members.
Enter: Regions Bank
Regions bank provides marketing support for their financial advisors, and is always looking for ways they can further that support.
Regions bank has very strict policies regarding maintaining their brand standards and compliance for all their materials.
Regions bank has 200+ financial advisors that could benefit by having access to more educational collaterals they could distribute as part of their sales efforts.
Enter: The Merrill Anderson Co.
Through a mutual partnership Merrill Anderson had the opportunity to show Regions Bank additional collaterals that their advisors would like to utilize. The Regions team liked the our content, and feedback from Regions reps was positive.
However, given the size of the organization the associated risks and costs were high, and mitigating them seemed like sit may be insurmountable (Hint: It was not).
During our Assess and Address phase our team disseminated what the potentials issues could be and provided alternative solutions and explained the pros and cons of each in these terms:
Branding, Cost, Inventory, Collections, Compliance, Fulfillment.
Merrill Anderson is flexible and versatile, and works within your priority structure.
In this scenario, rather than print thousands of brochures that may or may not have been utilized, we worked Regions legal and creative team to adjust our content to match their brand guidelines and create brochures their reps could order directly. We then created a website storefront where the reps could go to place their order, have it be approved and automatically individualized with their FINRA registered contact information, printed and drop-shipped to them. Each order is tracked and billed through Regions commission structure.
Advisors then get to opt-in to use what they want, have a compliance approved branded product with their information in place, and the Regions head office gets a much clearer picture of what topics and areas the Advisors may want further materials developed on.
We checked in to see if we could share the story with our contact - here's the response we received:
Instead of purchasing a product, we partnered with a provider. Merrill Anderson anticipated and helped overcome barriers, and integrated with our operations so well that our financial advisors are surprised whenever they learn that they are not part of our home office.
Kendall Austin Williams
Wealth Strategy and Effectiveness
VP, Digital Advisory Product and Marketing Manager
Regions Bank
Our primary focus is the content since without that foundation the rest will crumble, but we're excited to create efficiency elsewhere and overcome any barriers. We're proud to have Regions as a client, and to have automated on-demand printing for their Advisors.
