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Synergent’s mission is to ‘help credit unions succeed and improve the financial lives of their members.’ In our monthly Employee Spotlight series, we feature one of our dedicated staff members to help you get to know the people who are working as an extension of your credit union team.
Jen Braziel
Data Mining Specialist Jen Braziel has played a key role in delivering effective Marketing Services offerings in the seven years she has been with Synergent. The Data Mining Specialist role was created when Braziel joined the company in March of 2015, which allowed her to design the reports and processes used for the job from the ground up.
“I was able to help streamline the targeting processes and report creation, which saved time and allowed for the ability to turn around projects quickly,” Braziel said.
Every marketing campaign begins and ends with data, making it an essential component of the marketing campaigns Synergent brings to its credit unions. Data mining provides Marketing Services with important insight to identify which members to target during a campaign and it quantitatively explains how well the campaign performed.
“Data insights drive campaign strategy and help develop campaign goals, which then inform the best targeting tactics for the credit union,” explained Braziel. “After the campaign is done, we go back to the data to see how the campaign performed by analyzing response and conversion rates, return on investment (ROI), and year-over-year growth. Targeting allows for the right member to see the right message at the right time. Without this type of target marketing, the campaigns would be less meaningful and less profitable for the credit union.”
Strategic Marketing Services
A typical day for Braziel includes targeting segments of members for credit union marketing initiatives, creating snapshot reports that give insight into the marketing opportunities available for credit unions, providing marketing campaign results that highlight the ROI and conversion rate of targeted members to customers, and setting up marketing automations for credit unions to include automated marketing through the Synergent Email Platform.
“Connecting our Synergent Email Platform to the Symitar® Episys® core has been a game changer for credit unions,” said Braziel. “I take pride in the fact that we offer this service to our credit unions and that I helped with the implementation of it. Once our credit unions decide to use this connection to their core, they no longer have to worry about uploading lists manually to the email platform and the data is always fresh. This type of connection also allows for our Synergent Rewards emails to go out in an automated fashion.”
Email marketing is just one of many offerings Braziel helps Marketing Services deliver to credit unions. She attributes the creation and evolution of the ACH target marketing program as her biggest accomplishment at Synergent so far, as it has been the most popular marketing program for the recapture of loans.
“The ACH Snapshot report provides recapture opportunities within member data, along with competitive intelligence on the lenders their members have loans with,” explained Braziel. “Our ACH recapture campaigns consistently see higher conversion rates than any of our other types of campaigns.”
Credit Union Members at the Heart of Everything We Do
Whatever the task at hand is, Braziel enjoys her work because of the impact her position has on credit unions. She plays a critical role in curating strategies and results specific to each credit union and its members.
“My favorite part of my job is preparing marketing campaign results for credit unions,” shared Braziel. “There is nothing more rewarding than showing a credit union the impact our campaign made on their members and their bottom line.”
While Braziel spends a lot of time helping credit unions learn the best ways and areas to target segments of members, she learns right alongside them.
“I have gained an enormous amount of credit union knowledge that I was unaware of before I was hired,” said Braziel. “It feels great to be a part of the credit union movement.”
Outside of work, Braziel is a mother to her 12-year-old son, Jake, and her little 10-pound Papillon dog, Dexter. She also participates in local dance and theater productions in Portland, Maine.
