In today’s fast-paced digital world, connecting with members is more crucial than ever for credit unions. With up to 80% of account holders primarily interacting through digital channels, the digital branch has become prime real estate for fostering engagement. But how can credit unions cut through the noise and deliver truly impactful digital experiences?
A recent interview with Preetha Pulusani, CEO of DeepTarget, and David Miles, AVP of Marketing at Rio Grande Credit Union, sheds light on how targeted, personalized communication is revolutionizing member engagement and driving remarkable results.
DeepTarget, a technology platform enabling financial institutions to enhance their digital branches, has seen extraordinary click-through rates exceeding 27% across the institutions they work with. This is a staggering figure when compared to the industry average of 0.05% for generic banner ads. Pulusani attributes this success to a core principle: relevance. Unlike mass marketing that bombards users with generic messages, DeepTarget leverages deep data analysis to deliver personalized and timely offers. “It’s really the right message that’s going out at an appropriate time, because we’re using data so deeply in order to target,” says Pulusani.
Rio Grande Credit Union stands as a testament to the power of this approach. David Miles, a power user of the DeepTarget platform, shared their incredible results. In March 2025 alone, they saw 97 influence sales conversions with account balances totaling over $1 million, generating more than $20,000 in total revenue. Miles emphasizes that it’s not just about cross-selling; it’s about genuine connection and providing value.
A key differentiator for success, according to Pulusani, is the frequency of data refresh and the number of active campaigns. High-performing credit unions using DeepTarget typically run 25 to 30 campaigns concurrently, ensuring that the system can identify and present the most relevant offers to each individual member. Furthermore, simple personalization tactics, like addressing members by their first name, create a sense of recognition and strengthen the member-credit union relationship.
Miles echoed the impact of personalization, noting that a simple “Sarah, thank you for being a member” goes a long way in making members feel seen and appreciated. Rio Grande Credit Union also strategically uses “de-targeting” to avoid inundating members with the same message repeatedly, ensuring that communications remain fresh and impactful.
The discussion also touched on the future of personalization, with Pulusani highlighting the increasing use of transaction data to understand member behavior and anticipate their financial needs for “hyper-personalization”. Rio Grande Credit Union is also exploring integrating their robust rewards program data into targeted messages, reminding members of their points balance and encouraging redemption.
Interestingly, Pulusani observed that credit unions tend to adopt and innovate with technology faster than community banks, potentially due to their strong focus on member experience. Miles agreed, stating that Rio Grande Credit Union feels a responsibility to their members to leverage the best available technology.
This interview provides compelling insights into how credit unions can effectively engage members in the digital space through intelligent personalization.
Want to hear the full conversation and learn more about the strategies driving these impressive results? Click here to watch the complete interview!
Disclosure: Transcript below is automatically generated
Sarah Cooke 00:10
Hello, everybody. My name is Sarah Snell Cook. I’m your host here at the credit union connection. I’m here today with the DeepTarget CEO, Preetha Pulusani, welcome.
Preetha Pulusani 00:25
Thank you. Thank you. Sarah, absolutely. And
Sarah Cooke 00:27
we also have Rio Grande credit union, AVP of marketing. David miles, welcome, welcome. Thank you. And so I did those quick introductions now it’s your turn. You can do a little more about yourself and about your company and your credit union, David, why don’t you start?
David Miles 00:42
Yeah, absolutely. My name is David miles, a VP of Marketing, like you said, Rio Grande credit union is located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and we are just passionate about serving this community and helping our members become financially independent. Perfect,
Sarah Cooke 01:01
perfect mission for a credit union. And you, preta,
Preetha Pulusani 01:05
yeah, I’m Preetha Pulusani. Founded DeepTarget a few years ago, worked first on the technology platform, and now we’re doing a lot with, you know, some 200 financial institutions. A lot of them are credit unions, we help them really enable their digital branch be be a way to engage with their account holders. It’s not just about cross selling, right? It’s about just getting engaged. Because, you know, up to 80% of account holders are only visiting digital anymore, the digital branch, and that’s what we’re doing, and we love to hear success stories. So I look forward to what David has to say.
Sarah Cooke 01:51
Yeah, for sure, cranes need to know who’s helping who do what. Well, so Preetha, I’ll start my first question with you. Last year, you guys put out a press release. You put in that last year, your click through rates are more than 27% which is amazing. And then also, and you said it was, well, I didn’t do the math, but you said it was 400 times. How is that happening?
Preetha Pulusani 02:16
Yeah, so Well, I have my theory of why, why it’s happening. You know, when I go into, say, reading the New York Times, I see a lot of banner ads do pop up, right? And when the industry average is for those, the click through rate is point zero, 5% in general, across the board. And it makes sense, because you have so many things popping up at you, and they’re not really personalized, they’re pretty generic. They’re kind of a mass marketing, advertising with digital banking. What you have is some very valuable real estate. It’s not a bunch of ads, it’s maybe one or two, three, they’re talking to you. It’s very targeted. It’s very personalized. And an ad says, Preetha, how about looking into a HELOC and if I’m a renter, that doesn’t make any sense, right? So it’s it’s really the right message that’s going out at an appropriate time, because we’re using data so so deeply in order to target. And so that’s my theory. It’s because it’s clean, it’s personalized, and it’s relevant. And so people are, in fact, interested in what you’re providing them,
Sarah Cooke 03:34
Right exactly? And that’s why I keep getting questions from bankers about refinancing my house, my old house I moved from a year ago. Not very personalized, right? And so what made the difference between being above average, as far as performance prefa versus the banks and the cranium that might be below average? What’s the key difference there? Okay,
Preetha Pulusani 04:04
so first of all, most of our customers refresh the data every day. So what you’re seeing is very fresh information. The above average, by the way, the average was 27% we had credit unions doing 8060, I mean, they were just crazy results that we saw, right? And what made the difference was a couple of things. It’s making sure that you did, in fact, have campaigns that were refreshed and an adequate number of campaigns running. So typically, our customers, credit union customers, are running something like 25 to 30 campaigns at all times. That doesn’t mean everybody gets 25 or 30 offers. That means that our system takes the 25 or 30 campaigns and say you have 10,000 members. It’s basically say. Saying for each member which of these campaigns are relevant. So I may qualify for five, you may qualify for 10. So it’s having the refresh campaigns. And then the other thing that we see a lot of success in is when you actually speak the first name Prita, right? It’s simple, but it says that you as a credit union know that you’re talking to me as a member, you know me, and I think that also makes a difference
Sarah Cooke 05:28
Absolutely And so David, how is your credit unions marketing performed using deep target? Then, well, here the real, real world experience, and how does that compare to what it was before,
David Miles 05:41
Oh, yeah. I mean, we are over the moon with the target, and I’ve been the power user of the platform for about two years. And after a couple months of roaming pains, we really started to pick up our, you know, get our stride and learn what the platform can do. Because, as prefa said, it is more than just cross selling. We reach our members a number of way, and that’s, you know, things like alerts or we recently had a digital conversion where we had to give them instructions on how they needed to re enroll and what they needed to do to get our new mobile app. So we use deep target to make sure that those banner ads were available to our members, just to make their lives a little easier. Now, the personalization I’ve been doing a lot, and it’s great to put their first name. I mean, when a banner ad shows up and it says, you know, Sarah, thank you for being a member of rgcu, it goes a long way, just because we’re putting in the extra effort. It’s personalized. And our members might see that and say, Oh, that’s, that’s neat. I wonder, I wonder what the Learn More button does, what the call to action does. So we have been using that a lot, just saying, like, you know, Pritha, your your auto loan is about to be paid off. Now is a great time to get a new car. Or, you know, Sarah, are you thinking about buying a new car now, based on some of the targeting that we we use another important thing with the targeting is the D targeting. Because, you know, when you go to the New York Times, you may see the same banner ad over and over and over, and eventually you’re inundated with with the same ad, and it just becomes white noise. So with the D targeting, we are able to say, Okay, we want this member to view this banner, maybe, I don’t know, you know, 10 times a month, and then this member can view this banner maybe 20 times a month. So it’s really powerful technology. And I mean real grand credit union has really seen a difference in the way that we communicate with our members, the way that we show off our products and services in the digital world. Yeah,
Sarah Cooke 07:57
and how has that shown up in your loans and your deposits, whatever campaigns you’ve been running,
David Miles 08:03
yeah, well, I mean, I did pull up our influence sales conversions for last month, which was March 2025, and throughout that much we had, throughout that month, we had a total of 97 influence sales conversions. The account balances were more than a million dollars, and the total revenue was 20 over 20,000 so it’s great to put a number behind all the things that I tell my team. I’m like, Yeah, deep target is great. And they’re like, oh, okay, why is it great? And then I show them the numbers. I show them the influence, sales conversions, and it’s like, that’s why it’s great. Mm,
Sarah Cooke 08:39
hmm. And another thing, David, I was wondering about, like, who on your team did you have to pull together when you were first signing up with deep target and pretha, you can step in as well, but what departments are important to have involved?
David Miles 08:53
Yeah, well, you know, we’re a, I mean, we’re a medium credit union. We have a small but mighty marketing team behind us. So everyone in our marketing department was involved, and still is involved with the ideas and the graphic designs and everything. But we also wanted to make sure that our branch support team was involved when we were getting things set up, as well as our IT department, they’re involved in everything. So,
Preetha Pulusani 09:23
yeah. So what we’ve seen Sarah is, of course, marketing, and you know, marketing leadership is is involved in making the decision to adopt deep target. We’re also seeing a lot of interest come from the Chief Digital Officers, the chief innovation officers of some of the credit unions that we have sometimes from the CIO, because they see this as you know, the CIO, for example, knows about all of the data that’s available that’s not really being leveraged. And so when they see the solution, that’s when they get really interested about how. How they can actually achieve growth. It’s so it’s it’s more than branding. It’s actual growth by using the data that they have,
Sarah Cooke 10:09
and justifies why you keep marketing budget, right?
10:13
Yeah, exactly. Very important, yes.
Sarah Cooke 10:16
So there’s, you know, personalization is the buzzword. I was second to AI, maybe, but, you know, it’s one of the top buzz words. And so what’s next for this type of technology? Do you think? And I’m asking both you pretty Why don’t you, you go ahead and start.
Preetha Pulusani 10:35
I’ll tell you what we’re doing in terms of personalization. So today. So for the for quite a while, we’ve been using a lot of the data that a credit union has that is about member, you know, what accounts they have some demographic data, and that’s been used for targeting what we what we are now beginning to do more actively is using transaction data to understand more about the behavior the persona and what kind of financial needs a particular member might have at a particular time, and then use beginning to use that for even finer for what we call hyper personalizing the messages and the offers, and that’s pretty exciting, right? So we partnered with a company called Finn gold and integrated with Finn gold, they do we anonymize the data and find gold provides, takes the transaction information and David, you may not yet have heard about it, or you may have heard about it in one of our Customer Success webinars, but that’s becoming a very big part of what many of our customers want to do,
Sarah Cooke 11:50
right? And that’s that helps cranes compete with the the chimes and the Dave of the world that are already doing that kind of work. David, what’s next for you guys on the personalization journey?
David Miles 12:03
Yeah, well, we have something that we want to get off the ground in q3 and our rep, Jacob, is kind of working with me, and he brought it to my attention. So I mean, hats off to him. But we have a really robust rewards program at Rio Grande credit union, and we want to make some banner ads where it says, you know, Sarah, you have 40,000 points available. Or Sarah, you earned 40,000 points. Click here to find out what you can redeem with those points. So the personalization just pulling that data and pulling their rewards balance directly into their app that they’re they see five or six times a week. Hopefully we’ll get our members to our rewards page a little more so they can redeem the reward points that they earned. Yeah, I
Sarah Cooke 12:50
hear that’s a that’s actually a big problem for credit card rewards, is a lot of people don’t ever, ever using them or redeeming them. So, yeah, that sounds awesome. And so Preetha, you added 17 new financial institutions this last year, or I think it was about 18 months or so, 12 of those 17 were credit unions. Is that by chance? Or do you feel like credit unions? And this is kind of what I’m hearing from the industry. Overall, credit unions are adapting better than the community banks that might be using your product. Yeah,
Preetha Pulusani 13:27
I’m going to get in trouble,
David Miles 13:31
not with us
Preetha Pulusani 13:33
credit unions. I have found this since I founded the company, that credit unions seem to adopt the technology much faster. Seem to be open to the technology and to technology, to innovation in general. That’s kind of a general statement overall, comparing credit unions and banks, right banks? I think the banks have to be very forward thinking to kind of match what I’m seeing on the credit union world. Now if you ask me to explain why, I may not be able to, but I do see that trend for sure. Yeah. Oh, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. I
Sarah Cooke 14:16
was gonna say as David, what do you do? You see that like when you’re looking at yourself versus competitors. When you’re looking at Rio Grande versus competitors, do you feel like you’re ahead of the technology curve? We
David Miles 14:27
We try to be, and I think we owe it to our members to keep pushing forward and getting the the best technology available to us to them that way they can more successful.
Sarah Cooke 14:40
Yeah, absolutely for for the member as well as for your credit union. So win, win. Alrighty, folks, well, I always offer my guests the final thoughts. I started with David before so Preetha, why don’t you start with your five? Thoughts as we wrap up,
Preetha Pulusani 15:02
yeah, you know, I think in the industry, we have seen things like mobile first and maybe AI first. And I was talking about this to, from a technology perspective, to another recent, you know, credit union customer that we signed up, and he said something to me that really resonated, and he said it’s, I don’t think it’s about mobile first or AI first. It’s about experience first, right? And I do believe that credit unions do invest a lot of time and energy on member experience, and I think that makes them adopt this technology too, and I think that pays off in the end, with with what they providing to the members. So that’s it’s great to work with credit,
Sarah Cooke 15:51
of course, no, but it’s about the member. It’s about the outcome. It’s not necessarily about the tools that get you there, although they’re needed, yeah, yeah. They’re not going out and just saying, I need to buy AI. They’re saying I need my members to be able to do XYZ, or nudge them that direction or whatever. Very out. Thank you very much. Preetha, appreciate it. And David, you will close us up, yeah,
David Miles 16:15
well, I would just say I’m appreciative, and a big advocate of deep targets. It’s a really great program that has made my life easier and has helped our members. So a big fan, but yeah, technology, it’s, it’s getting pushed, and I think we’ve seen a faster development over, you know, the last three or four years, just with the the boom of AI. So it’s, it’s really great having a program like deep target to help me help our members, right?
Sarah Cooke 16:46
And so it also makes the employees jobs easier, Hmm, how about that? No,
David Miles 16:51
that’s, I like the automation.
Sarah Cooke 16:55
Well, thank you both so much. I appreciate Have a great rest of your day. Great weekend.
16:58
Thank you, Sarah, thank you. Alrighty, you.