Marquis knows why 33 replies can beat 15,000 impressions

Thirty-three replies would disappoint most people who had mailed more than 15,000 invitations. For an Indiana bank opening a branch, those replies brought approximately $2.4 million in deposits. The mailing did not need to win a popularity contest. It needed to find people with money to move.

Marquis, the bank’s marketing partner, helped define a market within a ten-minute drive of the branch, analyze its households and send a targeted postcard offering special certificate-of-deposit and money-market rates. The resulting deposits exceeded the bank’s first-month target. It is a useful introduction to a company whose work begins well before anyone chooses a photograph or writes a subject line.

The audience is already in the accounts

A financial institution can know a great deal about a customer while its marketing department knows remarkably little. Account information, card activity and campaign responses may live in separate systems. A familiar name becomes several rows that nobody has quite reconciled. The bank possesses the ingredients for relevance; the marketer is still waiting for a list.

Marquis’s Marketing Data Platform brings information from different sources into one database, organized around individuals and households. It supports data cleanup, filtering, campaign management and reporting. Its CRM helps coordinate customer relationships across marketing, sales and service. Journey Orchestration turns events, such as opening an account, into prompts for communication.

The significance is practical. A marketer can work on who should receive a message and why, rather than repeatedly asking someone else to assemble the audience. That is also Marquis’s place in the market: software for financial institutions paired with people who help turn the data into campaigns. The company sells to banks and credit unions, rather than consumers choosing where to bank.

The welcome that waited a week

At ILWU Credit Union, a marketing team of two relied on IT to pull new-member data. The marketers then formatted it and uploaded a list for individual email sends. Welcome communications could arrive as much as a week late. Expansion into Hawaii added another complication: new members there needed different information about services and ATM access.

The bottleneck was the handoff between systems and people. Marquis’s Engage service helped build a 90-day onboarding program with state-specific welcome messaging, mobile banking guidance and later product-specific emails. The reported results included a 69% unique open rate and a 7.9% click-through rate for onboarding.

Those figures describe engagement, not profit. The more transferable lesson is the sequence: connect the data, establish the trigger, write the appropriate messages and inspect the response. A two-person department gains capacity when welcoming the next member no longer requires repeating the same clerical exercise.

The expensive charm of the mailbox

Abri Credit Union began working with Marquis in 2019 with single-channel email campaigns. Its strategist suggested adding direct mail. This was a decision about additional expense, not a nostalgic attachment to postage stamps. Abri also needed tracking: it had not been measuring the results of its email campaigns.

After adding targeting and reporting, Abri brought direct mail into onboarding, reboarding and multi-product programs. Marquis’s case study reports improved responses and balances across all three. Its overall combined programs produced a 9.03% response rate and $11.8 million in new balances. The credit union could also bring core and card information together and give staff visibility into marketing outreach.

The case makes a good argument for testing a channel combination. It does not prove that every institution should mail more. Product economics, list quality, creative work and the cost of reaching a household all matter. A postcard can be an excellent employee, provided someone checks what it earns.

“She is a true extension of our marketing department!”Kristina Flores, Chief Marketing Officer, Prospera Credit Union, on its Marquis strategist

A consultant belongs in this software story

Prospera Credit Union’s experience explains why Marquis’s business model includes services. Its strategist reviewed the existing marketing approach, used peer analysis to identify opportunities and helped build branch dashboards and daily executive snapshots. The relationship included biweekly meetings to review progress and consider new campaigns.

This is a different purchase from simply adding another login. Marquis offers hosted software, implementation, consulting, creative design, digital communication and direct mail production. A customer can buy tools and the assistance needed to use them. That combination is particularly relevant when a financial institution’s ambitions exceed the hours available in its marketing department.

Salesforce and HubSpot are alternatives for portions of the CRM and marketing job; Marquis and ZAG also discuss integrating with them. A bank might instead assemble specialist tools, an agency and internal analysts. Marquis’s distinction is the concentration of financial institution data workflows and execution services in one vendor relationship. Whether that convenience is worth its cost depends on the work the institution actually needs done.

Balances are splendid. Margin pays the bills.

In April 2024, Marquis reported results from more than 1,000 campaigns run by 100 client institutions during 2023. They reached over six million customers and generated 197,000 direct-response accounts and $5.3 billion in balances. The company reported an average direct return of ten dollars in marginal profit for each dollar invested.

The distinction between balances and margin matters. Deposits provide funding; loans have yields, losses and servicing costs. A campaign’s apparent success changes when those economics enter the calculation. CSE Federal Credit Union’s 2023 case study, for example, separately reports $16.6 million in balances, $406,556 in margin and 351.25% ROI.

For a buyer, the useful questions are concrete: which expenses enter the return calculation, what counts as a direct response, and how long is the measurement window? Implementation, subscription costs, creative production and postage should be understood in the context of the proposed scope. The sensible habit to copy is deciding how success will be counted before the first message leaves.

The website joins the conversation

Marquis was founded in 1987; reporting on its 2016 majority investment identifies Les Kassing as its founder. Rockbridge Growth Equity acquired the business from Falfurrias Capital Partners in 2021, with CU Solutions Group investing alongside. In 2023, Marquis acquired ZAG Interactive, adding website and digital marketing services. The transaction terms were undisclosed.

In July 2025, the companies announced an API connection between Marquis’s Marketing Data Platform and ZAG websites using Kentico or Umbraco. Customer data could inform personalized website promotions, related products and resources. ZAG’s work includes defining contact groups, deciding what content changes and setting up performance tracking.

SwitchKit, announced in May 2024, addresses a neighboring problem. A newly opened account is not automatically a primary banking relationship. The white-label offering combines Marquis and third-party products to encourage payroll direct-deposit switching and use of the institution’s cards with online merchants. Marketing acquires the account; onboarding must help it become useful.

The database also has to withstand scrutiny

Marquis’s Compliance Data Platform organizes lending information for CRA, HMDA, fair lending and Section 1071 workflows. Its features include exception reporting, data correction, geographic analysis and lending comparisons. The aim is to help compliance teams prepare accurate submissions and examine potential risks. Software can help organize the evidence; a favorable examination still depends on the institution’s conduct.

There is another kind of scrutiny. Following its 2025 security incident, Marquis says it engaged outside cybersecurity specialists, investigated, contained the incident and strengthened monitoring and controls. It has taken legal action related to what it describes as a third-party firewall failure. That attribution remains the company’s position, rather than a settled finding.

A centralized customer database is valuable because it connects information. The same concentration makes access controls, data retention and vendor oversight consequential. Financial institutions assessing this approach need both a workable data pipeline and confidence in how sensitive records are handled. A tidy dashboard cannot answer the security questions on its own.

Start with the handoff

The company’s customer stories suggest a modest place to begin: find a useful interaction that repeatedly stalls. A welcome delayed by a list request. An offer sent without a response record. A staff member who cannot see what marketing has already said.

Make that interaction measurable, connect the necessary records and build a repeatable process around it. Poor data, an unappealing offer or weak follow-through can defeat perfectly capable automation. Marquis’s appeal is that it works across those practical steps. The most interesting result is sometimes a small number of replies from exactly the people a bank needed to reach.