Which financial services companies are most attractive to Hispanics?
Written by Paul Zeckser (contact - e-mail) -- March 6th, 2008 | Recommend ThisMuch has been said about the influence of the Hispanic vote in the contentious presidential primaries. However, battling for Hispanics is nothing new to financial services marketers; they’ve been vying for the attention and a larger share of wallet from this important segment for a long time.
Most major brands offer bilingual websites, for example GEICO and Bank of America, as well as specialized products and services, some of which have become controversial. But which marketers are best at bringing Hispanics to their company’s website to shop for new products – regardless of whether those products are credit cards, auto insurance policies, or home equity loans?
Let’s take a look.
*This graph charts the percentage of a site’s online shoppers (it excludes people logging into their accounts and just looks at people shopping for a new product) that are Hispanic. I’ve included only the top performing sites in this chart. There are a whole host of financial services sites that have a much lower percentage of Hispanic visitors to their websites, but they couldn’t fit on the graph.
Based on this data, I have a few observations and questions for the readers of this blog:
- According to eMarketer, between 9.5% and 9.9% of the internet population is Hispanic. However, between 15% and 20% of the shoppers to the top sites in our graph are Hispanic – more than twice what you would expect to find. Is anyone aware of Hispanic-focused campaigns these companies are running?
- Seven of the top ten sites feature auto insurance as their primary product – what is it either about that product or auto insurance marketing that attracts such a high percentage of Hispanics?
- Citibank is in the top five for two different products – Citibank’s checking product and their mortgage product. What is it about Citibank’s advertising (messaging, media placements, or targeted offers) that is resonating so well with the Hispanic segment?
Any requests for other segments?
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March 6th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Interesting graph and great questions brought about. I suppose more efforts should be focusing on the Hispanic market however, no more automated services should be provided here where WE must press the number 2 for ENGLISH! ;)
March 6th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Pretty interesting results. It reminds me of a time when someone I know referred to T-Mobile as the Asian cell phone company. I was completely unaware of this fact, and I still don’t know if it is true. However, this makes me wonder how powerful word of mouth is, especially within groups that have a tight-knit community. Perhaps this can be attributed to the higher number of Hispanics on these particular websites.
One quick question about the data. How do you find the percentage that is Hispanic. I assume that answering a question on ethnicity is optional. Therefore, it is just that a higher number of Hispanic visitors actually report being Hispanic or that other races may choose not to answer the question at all? This would result in a number % of Hispanic visitors. Doubling the number of visitors does seems rather significant, but is it possible that the results are overstated?
March 6th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Brian L - Good question about how we defined “Hispanic”. There is of course the self-reported route, but we didn’t take that. Instead, Compete has built “behavioral profiles.” We have over 300 unique profiles defined; Hispanic is just one of them. Here’s how it works: we see a person visit a series of sites. Based on the content of the sites they visit, it tells us something about who they are and what they like. For example, we see a person visit ESPN.com, MSN’s FoxSports and Yahoo Sports! and we can define them as a sports enthusiasts. In fact, we can go further and determine if they are into MLB, College Basketball, or Fantasy Sports. We did the same here for Hispanics. There are hundreds of sites out there that are either geared toward Hispanics, have Spanish language sections, or Hispanic content. If a person visited those sites with a certain frequency, we tagged them as Hispanic.
There are pros and cons to both self-reported and behavior profiles, as you pointed out. In this case, we used behavioral data.
March 6th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
What attracts Hispanics to auto insurance sites is a trip to Mexico. Insurance for a drive into Mexico is a big headache, there’s a lot of issues to it and even more insurance providers who offer all sorts of varying services and facilities, including online purchase. Which is what drives Hispanics, mostly in states like California and Texas, to these sites.
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