Lithys 2015: Barclaycard - Marketing Champion

Company: Barclaycard 
Entry submitted by: Jennifer Hitchens (JenH) Community Manager

Community: Barclaycard Travel Community (BarclaycardTravel.com) 

Lithy category: Marketing Champion

 

 

Barclaycard US is the 9^th largest credit card issuer in the US. We believe that building community environments helps to support our credit card products creates a differentiated customer experience through enhanced support and innovative engagement.

 

The Barclaycard Travel Community: A portion of Barclaycard cardmembers are invited to join a community, share their travel experience, look to other members for travel inspiration and earn miles for engaging in community activities.  

BarclaycardTravel.com is a one of a kind travel community where Barclaycard cardmembers and non-cardmembers can share travel experiences and earn miles that can be redeemed for travel rewards or e-certificates.  Lithium’s community platform is the driving force behind out latest marketing initiative for the Barclaycard Travel Community.

 

The Barclaycard Travel Community Great Getaway Giveaway Campaign

This campaign utilized the Lithium platform capabilities in 5 different ways to launch an online sweepstakes promotion in November of 2014 called the Great Getaway Giveaway.

 

 

The primary focus of the marketing campaign was to increase community registrations to BarclaycardTravel.com and helped in exceeding the 2014 goal of 100,000 total community member registrations.

 

Using the Lithium platform, we were able to develop a campaign that would: 

 

• Represent the premium quality of the Barclaycard US brand in design and experience
• Increase awareness of the Barclaycard Travel Community
• Include meaningful interactions with contest participants - without creating obstacles to entry
• Allow users to stay within a single, mobile-friendly environment

 

 

Our marketing campaign

 

We incorporated a variety of the Lithium platform functionality to build a successful marketing campaign: 

1) The Great Getaway Giveaway featured a two-tier prize structure which not only promoted Community registrations through a sweepstakes, but highlighted the storytelling aspects of the Community that utilizes the blogging platform on Lithium.

 

2) Our customized home page on the Lithium platform enabled us to feature the Great Getaway Giveaway prominently in the rotating image “Hero” area:

 

3) The Lithium registration and login path was modified to enable existing Barclaycard Travel Community members to sign in, share their dream trip on the dedicated Lithium ‘Great Getaway Giveaway’ Discussion Board for a chance to win the Grand Prize. The registration flow also enabled a new registration flow where new users were seamlessly taken (after registration) to the dedicated Lithium ‘Great Getaway Giveaway’ Discussion Board for the second step of the sweepstakes.

 

4) We created a responsive registration page that enabled for a seamless mobile experience.

 

Step 1: (New registration path that is mobile optimized)

 

 

Step 2: Submitting a dream trip as an ‘entry’ in the dedicated discussion thread (also mobile optimized). Discussion board was customized for optimal viewing on multiple browsers and devices and Lithium out of box board settings were implemented so that a registered community member could only submit one dream trip.

 

5) To encourage our active (and newly registered) users to socially share the marketing campaign, we implemented a customized Lithium social sharing component with pre-populated text for a quick and easy method of spreading the word.

 

We also launched a #TravelSkills Twitter Chat with one of our key influencers, Johnny Jet and reinforced the #GreatGetawayGiveaway hashtag.

 

 

#TravelSkills Twitter Chat with Johnny Jet featuring #GreatGetawayGiveaway images in all questions

• 1,300 tweets with 339 contributors
• 3.3M reach

• 3M timeline deliveries
• Key Participants: Travel and Leisure, Marriott International, SmarterTravel, JDAndrews, Brett Snyder

 

Our campaign results

 

Great Getaway Giveaway Campaign Results:

• • Exceeded 100K Goal
    • 31,824 new registrants: Exceeding our total campaign goal by 59%
    • 26,510 “Dream Trip” submissions by community members; averaged 1 submission every 2 ½ minutes
    • 430K Page Views during Sweepstakes; normal Page View average is 237K per month.
  • Increased engagement with existing Arrival cardmembers
    • During the sweepstakes promotion, increased Arrival cardmembers registering in the community by 20%.
  • Increase Social Media Mentions 
    • 1,123 Social Media Mentions (sentiment was 100% positive):
    • 5% of mentions on Twitter #GreatGetawayGiveaway
    • 27% of mentions on Facebook
    • Promoted posts = 252 shares

 

In addition to promoting the campaign via email, we also

incorporated a paid media campaign on Facebook:

• 14% of all registrations originated from Facebook
• Utilized 11% of budget for FB ads

 

 

Email Campaigns provided high impact with very low cost:

• 61% of all registrations attributed from newsletter
• Utilized 2% of budget to deploy 3 emails

 

Key Learnings:

• Mobile capability integral
• Integration of social sharing essential
• Email targeting highest performing results
• Creative assets: build in house
• Repurpose existing assets & terms for potential future campaigns utilizing Lithium platform