Company: Barclaycard US
Contact: Jen Hitchens (Community Manager)
Community: Barclaycard Ring Community
Lithy category: Marketing Champion
BarclaycardUS is the 9th largest credit card issuer in the US. We believe that building community environments supports our credit card products and creates a differentiated customer experience through enhanced support and engagement.
Lithium’s community platform is the driving force behind the Barclaycard Ring Community. Barclaycard Ring MasterCard© is a very simple credit card product with a low interest rate, simple terms and no annual or balance transfer fees. But what sets Barclaycard Ring apart is its use of online communities in an innovative way to talk with card members about the product and how it should evolve. The Barclaycard Ring team also developed the industry’s first profit sharing program with card members, called Giveback™. This aligns the interests of both bank and card member like never before and opens the door for both to advance the cause of charities. And to help crystalize the trust, the team posts the financial statistics for the program on the website and discuss the results each month.
Barclaycard Ring Community “Ask FICO” Online Event
According to CEB TowersGroup, a financial services industry analyst group, 90 percent of credit scores purchased by lenders are FICO® Scores. While BarclaycardUS has been a pioneer in FICO® Score access for its cardmembers, many consumers still harbor a flawed - and costly - understanding of their credit scores.
Knowing that access to one's credit score is a small part of the path to better credit, Barclaycard Ring embarked on a mission to provide cardmembers with a clearer path to credit health. Partnering with the team at FICO®, Barclaycard was able to connect cardmembers to expert answers while providing a platform to share their own credit success stories – at no additional cost to the business.
Our primary objective of the campaign was to promote and encourage a greater understanding of credit scores and the FICO® Score we share with our cardmembers.
Our secondary objective was to increase the number of registered users in the Ring Community, increase engagement as well as create evergreen content that could provide answers to questions other community members might have about FICO Scores.
Our strategy and tactics
CONTENT STRATEGY
The content strategy for the “Ask FICO” event focused on communicating to our existing Ring cardmembers about the upcoming event, its exclusivity, as well as its benefit as a cardmember who is interested in their credit health and eager to learn more about financial literacy topics.
Communication Materials:
- Working with FICO®, we developed a branded icon for the event (shown above)
- Developed an “Ask FICO” Blog Post focusing on the program and it’s focus (as well as the ‘rules’)
- The “Ask FICO” Blog Post was also featured in the Account Servicing part of the BarclaycardUS.com home page
- Initial email focused that it was an exclusive online event
- Last chance email focused on deadline
Initial email
Last chance email
Blog post
Our Results
COMMUNITY
- Cardmembers posted 130 questions in 12 days; each question was answered individually by FICO
- 19,000 page views (25% increase)
- 4,700 unique visits (20% increase)
- Ask FICO Q&A board had 459 posts and 222 kudos
- Ask FICO Q&A board received 51% of the overall traffic during the event
- Ask FICO blog post received 48% of all blog traffic during the event
- Over 400 new cardmembers converted to community members for the event; 6% of new registrants for the year
- Evergreen Content – post event, the “Ask FICO” Q&A board remains the #1 visited section of the Ring Community (surpassing the public blog page views in Q4)
- 35% Open Rate
- 11% CTR
CARDMEMBER
- Online event helped to increase cardmember registrations to 20% of portfolio
- Online event also helpe to re-engage some cardmembers who had not logged into the community in a while.
Key Learnings
COMMUNITY
- Q&A Board format worked very well for this online event; questions that members had were answered by other community members; however the FICO Representative answer could be selected as the accepted solution so viewers know the correct response/information.
- Created an easy to access “Ask FICO” board in the global navigation
- Don’t always need a big budget to have a large impact (budget for this event was zero!)