Company: Barclaycard US
Contact: Kati Driscoll (Community Manager)
Community: Barclaycard Travel 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 Travel Community. BarclaycardTravel.com is a unique travel community experience where Barclaycard cardmembers and non-cardmembers can share travel stories, look to other members for travel inspiration, and earn miles, which can be redeemed for rewards, for engaging in community activities.
Our unique promotion and objective
On July 2, 2015, changes to the Rewards Program Rules for the Barclaycard Arrival™ and Barclaycard Arrival Plus™ MasterCard® were announced. Community was part of a cross functional team initially formed to support customer care and manage complaint volumes, which were estimated to be higher than average, during the transition.
Rather than focusing on the minimal product changes being made, Social Media and Community teams suggested a different approach. Why not highlight the qualities of our award-winning travel card which remained unchanged?
We started with the question, "What is it about the experience of travel that drives our cardmembers' passion?" We discussed the emotions that travel evokes, especially the feeling when one arrives somewhere new. From there, we explored what it means to "arrive" as a symbol of status, connecting the existing social sentiment (#IHAVEARRIVED) to the way the Arrival card and its features enable and empower our cardmembers to have these same moments.
Our primary objective of the campaign was to promote and encourage positive product sentiment through proactive messaging of core featured benefits. This would be measured by a reduction in complaint volumes and an increase in positive social sentiment surrounding the brand.
Our secondary objective was to build loyalty and advocacy through an engagement campaign with our cardmembers and community members. This would be measured by content consumption & engagement on social media and within the community, content amplification, and cardmember behavior analysis.
Our strategy and tactics for our community
CONTENT STRATEGY
Strategy for #IHaveArrived content focused on two types of content: #IHAVEARRIVED "moments" and Arrival product benefits
- MOMENTS: Using Facebook audience insights based on our Arrival cardmember and community population, we created content which reflected lifestyle buckets
- Established Elite – represents America’s elite couples and singles. With no school-age children at home and the second highest income in the country, these households have enormous disposable incomes and pursue correlating luxuries and activities
- Summit Estates – families are enjoying the good life – luxury travel, entertainment and consumption of every kind are within easy reach
- Skyboxes and Suburbans – the best educated of all the clusters. These families shop at upscale stores, spend time feathering their nests and adhere to regular fitness programs.
- Corporate Clout – well educated and well compensated singles and couples in their 40s and 50s. These corporate executives and professionals are serious travelers, whether for work or pleasure and intelligent investors.
- BENEFITS: We used community search and traffic trends, we developed content which helped users to better understand some of the most popular Arrival benefits while highlighting more obscure card features
- No foreign transaction fees
- No miles expiration
- Chip card technology
- Travel protections
- Rewards
- Access to Travel Community
- Access to Rewards Fan Zone
- Access to RewardsBoost
- MasterCard World Elite benefits
- Automatic World Elite status
- World Elite Concierge
- World Elite Luxury Travel benefits
- MasterCard Travel Services
DISTRIBUTION STRATEGY
Content was posted across the following channels:
- Social Media
- YouTube
- Community
- Home page
- 5 separate user experiences
- PR
- Email
- Community Newsletter
- Arrival cardmember email
- Website
- Web tile
- Featured campaign content on the servicing site
- Integration with Arrival rewards – users could earn additional miles for registering for the community, sharing stories or using the #IHAVEARRIVED tag
PR
- 119M Media Impressions
- 225 outlets
SOCIAL
- 2M Social Media Impressions
- 961K Social Reach
- 125K Engagements
- 103K Video Views
- 91% decline in negative sentiment regarding the changes, our primary objective!
COMMUNITY
- 91K Page Views during Sweepstakes
- #IHAVEARRIVED generated 11% of 2015 community registrations
- 735 Travel Stories submitted
- 316K unique opens
- 20K unique CTR
CARDMEMBER
- 12% increase of arrival cardmembers registering in community
- Drove 5% increase of Arrival cardmembers linking accounts in the community
Key Learnings
SOCIAL
- Most engaged & cost effective age group for the contest: 18-34 (+20%)
- Most engaged & cost-effective age group for the benefits messaging was 25 – 34 (35%)
- Instagram ads proved to be cost effective but lacked the reach related to our Cardmember/Community audiences and fans
- Cardmembers who were Community Members, but were not linked were more inclined to enter the promotion via social
- Mobile is everything - 70% of the campaign reach was on a mobile device
COMMUNITY
- Best performing content spoke to our audience about benefits which provide a service for free or increase miles earns as opposed to benefits which save them money or offer convenience
- “If content is king, distribution is queen” - multichannel distribution is essential for content engagement success
- Content from promotion