The Campaign

Honouring a mistake is the quickest way to build brand trust – it shows we’re only human. The mistake, made by our intern ‘Tim’, was typo in an email to some of Velocity’s 7.5M members offering them a slice of 1 billion (instead of 1 million) Points. The more bank reward points people moved across, the bigger their share of the billion Points. After 24 hours of headlines and an explosion of commentary, we decided to honour the ‘mistake’ (like all trusted brands should) and framing this as the biggest points giveaway in Australian history. The Billion Point (that was supposed to be the Million Point) Giveaway. The consequences that followed were documented in a 40-part mini-series that played out across May.

Creative Execution

Implementation: The dramatised mini-series reframed the 15% bonus, recapturing attention from member cohorts. Then we recontextualized and refreshed the value of Points to drive member transfers with action driven messaging. Timeline: Knowing people don’t consume digital media in a linear fashion, this series found you, knew what you’d seen then served the relevant episode. Interaction with other campaign media informed retargeting activity, optimising personalisation and efficiency - creating unique member journeys throughout May. Placement: Members were targeted holistically with balanced owned and paid media from eDMs, SMS, display banners, social posts, partner assets, to LinkedIn, where Tim job hunted, plus in-airport print collateral, in-flight magazines, and lounge screens. Scale: From a 7.5 million membership base (May 2017), we built an addressable audience across Facebook-3.4M and DBM-1.2M, by data matching in paid channels, to extend the reach of the campaign in a relevant, highly targeted way, at scale.

Results

When it comes to frequent flyer programs, if people don’t earn or transfer their points they become inactive members. This campaign was designed to get our members to transfer more points than ever before. And it worked. Business impact and response rate: Compared to the November 2016 campaign (same 15% bonus mechanic), we had: - More points transferred: 34% overall uplift in points transferred and, - More unique member transferees: 26% increase in transfers and a total YOY revenue 34% higher than the previous November 2016 campaign - getting members moving more points, than ever before. -A better ROMI: $6.60 return for every dollar spent. Change in behaviour: We created a bespoke landing page designed to make it easy for consumer to calculate what their share of the billion points giveaway would be, streamlined the process and as a result promoted a 19% increase in total transfers for the campaign.

Velocity’s bi-annual offer gives members a 15% bonus when they move Points. Strong media investment in the last four campaigns saw only modest transfer increases, necessitating headline-making creativity to reinvigorate the category. The ‘accidental’ eDM typo, was sent to nine cohorts from Velocity’s 7.5M members. Split by interests, behaviour, and brand life-cycle stage, we tailored the creative to convert the right audience, through the right channel, at the right time. This reinvigoration saw unique member transferees increase by 26% and revenue 34% higher than the previous November 2016 campaign - getting members moving more points, than ever before.

Data gathering and Target Audience: With bottom-up approach, Velocity’s first-party data was mined to reveal member audiences of greatest value and opportunity. This database of 7.5M members was dissected into nine uniquely identifiable cohorts based demographic, account activity, and revenue contribution to Velocity, included current Velocity members who hadn’t previously engaged in transfer behaviour. Approach: High value cohorts were spotlighted and budget directed to cultivate established customer relationships. To deliver growth, non-transferring members were driven to action through our statistical model which predicted the likelihood of conversion. This approach contact strategies and frequency of communications creating bespoke messaging across all channels. Call to action: We built an addressable audience across Facebook-3.4M and DBM-1.2M delivering the right message to the right member cohort. Contextualised, then subsequently, action-driven messaging was delivered to each cohort sequentially regardless of the platform, providing a seamless narrative to reinvigorate the offer.