Listerhill Credit Union

Wier/Stewart

In the past, Listerhill had worked with our card servicing agency’s creative services team to produce Spring and Fall New Acquisition Campaigns for growing our credit card portfolio among members. Those campaigns consisted of list generation and preapproval along with printing, mailing, and campaign tracking. The mail piece would be followed up a few weeks later by an email.

In the Fall of 2018, we decided to take this campaign in-house for several reasons: we wanted to assume control of the creative and develop a campaign that could look more branded and whose elements could be employed in future campaigns; also, we wanted to produce a more fully-integrated campaign that could be offered not only to a pre-qualified list of members, but also to those available through cross-servicing opportunities; finally, we wanted to dispel the marketing myth that canned campaigns always work for every credit union by developing a campaign with a unique look and feel, thus hopefully producing better results. Essentially, we were going out on a limb internally by taking on the campaign ourselves and busting up “tried and tested” marketing techniques to break through the clutter.

With our Fall 2018 campaign, we saw nearly double the typical response rate and almost 30% over our marketing goal. While the success was good, we still saw areas for improvement when we incorporated feedback received from Retail, Card Services, and Operations in follow-up and recap engagements. That feedback loop told us that we needed to go outside our universe of members who got the credit card offers twice a year and that we needed to engage our staff more through the campaign. Also, we needed to make an offer that would encourage more adoption and usage of the cards. In addition, our process loop told us that the online application process for cards was arduous, time-consuming, and just plain clunky. While we were already working on an application overhaul, we needed to find a workaround that would speed up the process.

For Spring of 2019, our objectives were to grow our credit card portfolio with non-members, encourage consistent usage with new cardholders, and increase interest with branch staff in cross-servicing our credit card.

Our target audience was primarily non-members with a favorable consumer profile (770-940 Vantage score, homeowners, no delinquencies or chargeoffs, etc.); Second, qualified members who applied on or before June 30, 2019; Third, employees and their families or friends.