Crafting a VISA Credit Card Direct Mail Drip Campaign

With the rash of credit card offers that come through your mailbox and inbox every week, promoting VISA products for our clients is a unique challenge.

Competing for attention in a flooded market like credit cards is a different breed of advertising, and your priorities need to change a bit when it comes to marketing. It isn’t as simple as creating clear messaging and appealing graphics, and a thoughtful campaign strategy becomes crucial.

Years of experience in this space have helped us refine our framework for credit card advertising. The key aspects we aim to hit are:

• Consistent communication
• Multi-channel marketing
• Targeted messaging
• Simplified, focused messaging
• Segmentation of audiences

In other words, credit card campaigns are tailor-made for a mixture of print and digital advertising. With the digital side of things handled, we then got to focus on making a great print drip campaign.

On the print side, we devised a direct mail drip campaign that would target two different groups. Mailing lists were provided by our client to help with segmentation, which allowed us to target their current members in addition to prospective members.

The campaign consisted of six total mailers; three for the current members and three for prospective members.

From a thousand-foot view, the card’s major selling points boiled down to a high cash back rate and a nice suite of travel-related benefits. Having two main categories of perks played perfectly into our print campaign strategy. It also helped steer messaging and tone for each piece.

The overall campaign goal was to have the client’s current cardholders upgrade to the new card and attract new members to the credit union to apply for it.

Current members received mailers about the benefits of upgrading their existing credit cards and prospective members received mailers with messaging that positioned the card as an elite card that they couldn’t fine anywhere else. This supplemented our larger, long-term marketing strategy with the credit union to grow membership over the course of 2018.

The messaging aspect of the campaign was especially thought out in terms of the overall cadence of the drip campaign. Splitting the card’s many benefits into categories allowed us to introduce “new” benefits in each mailer.

We weren’t satisfied with just checking the ‘multi-channel marketing’ box by mixing printed mailers with emails, however. For an added layer of depth to the campaign, we created multiple mailer formats.

To inject variety into the print side of the campaign and keep the marketing fresh, we produced three different types of mailers. It started with a pull-tab dynamic mailer (pictured top right in the photo above) that’s just plain fun to open. We also used poster-fold mailers, as well as traditional letter-format mailers.

Within just two weeks of the campaign’s launch, our client received 13 new applicants for VISA cards.

Print campaign mailers included:

• One dynamic pull-tab self mailer (for prospective members)
• One poster-fold mailer (for current members)
• Two roll-fold self mailers (one for current members, one for prospective members)
• Two letters (one for current members, one for prospective members)