From weeks to hours. Mastercard has reduced the preparation of Priceless Specials campaigns to a minimum

Mastercard is a leading provider of universal payment solutions, supporting its partners around the globe by offering a wide range of innovative services. One of these is the Mastercard Priceless Specials loyalty program, which was launched in the Czech Republic and Slovakia at the end of May 2015. If the cardholder uses their Mastercard to pay merchants participating in the program, they automatically get money back on their card for each payment. After the first 12 months of being in effect, more than 900,000 Mastercard and Maestro cardholders were already part of the program and had received nearly CZK 8 million cash back. (Source: Mastercard).

As the number of participating merchants and customers registered for the program increased, so too did the challenge of preparing direct mail campaigns. Initially, individual campaigns were realized in association with various marketing and direct mail agencies, who used their own systems. Preparing, managing, and evaluating campaigns was a lengthy procedure, which is not ideal in either retail or payment services. Mastercard therefore began to look for a solution that would cover all their needs while also accelerating the process as a whole and giving their own marketing team total control over ongoing campaigns.

Adastra’s Campaign Management was precisely this kind of solution. Over the course of 3 months, Adastra consultants implemented it and fully integrated it with the company’s existing systems. They also built a reporting platform based on Microsoft Power BI technology to provide a clear evaluation of ongoing campaigns. The whole solution is provided by Adastra to Mastercard as a cloud service. With regard to the implementation, we focused primarily on the following:

• Optimizing processes and awareness of individual campaigns
• Even better campaign targeting – setting selection criteria for segmentation or, as the case may be, micro-segmentation, to truly reflect the preferences of each participant in the program
• Improved planning for communication with participants in the loyalty program with regard to long-term offers, limited offers, and reminders to take advantage of individual campaigns before they end
• Optimizing campaign management – for example, harmonizing e-mail and SMS communication, or prioritizing when multiple campaigns are sent at the same time
• Evaluating ongoing campaigns thoroughly and in a user-friendly way – for example, clear dashboards showing the number of direct mails sent vs. the number of opened or unopened e-mails vs. the number of actual purchases made

In deploying Adastra’s Campaign Management, Mastercard has gained a tool with which to effectively manage direct communication with members of their loyalty program. The change has resulted in:

• Faster preparation of all direct mails – going from weeks to a matter of hours
• Less time required for the mails’ graphic design, thanks to pre-defined templates
• More precise campaign targeting
• A system that allows multiple campaigns, and a whole range of micro-campaigns (e.g. with limited offers) to run in parallel
• Simplified processes for campaign management and evaluation

A comprehensive and systematic communication history is a given. Thanks to transparent visualization in the form of dashboards, marketing staff as well as managers of other departments have a clear idea of the progress of individual campaigns and can continue to dynamically adjust and further optimize them. Among the teams, general awareness of ongoing campaigns has also increased.

Mastercard work with the system self-sufficiently and wholly independently of Adastra and internal IT. They have everything they need to manage and evaluate campaigns in one place and entirely under control.