Content 360 2025 Singapore
#LEAwards 2021 highlight: Mastercard pivots rewards experience to tackle 3 key challenges

#LEAwards 2021 highlight: Mastercard pivots rewards experience to tackle 3 key challenges

share on

Founded in 1966, American multinational financial services Mastercard is one of the longest-running companies in the financial corporation scene. Through the years, as the trends in consumer spending habits have evolved, Mastercard has always been quick to adapt. While the COVID-19 pandemic proved to be the biggest challenge for majority of the businesses from various industries, Mastercard was quick to devise a strategy. 

In response to the pandemic, Mastercard launched its "Mastercard Travel Rewards" campaign which sought to benefit merchants and consumers alike. As a result, Mastercard clinched the gold award for Best COVID -19 Response in a Loyalty Campaign at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE’s Loyalty & Engagement Awards 2021. 

Challenges

When the pandemic hit, it caused significant impact on the consumers' spending habits and brand interactions. However, despite these tough times, Mastercard realised that consumers are still looking for value, accessibility and simplicity. With this, Mastercard came up with its "Mastercard Travel Rewards" campaign, which was an international programme powered by payment card linked technology to scale globally without the need for POS software changes The aim was to provide a seamless redemption experience for consumers. 

This programme solves for three key challenges that Mastercard faced. The first challenge Mastercard identified was how difficult it could be for individual issuers to build a sustainable global network of merchant funded offers. While merchants around the world strive to attract inbound tourist spend, Mastercard also identified that it can be challenging to target and promote directly to relevant overseas customers. The last challenge was how could Mastercard achieve a global scale of its card linked offer programmes. 

Strategy

Mastercard realised that the best way to tackle these challenges would be to utilise a payment card linking technology. With the use of this technology, it enables the user a 100% seamless redemption experience by auto linking offers directly to the card. The flexibility and configurability of this solution allowed the programme proposition to expand quickly from purely travel offers, to also onboard online eCommerce brands in response to COVID-19. This programme expansion needed to be rolled out in a way that would require no implementation from issuers due to their need to focus on business-critical priorities and ever-changing conditions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=gkJfua74vqk

In May 2020, Mastercard successfully pivoted the international offers programme, continuing to engage cardholders and drive spend during COVID-19, even while staying at home. Additionally, Mastercard also implemented a four phase COVID-19 recovery strategy. 

1. Containment 

With the social distancing and border lockdowns in place, Mastercard implemented more eCommerce offers from a variety of brands such as FARFETCH, Michael Kors, Net-A-Porter and among others. This strategy was playing to the shift in consumer behaviour, where a majority of the public had to spend more time indoors. 

2. Stabilisation 

While the general public continues to stay at home, dining and domestic travels were starting to commence, such as staycations. As such, Mastercard decided to pivot towards domestic travel offers and extend eCommerce travels. 

3. Normalisation 

As countries around the world start its vaccination process, businesses begun to reopen with social distancing in place. Intra-regional travel bubbles were also opened to specific locations, attempting to boost the travel industry after its massive hit from the pandemic. In this area, Mastercard decided to capture spending in newly opened corridors such as New Zealand. 

4. Growth 

With the borders reopening and the reduction of social distancing measures, Mastercard tweaked its rewards programme to include offers as the general public's lifestyle start to gradually revert back to normal. Firstly, the company sought to expand its global destinations, touching on more cutomers from different regions. Next, it included real-time alerts for qualifying purchases for in-the-moment engagement. 

Execution

While other brands struggled to create marketing campaigns and creative assets alongside new and shifting COVID-19 related priorities, Mastercard enhanced its website with the “Online Offers” category. For this category, EDM templates were created for issuers to promote the new online offers. A simple API was also available for issuers to present the offer content directly within their digital channels.

Results

The scale, simplicity and efficiency of this expanded programme was very well received by both merchants and issuers. Since the launch, the MTR redeemer portfolio has been significantly outperforming. Furthermore, more than three million debit and credit cardholders enrolled with banks across markets such as Australia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

share on

Follow us on our Telegram channel for the latest updates in the marketing and advertising scene.
Follow

Free newsletter

Get the daily lowdown on Asia's top marketing stories.

We break down the big and messy topics of the day so you're updated on the most important developments in Asia's marketing development – for free.

subscribe now open in new window