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Credit Card Marketing Strategy: Efficiency Through Addressable TV

  • - LiveRamp
  • 3 min read

With financial services and credit card marketing, the stakes have never been higher to get it right with your customers. Today’s customers are particular about what they want from their financial providers, and will switch if they’re not getting it.

That’s why you need to be obsessed with every step of your customer journey, and TV is no exception.

It’s difficult to beat the pure audience reach of TV (after all, an estimated 96% of U.S. households have a TV), but that does not mean that marketers have to keep their messaging broad and top-of-funnel. The modern TV buyer has access to a growing number of TV channels and granular data sources to use in their campaigns to reach prospects and customers in a people-based manner.

Take for example addressable TV, which allows marketers to reach or suppress specific audiences down to a one-to-one household level. Did you know, there are 74 million households in the U.S. with addressable-enabled devices, and inventory is available through multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs)?

One way financial services marketers can use addressable TV efficiently as part of their credit card marketing strategy is to ensure they are reaching only net-new customers with a prospecting campaign intended to convert first-time cardholders.

Think of the credit card marketing strategies you’ve used in the past, like offering bonus points or waiving the first year’s annual fee. Your current customers probably don’t like seeing those ads—after all, they’ve been loyal for years, and yet you’re not showing THEM the love.

Thanks to people-based marketing and addressable TV, your credit card marketing campaigns can be more efficient because you can find and suppress your existing customers (or show them an ad for an upsell or cross-sell) and make sure only your prospects receive that offer for a nice sign-up bonus.

How to Use This Strategy

Step 1: Build your audience of current customers. This will be the list of people you DON’T want to show the ads to, and should be easy to pull from your CRM. (As an added benefit, you could reuse this same list later on to target in a cross-sell or upsell campaign, like getting them to open a checking account or open a second credit card.)

(Optional) Step 2: Build your audience of target prospects. This is optional because you could just suppress your current customers and assume everyone else is a prospect. But if you want to target your prospects based on demographic, qualifying attributes, or other data you have access to, this would be the time to do it.

Step 3: Onboard your list to LiveRamp. Through our integrations with the top MVPDs, you’ll be able to deliver your segments to the TV platforms of your choice and place a buy, pretty much as you normally do.

Step 4: Run your credit card marketing campaign only to net-new customers. It’s as easy as that!

Expected results

TV is one of the biggest spend categories for marketers of all industries, and one of the most effective in terms of branding and driving sales. (Have we mentioned that you can use people-based marketing to measure the impact TV has on sales and other down-funnel actions? Because it can!)

By suppressing current customers, marketers in financial services can ensure they are spending their TV ad budget efficiently, without sacrificing scale.

Plus you’ll make your current customers happy—or at least won’t upset them—and acquire new ones at the same time. And if you take the next step with this strategy, you can turn your suppression list into a targeting list that will provide more value—the gift that keeps on giving.