SCOTRAIL CASE STUDY
Advance- Providing Sevices to our best customers
Compiled from conversations with;
Alan Pratt – Marketing Manager – Caledonian Sleeper and Advance
Graeme Macfarlan – Marketing Manager First ScotRail
The introduction of a loyalty club was a franchise commitment for FirstGroup when we took over the franchise in January 2005. Our predecessor already had in place a very basic loyalty scheme called Select which formed the basis for the development of Advance. This we used to best advantage by using Select members as a research audience to understand what the new Advance scheme should look like.
Also, our Advance target market was based on commuters, accounting for around 35% of current business. What we effectively wanted to do was protect this vast segment of regular travellers by adding real tangible value to their ticket purchase through membership of the Advance scheme.
Our first challenge was to recruit existing Select members and other qualifying customers to the new scheme. Initially, the main channel was targeted mail, with an incentivised mail piece used to encourage existing Select members to reapply for the new Advance scheme. At the same time, we undertook an extensive recruitment campaign, targeting new members online through the web site and using posters, leaflets and promotion in the free First Scotrail newspaper at stations. All applicants were issued with a membership card containing a unique membership number to quote/use when against Advance offers.
The initial mailing was 28586 and the number of positive responses was 827, a return of 2.8%. Though this process was moderately successful, we wanted to drive more Select members over to Advance. We therefore created a second campaign where we mailed the membership pack to 20,000 key Select members who had not applied for Advance, thereby enrolling them, by default for the new scheme.
With the main recruitment phase completed we had 22,500 members for our budget when we had originally targeted 20,000. The emphasis has now changed somewhat with two other issues having become priorities;
Firstly, we are looking to drive as many members as we can to opt for contact by electronic media. It had always been our intention to make Advance more “web-centric” as Select had been mail based and, as a consequence, clunky and inflexible. Contact by email is a cost effective and efficient way of running loyalty schemes as the use of web pages and web forms is a straightforward way of offering benefits and collecting membership details. Also, the Market Developer system provides a “Preference Centre” module which allows recipients to click through to their own record on the Database and make any changes they want. Therefore, for these members, the Database is largely self service and self cleaning. Also, when applying, members can submit a password which gives them access to a second tier of services on the website. This allows us to develop a genuine dialogue with our members.
Secondly our aim is to get members to use their membership card. At present and going forward it is our intention to have the card used by customers as the redemption mechanic for special offers, particularly those on the Advance microsite. For example, free upgrade to First Class at the weekend, on-train special catering deals etc have already been made available to members on presentation of their card. The objective of this is to increase the utility value of having the card that will reinforce membership status. We are increasingly making co-branding offers where we encourage the 3rd party organisation to accept the membership card rather than, say, a voucher as a mechanic for redeeming the offers. Indeed now the majority of 3rd parties that we work in partnership, both in print and via the web, accept the membership card as the qualifying criteria.
Members receive a Newsletter 3 times a year with a host of offers, again to encourage people to register to online contact.
We continue to seek the views of members via the Advance microsite to ensure that product development opportunities are identified as well as getting feedback on previous offers. These surveys are then held against the client record within the data warehouse. Continue on the Next Page
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