Wildfire Case Study —

The Power of Full-Throttle Omnichannel Marketing to Drive Enrollments and Sales for Banking Rewards Programs

For rewards programs to move beyond incremental gains to exponential enrollment and engagement spikes, a strategic shift from passive marketing to an active, multifaceted approach is essential. Our experience with clients demonstrates that relying solely on one-off marketing messages or inconsistent email marketing limits your program's potential.

Instead, the real strength lies in a full throttle marketing engine — a concerted, consistent, and strategic omnichannel effort that leverages every customer touchpoint and incentive program to spur engagement.

This comprehensive strategy is what truly moves the needle, driving not just peak performance, but also raising the baseline of daily user activity and, ultimately, revenue.

To illustrate the impactful results of such a strategy, we'll recap our experience with a large client whose collaboration with Wildfire led to a significant transformation in their marketing efforts, ultimately driving remarkable growth across nearly all aspects of their Wildfire-powered shopping rewards program.

Client Challenges

Initially, our client experienced steady growth in daily enrollments, largely using basic email marketing strategies. This approach, while providing some level of engagement, limited their ability to significantly expand their user base and fully maximize the value of their rewards program.

To achieve a breakthrough and transition the client's growth trajectory from linear to exponential, it became clear that a more active, strategic, and incentive-driven marketing ecosystem was required.

Campaign Strategy

To overcome these challenges, our client implemented a smart campaign strategy that integrated several key initiatives, creating a true marketing engine. This engine consistently layered strategic incentive marketing across multiple channels, designed to generate explosive spikes in enrollments and sustained engagement.

The core components included:

1. Optimized Enrollment Flow
   This involved a series of improvements to reduce friction for new users. Key actions included enhancing web store presence and marketing landing pages, simplifying onboarding (e.g., Face ID and auto sign-in for authenticated users), immediately displaying eligible merchants after enrollment, and retargeting users who had not finalized enrollment via email and digital marketing. This streamlined process was crucial for pulling more users efficiently through the enrollment funnel.

2. Regular Boosted Offers
   Leveraging a Wildfire-powered tool called Boosted Offers, our client implemented frequent, enhanced cashback offers at certain merchants. These boosts could be a set multiplier (e.g., 5x) or a specified percentage threshold. Campaigns typically ran twice monthly for one week at a time, ensuring consistent opportunities for engagement. Wildfire managed the technical setup, budget, and reward payouts, allowing our client to focus on marketing. Critically, these offers were promoted across multiple marketing channels the client owned, to increase awareness of the offers.

3. Action Rewards Enrollment Bonus
   Wildfire's incentive marketing solution Action Rewards was deployed to provide custom incentives, such as a $10 bonus for enrollment or a first purchase. These campaigns, usually running quarterly for two weeks each, significantly increased conversion. Wildfire handled the complex aspects of Action Rewards campaign management for the client, including bonus eligibility, reporting, and fraud mitigation, allowing the client to focus on marketing these attractive incentives. Without marketing, an incentive is just a reward, so it’s necessary to have a clear plan to communicate to users "what you want them to do" and "what they'll earn."

4. Branded Shopping Day
   Positioned as a high-impact, 48-hour sales event, this was a cornerstone of the full-throttle strategy, designed to supercharge program enrollment and drive loyalty. Modeled after major retail events, it generated buzz and urgency, featuring huge reward boosts (e.g., 20x) at popular merchants such as Nike, Walmart, and Macy's. Extensive multi-touch marketing integrations were used for the Branded Shopping Day, including teaser campaigns and broad outreach across high-traffic placements including email, digital channels, social, mobile, merchant sites, and employee communications, to build anticipation and reinforce the program's value.

Results

The implementation of this omnichannel marketing strategy led to 10x growth in daily enrollments and significantly increased user engagement for the client. Their daily program enrollment graph visibly transformed from a pattern of steady increases to one of explosive spikes.

Importantly, this comprehensive strategy "raised the floor, not just the peaks," with higher average daily enrollments over time and compounding growth with each campaign.

Here’s a breakdown of the specific impacts of the integrated strategy:

• Enrollment Enhancements Reducing friction in the enrollment process resulted in a 70% lift in enrollments.

• Boosted Offers These recurring campaigns drove an 8x order lift over business-as-usual (BAU) marketing. They also significantly outperformed regular email marketing efforts by 3x in open and click volume.

• Action Rewards (e.g. Bonus of $10 to Enroll) These incentives drove much higher enrollments and contributed to a nearly 10x enrollment growth over BAU. Campaigns with enrollment incentives quadrupled the enrollment conversion rate vs. campaigns without incentives.

• Branded Shopping Day This high-impact event, as part of the broader strategy, achieved an 8-10x enrollment lift and a 2x order lift compared to other Boosted Offers, proving to be the most effective campaign at moving users down the funnel.

• High Engagement The Branded Shopping Day illustrated success at moving users down the funnel: 85% of new enrollees saw a cashback offer at a merchant, 62% of them activated an offer at a merchant, and 21% made a purchase.

  • Rapid First Purchase A remarkable 17% of Branded Shopping Day enrollees made their first purchase within 24 hours, a critical factor for building early engagement and long-term loyalty.

Overall, campaigns featuring 2x impressions and multiple new placements resulted in a 2x enrollment lift.

The consistent launch of these campaigns over time helped the client maintain momentum and ultimately delivered compounding growth.

Why Wildfire Clients Should Embrace Full-Throttle Omnichannel Marketing

Our client's remarkable success unequivocally shows that true, sustained growth in rewards program enrollment, engagement, and revenue is not achieved through simple, one-off events, but through a dedicated, consistent, and strategic full-throttle omnichannel marketing approach.

While each incentive program on its own is a powerful component to drive action in a rewards program, clients can maximize their effectiveness by integrating them all into a larger ecosystem of strategic initiatives across all customer touchpoints.

By embracing a comprehensive omnichannel marketing playbook, Wildfire clients can expect to:

• Achieve Exponential Enrollment Growth
  Move beyond linear growth to generate significant, rapid increases in user acquisition by actively engaging customers across all touchpoints.
• Maximize User Engagement and Conversion
  Create a dynamic environment that sparks high levels of excitement and effectively guides users through the entire conversion funnel, from impression to activation and purchase.
• Accelerate First Purchases and Drive Ongoing Usage
  Leverage the urgency and compelling offers of integrated campaigns to drive quick, positive first experiences, which are crucial for building early habits and fostering long-term loyalty.
• Efficiently Re-Engage Inactive Users
  Transform dormant segments of their user base into active purchasers, by providing targeted incentives and opportunities.
• Ensure Compounding and Sustained Growth
  By consistently optimizing engagement flows, deploying regular boosted offers and action rewards, and strategically utilizing branded shopping days, clients can establish a rising baseline of daily enrollments, ensuring sustained and compounding growth over time.

Applying this proven marketing playbook, including running Branded Shopping Days quarterly as part of the overall strategy, has the potential to drive new revenue and significantly increase end-user adoption of shopping rewards programs.

The key takeaway is that a well-planned, fully integrated approach is the best tool for any client aiming to truly drive results in their rewards program.