There are many ways financial services institutions can put Facebook apps to work, and we really like what Chase Sapphire Preferred has done with its most recent Facebook app, “First Friday Favorites.”
Chase’s “First Friday” promotion offers accelerated rewards in dining, a targeted merchant category code (MCC) for the card. It creates a monthly virtual event for cardmembers who can customize their experience of the event by dining out on First Fridays… at the restaurant and geographic location of their choice.
The “First Friday Favorites” app encourages card use during the “event” in a way that is highly social: not only does it “live” on Facebook, but it’s all about sharing, connecting and voting. Cardmembers can use the app to add their favorite restaurants, discover other cardmembers’ favorites in cities across the country, vote on favorites already uploaded and share a list of the top 10 restaurants with their friends.
In addition to promoting “First Friday Favorites” on Facebook via status updates and cover photos, the Chase Sapphire Preferred application page highlights the promotion directly below the card’s list of benefits and includes a direct link to the app. The call-to-action reads, “Share a First Friday Favorite.”
From a marketing point of view, the promotion works hard for the brand in many ways:
- It uses social media to drive card use.
- It ties a targeted MCC to accelerated rewards (3X points) and is aligned with the way cardmembers already use their Chase Sapphire Preferred cards. (Chase’s core value proposition for this card: dining and travel always earn 2X points.)
- It’s on brand. The structure of the offer and the language it uses (“be inspired to dine,” for example) supports the card’s “enjoy more” positioning, elevating dining as a way to get greater enjoyment out of everyday experiences.
- Its customization (via customer choice) is powerful and solves for the broad geographical reach of the brand… and the social platform hosting the app.
- It reminds cardmembers of points available from dining out at restaurants they probably frequent and offers the option of booking a reservation on the spot via Open Table. Encouraging card use — which is the goal of the promotion — these strategies make it easy and convenient (i.e. “low lifts”) for cardmembers to earn rewards.