Alliant Credit Union is a not-for-profit financial cooperative with more than 500,000 members and over $12 billion in assets. Founded in 1935 and headquartered in Chicago, Alliant is the largest credit union in Illinois and one of the largest in the United States.
As a digital financial institution, Alliant has national reach and competes in a highly competitive and commoditized digital banking environment. The institution’s online model allows them to invest resources in providing a superior member experience, offering competitive rates on all products. Alliant’s mission is to provide members with consistently superior financial value, while simplifying and enabling how people save, borrow and pay.
As Alliant approached year’s end, the marketing team was charged with an aggressive membership growth goal – and needed to achieve it efficiently. Focusing on lead generation and new memberships, the team decided to implement a membership referral contest as one of the initiatives used to reach their goal.
In building and launching the referral campaign, Alliant faced several challenges:
With Sellligent as its automation platform, Alliant was confident that they could overcome these challenges and successfully meet their goals.
In just a four-week campaign, our members referred over 7,000 new prospects and we added 150 new members. Selligent by Marigold allowed us to utilize key tracking capabilities which we are now leveraging for other lead generation campaigns.
Maggie Tomasek
Manager of Marketing Special Projects at Alliant Credit Union
In Alliant’s member referral contest, members of the credit union were offered a chance to win $1,000 by referring their family and friends to open an Alliant High-Rate Savings Account. To enter, members needed to click on a link in the contest email. This took them to the member referral contest landing page where they could enter up to five referrals. Each referral gave the member an additional contest entry. Five member-winners were chosen at random to receive a $1,000 Alliant savings account deposit.
To allow the campaign’s creative to shine and truly be effective, Alliant needed to ensure a seamless process for members and leads. To accomplish this on the backend, utilizing Selligent by Marigold, they used an input component, a redirect component, and data components to create the member referral process. By using these components, members and prospects were able to submit their data through a form on an external landing page. To store and pass data from the member referral landing page form, they used a simple journey map with those components. Once the data was captured in Selligent by Marigold, an email was triggered out to the prospect referral.
To track all of this, Alliant passed the member’s unique Selligent by Marigold ID in the URL parameter and stored it as a hidden field inside the form. This allowed them to successfully attribute the member to the referrals and confirm contest eligibility.
In just a few short weeks, Alliant’s member referral campaign generated outstanding results.
“Thanks to Selligent by Marigold, we were able to leverage key capabilities including an input component, a redirect component, data components, and a journey map based on triggers,” said Maggie Tomasek, Manager of Marketing Special Projects at Alliant Credit Union. “Just as importantly, the tracking capabilities Selligent by Marigold built for this campaign have been leveraged for other lead generation campaigns, including deposit and credit card campaigns, external landing page forms, and other contests.”
Marigold: where relationships take root.
