The Skip-A-Payment is a tried and true money maker for financial institutions. This is not a secret. However, in the financial climate of November and December of 2020, it was believed by those in charge that this particular iteration of the promotion would be minimally impactful due to the fact that so many loan holders had skipped their quota of payments much earlier in the year. The March/April promotion had remarkably high numbers as one would have guessed due to the onset of the global pandemic. Undeterred, we pressed on.

As is typical for this time of year, we chose to run with a Holiday theme and marketed via a direct mail and free channel (website, email, social, and branch TV screens) campaign.

We didn’t do everything the “same as usual” though. After reviewing the numbers from the rest of the year, I suggested that we do a staggered roll out of our marketing pieces and to measure the response over time to gauge the effectiveness of each touchpoint. It was agreed that we would begin with the direct mail piece and wait a full week after it’s drop date to introduce any other media to the campaign. The following week we introduced TV screens, website banners, and social media posts. The third week we sent out an email. Finally in the sixth week we sent a follow up email.

We were surprised to find that the direct mail piece did in fact drive people to our skip a payment web page (up 40% over the previous period) and to submit the application to skip a payment (up 26% over the previous period). These results were amplified when introducing the free channels and we saw an additional spike when the first email went out. There was a downturn in the last two weeks of the promotion, but overall the results for the period far exceeded expectations. In fact, it was comparable to the spike we had seen in the spring with total pageviews up 336% over the previous period and unique form submissions up 258% over the previous period. We estimate that the promotion netted over $50,000.