Role:
Product Marketing Intern
Department:
Credit Card Marketing
Duration:
4 months
Introduction to the Project:
As a Product Marketing Intern at Scotiabank, I played a pivotal role in the execution and success of high-impact credit card marketing campaigns. My work focused on ensuring seamless cross-functional collaboration, meticulous quality assurance, and ultimately, delivering campaigns that drove significant sales growth in a highly competitive market.
Organizational Problem:
In the highly competitive Canadian credit card market, where differentiation beyond interest rates and annual fees is challenging, Scotiabank was continually focused on driving new account acquisition and market share growth for its diverse credit card portfolio. While bi-monthly campaigns were a regular part of the marketing cadence, the credit card marketing team was constantly challenged to:
- Outperform past campaign benchmarks: Consistently improve upon previous campaign sales and efficiency.
- Achieve aggressive acquisition targets: Meet ambitious sales goals in a saturated market with numerous competitor offerings.
- Ensure flawless, high-volume execution: Manage the intricate cross-functional coordination and meticulous quality assurance required to launch major multi-channel campaigns, on schedule and without error, to maximize their impact.
Goal:
The overarching goal was to achieve ambitious credit card sales targets, specifically driving a 20% year-over-year increase in new account acquisition. My specific objective was to provide critical support for the efficient and error-free deployment of each campaign through proactive cross-functional communication and diligent quality assurance of all marketing assets ensuring campaign integrity.
Actions & Execution:
To ensure the successful launch of these campaigns, I undertook a detailed and proactive execution process:
- Strategic Planning & Project Management: Collaborated in the development of comprehensive workback schedules, proactively incorporating contingency buffers to ensure campaign resilience and on-time delivery across all phases.
- Campaign Optimization & Testing: Supported the design and implementation of several A/B tests for the email marketing channel, providing insights for data-driven optimization of campaign messaging and performance.
- Rigorous Quality Assurance: Executed meticulous Quality Assurance (QA) for all multi-channel marketing assets. This involved reviewing digital, mail, automated banking machine (ABM), branch collateral, email, and mobile materials to ensure accuracy, brand consistency, and legal compliance in both English and French.
- Cross-Functional Communication & Alignment: Acted as a central liaison, facilitating seamless communication of critical changes from legal and creative teams to all stakeholders, guaranteeing consistency and integrity across all campaign materials.
- Timeline Adherence & Coordination: Actively managed adherence to campaign timelines by providing proactive and consistent follow-ups and coordinating with all cross-functional teams, ensuring strict deadlines were met.
Results & Impact:
My support and execution directly contributed to the success of key credit card campaigns, yielding growth significantly beyond projections.
- Outsized Acquisition Growth: One of the two campaigns I supported achieved 35% Year-over-Year growth in New Accounts Acquired (NAA). This campaign was one of the most successful credit card acquisition campaigns in the past four years, significantly exceeding sales targets and demonstrating outstanding market penetration in a highly competitive environment.
- Enhanced Campaign Effectiveness: Through rigorous QA and proactive communication, the campaigns maintained high integrity across all channels, eliminating errors and ensuring consistent brand messaging. This operational excellence directly supported the campaigns’ ability to resonate with target audiences and drive conversions.
Learnings & Next Steps:
This internship offered invaluable insights into the intricacies of high-volume marketing campaign execution. I learned that effective project management is fundamentally about cultivating a shared sense of accountability and purpose amongst all cross-functional teams, ensuring everyone is aligned on the ultimate end goal rather than just their individual contributions.
While recognizing that external factors like seasonality and broader macro-economic conditions significantly influence campaign outcomes, this experience made clear the importance of maintaining unwavering consistency in quality. Over time, sustained excellence in execution becomes the key validator of impact as growth becomes the rule rather than the exception, under almost any macro conditions.
Moving forward, I aim to foster even greater organizational transparency and collaboration. I would prioritize actively keeping diverse teams informed about the progress and contributions of other departments. Cultivating this broader awareness of collective effort is essential for building a unified team driving toward the same strategic direction, creating a greater sense of urgency and ownership beyond isolated task management.
