Prospera Credit Union turned to a branded ice pack to trumpet its latest message about tax relief

By: Gwen Moran

As a community-based financial institution, Prospera Credit Union has cultivated an image of being a fun and friendly place, providing everything from insurance to checking accounts to loans, all with a sense of personality and approachability.

But how do you make equity shares fun? That was the challenge facing Prospera after it decided to raise capital through a special equity-share offering. It was a tall order: Create an exciting, fun and engaging piece about the tax-deferred product but also include a high level of dry detail.

While some experts warn against using too much humor in financial marketing, Prospera decided that it could balance the yuks against hard information about the equity shares.

For the company’s marketers, the tax benefits were the key. Since the share dividends are only paid out at the end of the investment period, investors have the benefit of deferring any income taxes until the end of the investment period. But while that’s an important detail, the information wasn’t enough by itself to have investors beating down the door — as the credit union learned after two previous campaigns to promote the equity shares.

This time, the marketing team began to play with the idea of “freezing your taxes” to reflect that concept. And few things say “freezing” better than freezer gel packs.

Before long, the credit union was mailing out branded gel packs bearing the message, “Paying taxes is a big headache. That’s why we’re freezing them for 10 years.” Print materials that explained the investment opportunity were packaged along with customized letters and the gel packs in Mylar envelopes, which allowed recipients to see the gel pack inside.

Prospera mailed nearly 4,500 packages to a highly qualified list of prospective investors culled from the credit union’s 60,000 members, says Tanya Curtis, public relations manager for the credit union. Key targets included those who were paying income taxes at higher marginal rates; those who had maximized retirement contributions for the year; those who had funds to gift, loan or transfer to a minor; and those who preferred dividend income over interest income, among other factors. Each recipient received a follow-up phone call about the offer from a Prospera representative.

The total cost for the promotion was $42,475. In just seven weeks, the credit union exceeded its revenue goal. Meanwhile, the ROI on the direct mail campaign bettered returns on the previous campaigns by 143 percent, Curtis says.

But whatever Prospera’s successes, financial firms should take care when being playful in their marketing, experts contend. Despite the urge to attribute the success of the campaign to just the gel pack, the real “magic” of the campaign was probably as much in the audience as in the mailer, says Chet Meisner, author of The Complete Guide to Direct Marketing and founder of direct marketing firm Meisner Direct, in Roswell, Ga.

“People don’t always see their investments as humorous,” he says, adding that he’s seen cases where response rates in financial service products have dropped when humor was used to promote them.

But Curtis says that the humor embodied in the freezer pack was vital to the Prospera campaign, which generated a whopping 8-percent response rate. “This was the third equity share promotion we had worked on,” says Curtis. “By using direct mail in such a creative way our return on investment was better than the two previous promotions.”

And for marketers at Prospera, that meant that at least one headache had been alleviated.