The Magic Behind Citi's Marketing
Leveling Up Loyalty: Citi’s Data-Driven Evolution
Close popup form
Download the PDF
Success!
Great content will hit your inbox soon!
Challenge
Citi’s marketing team has always prioritized enhancing the customer experience, consistently evolving their communications to better connect with cardholders. Recognizing the untapped potential in their Merchant Offers and ThankYou® Points Summary campaigns, Citi saw an opportunity to make these initiatives more visually personalized and impactful. Both campaigns shared a common goal: harnessing the power of data to deliver more tailored experiences that drive customer loyalty and engagement.
Solution
Citi partnered with Movable Ink to turn these campaigns into dynamic, data-driven experiences that evolve alongside customer needs and expectations. By unlocking new creative possibilities through the availability of data, Citi continuously elevated the design, functionality, and personalization of each campaign. Keep reading to see exactly what Citi’s marketing team has accomplished.
MERCHANT OFFERS
The Evolution
In 2020, Citi launched its personalized Merchant Offers program on-site and in-app. While email was identified as a critical channel to engage customers, delivering these offers in real-time with millions of personalized variations presented a significant challenge. Movable Ink stepped in, tapping into Citi’s offers API to seamlessly generate real-time, personalized offers in email at the moment of open.
Citi’s Merchant Offers program has since evolved into a personalization powerhouse:
2020: Initially, emails featured a 1:1 feed of discounts from merchants based on recent customer shopping behavior.
2021: Creative and functional upgrades prioritized offers by brand name and top merchant categories like travel, shopping, and dining. These updates boosted click-through rates and drove results 25% above the CTR benchmark.
Recent Enhancements: Local dining and top offers have been the focal point, with personalized emails driving higher clicks and activations—curated dining offers, in particular, have seen a 57% higher activation rate than other featured deals. By leveraging recipients' spend and savings data, Citi highlights total savings and redemptions, achieving a 6.8% CTR—far surpassing the 1.3% CTR of non-personalized audiences.
These innovations demonstrate how tailored messaging and creative refinements fuel growth. By aligning the program with customers’ real-time shopping habits and preferences, Citi delivers offers that feel timely, relevant, and highly actionable.
This was the first cards program to leverage Movable Ink. We started with 9 million customers and now we’ve rolled it out to nearly our entire card member base - 25 million customers. Every time a customer opens their email, it’s fully tailored to their needs.
Suzanne Oommen
Director, Head of Spend Engagement Marketing - US Cards, Citi
ThankYou® Summary
The Evolution
The Citi ThankYou® Points Summary campaign has undergone three major transformations since Movable Ink began powering it in 2019.
2019: The campaign launched with a straightforward pie chart showing customer spending across categories like dining, travel, and retail. While functional, Citi saw room to create a more compelling visual narrative.
2022: The summary was upgraded with redesigned bar graphs that made it easier for customers to visualize their total points balance, points earned, and points redeemed. Citi also expanded the campaign to cover five card products, increasing its reach.
2024: Today’s iteration features a combination of tailored circular charts and line graphs, breaking down each customer’s quarterly points balance by earning category. This vibrant visualization provides a clear, interactive snapshot of rewards to strengthen Citi’s brand identity while delivering a more engaging experience.
This evolution showcases Citi’s ability to leverage data to craft communications that truly resonate, delivering a tailored, visually striking summary that makes it easier for customers to understand and take action.
With our ThankYou® Quarterly Points Summary, we’re looking to create an emotional connection to our loyalty platform. Here is where we are saying that everyday purchases can lead to bigger and better things. This was already one of our highest performing communications, so it makes sense to test it and iterate to go even further. The possibilities are endless here.
Suzanne Oommen
Director, Head of Spend Engagement Marketing - US Cards, Citi
Conclusion
Citi’s commitment to innovation shines across its campaigns, from the evolution of the ThankYou® Points Summary to the launch of Merchant Offers. These initiatives exemplify the power of regular, personalized touchpoints that consistently deliver value to customers. By turning existing campaigns into dynamic, customer-first experiences, Citi has driven loyalty month over month, proving that sustained engagement yields solid results throughout the year—beyond the impact of one-off campaigns.
