Revolut Perks and Trainline — a case study 🚂

Revolut and travel go hand in hand. In fact, travel is one of the main reasons Revolut got started in the first place. We wanted a way for people to spend abroad and exchange currencies quickly, and without the unfair (in our opinion) fees charged by the big banks.

Since then, we’ve expanded into all sorts of other areas, including trading, crypto, and customer rewards. With Perks, we find the services our customers know and love, and develop partnerships with those brands to offer discounts and cashback.

Being travel fans, Trainline was a natural choice for a partnership. In this short case study, we’ll take a look at our brief, some key results, and what we learnt along the way.

About Trainline 🚆

Trainline is a European train and coach app, bringing together travel services into one experience. Trainline offers routes, fares, and journey updates from 260 train and coach companies in 45 countries.

The service allows you to buy the tickets for your journey on-the-go, combining personalised travel information for each user.

The Revolut Perks brief 🎁

Our brief for this partnership was pretty simple. We wanted to:

• Offer tiered rewards for Revolut and Trainline customers
• Generously reward new Trainline customers
• Give Premium and Metal Revolut customers bigger rewards

Pretty simple, right?

We planned to run the offer on two platforms within the app:

Perks Beta — Our regular Perks feature for Revolut customers on Standard plans

Perks Plus — Our advanced Perks feature for Revolut customers on Premium and Metal (bigger discounts, more merchants, for longer)

The solution — cashback, baby! 🤑

As mentioned, we love to travel, and so do our customers. We already knew that Trainline was popular with the Revolut community, so we were determined to strike some great deals. Here’s what we came up with:

Standard Customers — 10% off for new customers / 1% for existing customers

Premium/Metal Customers — 10% off for new customers / 2% existing customers

We began by rolling out the Trainline Perk to a cross-section of Revolut customers on Standard. This would give us an idea of how the offer might perform with the rest of the community. After gathering customer feedback, information on transaction rates, and ATV (that’s Average Transaction Value), we determined that the partnership was indeed valuable and worthwhile.

Following this, we refined our strategy and messaging around the offer, and began rolling it out to other customers, including those on Perks Plus.

The results — people love Perks 😻

One of the key findings of the partnership was that the ATV (Average Transaction Value) of Revolut cardholders buying at Trainline via Perks (compared to not through Perks), was consistently higher.

The figure above demonstrates a consistently higher ATV for customers who have access to Perks.

Here are some other key stats from the partnership so far:

• An overall 57% approval rating by Perks customers
• Over 120,000 users have received a Trainline offer
• An average of 5.7% click-through rate (in-app). When comparing this to the average Google Ads mobile display CTR of 0.61%, it highlights well this Perk performed with our users (WordStream, 2019)

Making travel more affordable 👍

What matters most to us at Revolut is giving our customers a great experience. We were fortunate to find a great partner in Trainline. Here’s what they had to say:

“It’s a pleasure working with the teams at Revolut who are passionate and professional. A true partner, they took time to understand our business objectives and constantly explore new collaboration and opportunities that are mutually beneficial. We see Revolut as a partner who shares many of the same values as we do at Trainline in being data driven, customer obsessed, and always blazing new trails.” - Y E Leong, Head of Partnerships at Trainline

Conclusion — a worthwhile partnership 🤝

We entered into this partnership with the belief that Revolut customers love to travel, and that a discount on already-affordable travel options, with a renowned partner, would be well received. This turned out to be true, and in that regard the partnership was a success.

Another surprising result was that the Average Transaction Value of customers visiting Trainline via Perks, was higher on average than those who visited Trainline via some other means. Could this mean that customers don’t just want cheaper tickets, but tickets which represent better value for money?

In terms of improvements, we would love to see that customer approval rating continue to rise, and for that, we will continue to refine our offerings and our messaging.