Winter comes every year. And as soon as it starts to snow the biggest public transport in Sweden, The Swedish National railway, comes to a grinding halt. For Swedes traveling by train, this means few will get to their destinations on time and some won’t get there at all.

Our client Swebus, a long distance bus company, is Sweden’s most punctual public transport, even during the winter. The strategy of the campaign was therefor to communicate the advantage of taking the bus instead of the train and convince new customers to try Swebus and existing customers to return.

To let people know about the advantage of using Swebus, and to steal customers from the big national railroad company, Swebus launched a new discount system called The Swebus Train Switch. Sweden’s ten biggest train stations were monitored and whenever a train was late the Swebus Train Switch site generated a discount ticket, free for anyone to collect.

Each delayed minute equalled 1% discount. If a train was canceled the bus ticket was free. Only one person could collect each ticket. So to get a good discount users had to keep track of arriving trains and hope for massive delays.

Gain on the train. Take the bus. This winter was just as every other winter, snowy and troublesome for The Swedish National railway. The campaign was supported by the infrastructure minister of Sweden and lead to a 6% increase in revenue compared to the same period last year.

8516 trains were delayed or cancelled resulting in as many coupons on the site, out of those 3245 coupons were clicked and claimed, a 38% clickthrough rate.

The overall communication strategy for Swebus is to become a viable alternative to the train. Swebus advantages are puncuality and the fact that busses don´t use a track, meaning they can go around obstacles. During the winter in Sweden both those advantages become extremely relevant and Swebus Train Switch was the best way to accentuate them both at the same time and through the use of coupons increase conversion.