Backroads Doubles Bookings With Dynamic Marketing

There's nothing standard about the trips that adventure travel company Backroads offers—and there's nothing standard about its marketing either.

Massimo Prioreschi, vice president of sales and marketing at Backroads, says the company relied on broad-based marketing for years, sending expensive catalogs to people Backroads thought would like to travel. But as Prioreschi explains, mass marketing is less effective than one-to-one efforts for adventure travel, because broad marketing messages can't convey the exact experience that interests each person. "Getting the [Backroads] experience across to folks is our biggest challenge," Prioreschi says.

The average Backroads trip costs $3,500 per person, so the conversion process can be lengthy. The company sends one multifaceted campaign per year to increase conversions and minimize costs, in the form of a one-to-one "nurture" marketing campaign. Backroads hired Nimblefish to develop and manage it.

For its most recent campaign Backroads leveraged the unique memories its customers create on their trips. The company printed personalized postcards that included customers' names and photos of their last-visited destination. On the back of the card, the message read, "Remember the fantastic time you had in April, 2007? Based on your last trip, we came up with three suggestions of other trips." The three suggestions also included color photos of the destinations. "We rekindled the good memory with the good trip," Prioreschi says.

Backroads predicted the three destination suggestions by using a recommendation engine to analyze the past behavior of similar guests. Consider customers who have taken a biking trip through Tuscany, for example. Backroads looks at trips that those people took after Tuscany and layers that information with its four major activities—biking, walking, multisport, and cultural exploration—and then applies that logic to other guests who have taken Tuscany trips to determine which destinations to suggest to them. "Classically, what you say you're interested in is different than what you actually do, so I take what you do as a stronger indicator of what you will do," Prioreschi explains.

Underneath the destination suggestions on the postcard was a link to a personalized website (PURL). Once on the website, customers could watch destination-specific videos. Backroads' President Tom Hale introduces each destination, which helps convey the brand personality. After guests visited the PURLs, Backroads followed up with tailored emails whose design was consistent with the postcards and PURLs. Customers who opened the email automatically received a catalog.

Similarly, Backroads reached out to new prospects who completed an activity profile on the site, and designed the postcards around the activity that they indicated they liked, such as biking or hiking. The cards also contained PURLs with personalized offers and discounts.

In addition to the nurture marketing campaigns, Backroads started running Nimblefish's Advisor module on the website in the "family trip" section. Visitors can answer a few questions in terms of trips and activities that interest them, and a tailored video pops up that describes the trips they noted.

The customized campaign was a success, according to Prioreschi. Response rates have more than doubled and twice as many people booked trips than with the 2008 campaign. The program itself is more expensive than just sending out postcards, but the double response rate more than paid for the added costs, Prioreschi says. "We're really, really happy." > Mila D'Antonio

Continental's Customer Experience Extends Beyond the Flight

The air travel industry is one where identifying characteristics like name, destination, and travel dates are necessary-—and allow for personalization that can spur an increase in wallet share. There are countless opportunities to offer customers additional services, information, and products within something they won't lose: their confirmation.

Continental Airlines sends its TripNotes confirmation email to every OnePass loyalty program member shortly before a scheduled flight. Many customers print the email, which summarizes their itinerary, and take it with them to the airport as a reminder of their flight numbers and departure and arrival times. But that isn't the TripNotes' only function; the email also contains weather forecasts, connecting information for ground transportation, and offers on hotels, car rentals, and various other cross-sell opportunities—all pertaining to the traveler's destination.

Continental began sending these confirmation emails years ago, but recently partnered with Responsys to relaunch the program using additional, customized content based on the individual customer and the destination city. For example, customers traveling to Newark Airport see information about the company's helicopter service to Manhattan, while those going overseas see passport information for that particular country. "Each email we send out is unique to the recipient," says Kim Schwager, Continental's email marketing manager. "We really wanted to increase the amount of targeting with the redesign, and of course offer our customers more relevant content."

So far, customers have been responding well to the content increase. More than 50 percent of recipients open the TripNotes email, usually sent 72 hours before their scheduled departure, resulting in a 50 percent increase in click-throughs to the ancillary content. "We can see content that's appeared in both the old and new design and it's receiving more clicks now, which indicates to us that we're gaining visibility with our customers," Schwager says.

Building on the success of the redesign, Continental plans to add even more personalization, like the ability to change seat assignments through the TripNotes email. Schwager also says the company will expand the program beyond OnePass members, making TripNotes available to all passengers. "We're always looking to enhance a customer's travel experience," she says. > Jeremy Nedelka

Bales Worldwide Transforms the Travel Experience

acationers who want a unique experience call Bales Worldwide. The U.K.–based tour operator offers customized tours off the beaten path, caters to local culture, and focuses on niche activities such as art appreciation, safari, adventure, or shopping. The company's customer experience is all about personalization, but its marketing communications took a one-size-fits-all approach, contradicting the company's product and service strategy.

"With a database of 100,000 customers, it's hard to truly know each of our clients," says Ray Howe, marketing and communications manager. "But we want to create the perception of a one-on-one relationship."

Working with Neolane, Bales married its mass and direct marketing initiatives to be more relevant and valuable to customers. The company now emails its opt-in customers twice per year with an editorial-based newsletter, linking to a selection of 86 different articles based on segmentation highlighting specific events and areas of interest listed on its website. Each link the user clicks is tracked. Bales then cross-references this data with customers' behavioral and historical data to create "inferred intelligence" about each customer's preferences. This information then triggers an automated workflow that generates both email and direct mail pieces that pertain to a customer's specific interests.

A user who clicks through from the email to read an article about Asia, for example, may read an article specific to food in Thailand and look at vacations in that region in a certain price range. That person will then receive an email about food-based Thailand trips within that same price range, and might also receive a brochure in the mail with information on similar trips.

Howe says the company constantly monitors and tests email frequency, delivery day and time, and other variables to find the optimal open rates with the least amount of "unsubscribes." He also says that the amount of data cleansing performed is more than it was previously. "We're a lot more ruthless about who stays and who goes," he says. "If people don't react today, chances are they won't be interested at any time." He says that in the past everyone stayed in the database, and the focus was on volume. Now it's about data quality.

The results have been impressive, Howe says. Email open rates rose from 23 percent to 69 percent after the initiative launched, and click-through rates rose to 41 percent from 8 percent. Howe says that its customer reactivation rate is up 600 to 700 percent. Most notably, Bales had a 4.7 percent increase in vacation purchases that can be directly attributed to the new messaging strategy.

Next steps include integrating insight from the call center to track more touchpoints. Howe says he wants to communicate and automate even further to create more real-time interactions. "If you get the right system," he says, "your imagination is the limit." > Elizabeth Glagowski