United States
1to1 Magazine
December 18, 2009
Bales Worldwide Transforms the Travel Experience
Vacationers 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."
