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Holiday Extras has lowered email marketing costs, improved response rates and enhanced the data security of its 2.5 million customers through switching to an in-house email platform from StrongMail
Brief
Founded in 1983, Holiday Extras is an award-winning provider of add-on services for holidays, including airport parking at 26 airports across the UK, hotel packages and holiday insurance. The company conducts 90 per cent of its business online and serves over six million travellers annually.
In recent years it has launched a number of new brands that sit under the Holiday Extras umbrella, including 'Show and Stay' and 'Play and Stay,' which offer theatre breaks, London days out and theme park breaks. Holiday Extras has also launched its brand into Germany with an operation based in Munich.
The company relies on email as a tool for many customer marketing and transaction-based services. With campaign deliverables including fortnightly emails sent to its database of more than 2.5 million customers, Holiday Extras has a huge task on its hands to effectively manage its email communications.
Strategy
To support the company’s continued growth, Holiday Extras urgently needed to find a solution that would help it maintain control of its customer data and provide real-time reporting and delivery functions. It was also important that the solution integrated into the company’s own bespoke automated email platform.
Emma Bates, email marketing manager at Holiday Extras explains, “Previous to our relationship with StrongMail, compiling reports was time consuming and as soon as a report was completed, it was out of date. We couldn’t leverage valuable customer behavioural data for future campaigns and were missing a major revenue opportunity.”
Given the importance of email for driving revenue, Holiday Extras made a strategic decision to invest in an in-house email platform that enabled it to improve efficiency and reliability.
“We started looking at best-of-breed ESP vendors, but we soon realised that, with our requirements for security, control and confidence in sending, a hosted model wasn’t going to work for us,” said Bates.
Holiday Extras’ CEO, Matthew Pack, suggested StrongMail as the solution, due to its capability of linking directly to the company’s databases, making the process of sending marketing emails more fluid and less time consuming.
Execution
With an email marketing team of just four, responsible for sending more than four million emails a month, switching to StrongMail has freed up time to concentrate on the strategy behind marketing campaigns, rather than worrying about email delivery. The StrongMail solution has helped to improve the delivery of confirmation emails from the booking engine.
Results
Using StrongMail, Holiday Extras can create bi-weekly offer alerts, automated follow-ups, holiday count down emails, welcome home feedback requests and automatic responses. All of these emails can be analysed using metrics including click through rates, comparison between specific batches and comparing campaigns on a week-by-week basis.
“StrongMail allows us to use our data more intelligently and to build better emails while also giving us the control to avoid replicating data or worrying about security,” explains Bates. “Implementing StrongMail has been a success company-wide and supports our strategy to keep email in-house.”
Rather than being charged the CPM (cost per thousand) fee that most firms charge, StrongMail's unique pricing model has enabled the company to save money on its bulk email marketing.
“The whole process is now easier and it would be difficult to go back to uploading mailing lists manually, taking into account the amount that our databases have grown. StrongMail is very much a tool that enables us to do what we need to do.”
Bates continues, “One of the best features about StrongMail is that it integrates with our systems. We now have a single location from which to send, track and analyse our customer data. It’s completely changed the way we manage our marketing and transactional emails and allows us to develop timely, relevant and highly targeted content."
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