Member Article

Holiday brand strengthens multichannel marketing activity to fuel growth

Active holiday specialist Neilson has invested in call intelligence technology from ResponseTap, to strengthen the brand’s multichannel marketing strategy.

The move comes hot on the heels of a new website launch in late 2016, which was designed to improve the research and booking experience for Neilson customers shopping online.

However, acknowledging the complex path to purchase in the travel sector, the team has taken its martech stack one step further to understand what makes the phone ring too.

With a strong relationship with tourism partners, Neilson can also receive anywhere up to 100,000 calls per year, from people keen to book their perfect ski, mountain, beachclub or sailing break. But that call could have been prompted by anything from a traditional broadsheet display ad to a paid search campaign.

The integration of ResponseTap’s software will therefore uncover a deeper level of data-driven insight on an individual customer level, which will benefit the company and client-base alike.

“Our entire brand is about creating holiday experiences that make customers’ hearts sing,” comments Head of Digital Jennie Webster. “But that philosophy isn’t restricted purely to the vacations themselves – we want every interaction with Neilson to form part of the memorability.

“So, if a customer chooses to contact our sales centre because they believe you can’t beat the first-hand knowledge of our active holiday experts, we want that call to be as relevant and informative as possible. And now, armed with real-time insight into an individual’s research and behaviour, up until the point of them picking up the phone, we can tailor our advice and ensure the conversation is even more valuable.”

But a greater level of customer journey data will prove powerful for the marketing team too, believes Jennie.

“Our brand is growing – in both reputation and capacity – which means our marketing activity has to become slicker and more integrated to support this ongoing expansion,” she explains. “Because we’re now linking online and offline behaviours, we can measure the effectiveness of every campaign and channel, enabling us to optimise our spend thereafter. This gives us the ability to make decisions based on evidence, not assumptions, and convert more enquiries into sales as a result.”

Despite the onboarding process only beginning in February, ResponseTap is now fully integrated into Neilson’s website, with CRM integration next on the agenda.

“We’ve already been blown away by the amount of data available to us. It’s solving pain points we didn’t even know we had!” elaborates Jennie. “Now it’s a case of fully training our sales centre agents so that we can record the outcome of every call, before we move on to thinking about what’s next for this intuitive technology.”

The software has been supplied on ResponseTap’s newly-launched fixed pricing model, to overcome many of the forecasting issues experienced when investing in martech solutions.

“Functionality aside, the pricing structure was one of ResponseTap’s key selling points,” Jennie concludes. “Budgets are a real hot potato in my world, but we know exactly what we’re paying for, upfront, which can’t be said for many martech platforms on the market.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Katie Mallinson .