Golfbreaks.com Increases Campaign Response Rates by 40% with smartFOCUS
Industry Sector
Travel and Tourism
Solution Components
smartMARKETER eChannel
Business Benefits
- 40% response rate improvement through campaign optimisation
- Low cost to implement into future campaigns
- Optimised multivariate digital marketing
About Golfbreaks.com
Golfbreaks.com is Europe’s largest golf travel company. Founded in 1998, the company’s mission is to make booking golf breaks as simple as possible. This unique approach has led to continued success, and Golfbreaks.com now takes bookings for over 950 venues across the UK, Europe and worldwide.
Golf travel is a very competitive market and, since the company was founded, consumer interaction with email has changed significantly along with consumer behaviour when researching or buying online. To ensure it remained competitive, Golfbreaks.com needed to be able to continually improve and refine its email marketing communications in order to stay in line with these changes in consumer behaviour.
Golfbreaks.com worked closely with smartFOCUS to optimise its email design. smartFOCUS produced an innovative strategy to scientifically test design variations and determine the combination of factors to provide optimised performance. Since embarking upon this testing process, Golfbreaks.com has seen improved response rates and increased revenue as a direct result of the findings.
Challenges
Golfbreaks.com successfully introduced revised email template designs at the beginning of 2009. To support these designs, and improve campaign response, Golfbreaks.com wanted to start optimising its campaigns in a structured way.
The Solution
Working with smartFOCUS, Golfbreaks.com implemented a structured approach to email campaign optimisation based on multivariate testing. The intention was to optimise email copy, design and layout.
To be truly effective marketing material, all the elements of an email must work together. Using a multivariate testing method, Golfbreaks.com was able to see how the different elements of the email interacted with each other. The email campaign optimisation process consisted of three stages: research and review, discovery, and execution and interpretation.
Research and review
Prior to testing any email optimisation, smartFOCUS identified Golfbreaks.com’s marketing objectives and determined the key metrics used to measure improvement. The results and metrics from previous campaigns were then analysed, allowing identification of those areas in which campaigns could be improved, and learning as much as possible about specific customer behaviour.
Discovery
The discovery stage involved combining the results of this research with best practice and smartFOCUS experience, in order to help Golfbreaks.com select the test variables that were likely to have the biggest campaign impact.
The test plan smartFOCUS developed involved five test variables, and resulted in 26 different email variants. Before the testing proper began, calculations were made to ensure that the level of improvement Golfbreaks.com needed was statistically significant with the test cell sample sizes proposed. It’s not uncommon for businesses to miss this step, and it can lead to inaccurate tests and incorrect conclusions.
Execution and Interpretation
Golfbreaks.com and smartFOCUS executed the 26 email variations with smartMARKETER eChannel. Once the tests were executed, the results were analysed to determine if differences in response between the 26 test cells were statistically valid. For those cells that showed definite improvement over the control, smartFOCUS reviewed user click patterns to understand how the differences were affecting reader behaviour and determine why the campaign response had improved.
One of most significant discoveries that Golfbreaks.com made through the testing was that although using competitions rewarded existing customers and drove apparent engagement, it was detrimental to the campaign objective of achieving holiday bookings, as the people interested in competitions were not those interested in booking a holiday.
Removing the competition from the subject line in order to attract the right customers has resulted in much greater engagement and increased revenue.
The Results
The multivariate campaign optimisation project generated a 40% improvement in campaign response. In addition, Golfbreaks.com has a more thorough understanding of what works and what doesn’t and can plan and adapt email campaigns accordingly. Its marketing team has strong data and campaign intelligence to work with, and this means email campaigns are improving all the time.
smartFOCUS understood our business needs and provided full consultancy at all stages of research, execution and analysis throughout the course of the project. This allowed us to identify three or four changes that were needed in our processes which in turn led to significant improvements with our campaigns.
Keith Mitchell, Director of Product & Marketing, Golfbreaks.com
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