Automated Marketing Puts Harvey World Travel Miles Ahead

A few months ago I blogged about the concept of marketing automation as a valuable tool for customer engagement.

But there’s nothing like a real case study to help bring buzz words to life, so I thought I’d share some work we’ve been doing with Harvey World Travel who place a huge emphasis on keeping in touch with their thousands of customers.

Late last year, they began managing all their email communications using our Engage platform and since that’s been running smoothly with great uptake, we agreed that it was time to take the next step and focus on further enhancing the end-to-end experience for their customers.

The result is a really great example of a multi-channel automated customer on-boarding and engagement programme, and the marketing team has kindly agreed to let me share it with you here.

So what’s the secret?

1. Automated welcome email

• As I mentioned in a previous blog, this is quite simply best practice when it comes to customer engagement.
• In Harvey World Travel’s case they’ve gone the extra mile by creating a variety of templates that are automatically sent depending on how each individual customer signs up. For example, if they’ve signed up in-store, the message in their welcome email acknowledges that.

2. Minimum information required on sign up

• Sign up forms can look pretty intimidating if they have a long list of questions and this can act as a barrier to uptake.
• Harvey World Travel’s subscription forms now just capture the minimum of information.
• We still extract a richer data set from customers but we do it further down the track, once the relationship is established.
• Four weeks after sign up customers are automatically sent a follow up along the lines of: “Hope you’re enjoying these emails – to help us provide you with useful info and offers, tell us a bit more about yourself.”

3. Aim for fewer emails but make each one more relevant

• As a first step towards being able to segment customers and send them more targeted relevant messages we ran a data capture campaign to ensure Harvey World Travel had just one set of up-to-date data for both new and existing customers.
• The marketing team can now start using that information to automatically provide customers with only those offers that they have indicated are relevant.

4. Move beyond offer-based emails to adding value with relevant content

• Together, we’re working to ensure that Harvey’s World Travel’s reputation as a trusted advisor extends to its email with really useful travel advice.

5. Surprise and delight

• With the unique customer insights available to Harvey World Travel via our Engage database, they can now set up automated emails with a personalised “birthday” or “anniversary” offer to each customer, further deepening the one-to-one relationship.

6. Offer TXT options for time-specific messages

• Harvey World Travel recognised that email may not always be the best way to reach customers, so we’ve now built a database of people who want to receive TXT alerts. When an email with a great – but short turnaround – offer goes out, these people now automatically receive it via SMS.

7. Triggered programme of emails and texts

• It’s always nice to be welcomed back: when a customer returns from their Harvey World Travel holiday, their travel agent can choose to automatically send them a personalised “welcome back” email or text.

Like to find out how automated marketing could help your business? Contact us.