The challenge

• The design should reflect the Haven brand values of family fun, freedom and flexibility.
• Provide customers with a positive brand experience that will be ‘the next best thing to being there’.
• Arm customers with all the information they need to plan and book their holiday.
• Achieve AA accessibility rating without compromising customer experience.
• The site must work on all major browsers with common screen resolutions.
• Increase revenue, and overall share of business, from the website
• Increase the number of visitors who enter the booking engine
• Improve conversion rate
• Increase email sign-ups

The Solution

Creating a successful user experience with loads of strategically placed rich-media was a real challenge as the site was also required to be AAA accessible.  We solved this by painstakingly creating site-wide rule sets and design guides for almost every little detail to make sure that each of the 600+ pages worked perfectly both as individual pages but also as a whole within the rest of the site.

As part of creating a more rewarding user experience, we created a flash application which lets the user interact with one single simple interface to find their perfect holiday park, whatever their needs. This is something that usually takes about three steps and a lot of reading using regular flat pages.

Results

• A scalable, flexible website that is rich in content and quality, but simple and reliable in its design and usability.
• Visitors up 31% year on year - up to 25,000 unique visitors per day.
• Revenue up 34% year on year and on track to achieve £45m target for 2007.
• Website now accounts for a third of all sales.
• Number of visitors who enter the booking engine up to 41%.
• Sales conversion rate at an all-time high circa 5%.
• Email sign-ups increased by 155%.
• Achieved AA accessibility rating.

The site has been overwhelmingly well received by Haven and its customers, with a high volume of positive customer feedback received since launch.

Haven says:

“Your focus and support on creating demand and fulfilling it effectively is driving the business forward in leaps and bounds.”

Industry feedback

The site achieved the highest rating in an online travel industry survey by Travolution magazine beating sites such as expedia.co.uk and lastminute.com in terms of design, usability and accessibility.

The Solution

The campaign had already been running for over a year on Commission Junction and had not been proactively managed.  It had 1000’s of affiliates and the commission was the lowest in the sector.

We decided to open a second network, reduce the number of affiliates to an appropriate mix of affiliates 30/30/40. We also introduced a tiered commission structure that paid 1% more to be more competitive.

Through a combination of personal recruitment (we know who the big travel affiliates are), acting as a brand ambassador at affiliate events, competitions, promotions and including the affiliates in shaping the marketing strategy – we produced some special results over the next four years.

Highlights

• There is really only one highlight. We increased revenue from affiliates from less than £80,000 a year to nearly £10,000,000 a year!
• Our intimate knowledge of travel has since seen us nominated for excellence in retail and travel at the Affiliate A4U Awards.

The Solution

The key here was to remember everyone is an individual, and that success lies in bespoke targeting and understanding the customer! 

We began therefore by creating a strategy based around our already in-depth understanding of Haven's customer segments.

We knew that there were 4 months of the year they were receptive to discounts for summer.  Thereafter ‘late bookers’ would generally start considering a holiday about 6 weeks before an event.

This alone was not enough to ensure success.  We had to keep the creative as fresh as possible in order to ensure that our message was consistently well received by the audience.

The solution was to segment the database in clusters of 9 park regions. Each of these segments would only receive emails relating to those parks which they would be likely to visit.

The strategy was to consistently deliver a different look and feel for each send, populated with offers for each of the 9 park regions. Each email effectively became 9 highly targeted campaigns.

This was overcome by stringent macro and micro planning to ensure that each campaign was designed, developed and delivered on time.

We knew that people start considering a holiday 6 weeks in advance of an event such as Easter or half term. With this insight each campaign was broken into a series of 3 messages spanning that period.

The first email served to raise awareness of the event, the second to book now and the final one to inform them to book quickly or risk losing out.

To ensure high conversion rates we integrated themes in the website and emails.  This created a seamless customer journey as well as deep-linking to all of the Park offers. It minimised the number of clicks that the visitor had to do to find an offer and thus helped conversion rates.

The more relevant, the better

In addition to the sales messages we created a series of trigger communications depending on user interaction on the site.

One of these was based on our understanding of how people look and then book. We developed a ‘save your holiday’ feature on the website.  This allowed customers to ‘hold’ a holiday for up to 7 days. Each week we sent a personalised email to everyone who had saved a holiday with a reminder to book.

This achieved a fantastic success rate with average conversion at around 90%.

More data, better data

We knew that to increase the size and quality of the database we had to make things as simple as possible. 

We optimised the performance of the email opt-in feature by reducing it to requirements to only name and email address. We created an optional second stage for detailed profiling information.

The final challenge was to reduce the un-subscribe rate. To achieve this we decided to empower customers.  As well as having an unsubscribe option we also introduced a feature called “Your emails your way”.  This built trust by putting the customer in control of the frequency they received email, as well as encouraging them to give us useful profiling data including which Parks or regions they were interested in.

Results

• Delivered 329 campaigns to over 9,000,000 recipients
• Achieved 70% year-on-year growth for email bookings
• ROI of 2014%
• Conversion rate increased by 29% year-on-year
• Un-subscribes fell to less than 0.1%