Thompson al Fresco| Website & marketing campaign

Portfolio_ Travel & Leisure_

The new Thomson Al Fresco website.

Interactive map - Alf's magnifying glass helps you find your perfect destination.

An 'Out of the Ordinary' email camapign.

Modular promo component that made sending timely offers more cost-effective.

Introducing Alf!

Thomson Al Fresco, a division of TUI, sells mobile home holidays in 43 holiday parks across Europe, including France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Croatia and Holland.

You get a unique type of holiday experience with Thomson Al Fresco, staying in luxury chalet-style accommodation designed by Linda Barker, on some of the finest holiday parks in Europe. In order to distinguish itself from competitors such as Eurocamp and Keycamp, the company has developed the concept of 'posh camping' and the brand positioning of being 'Out of the ordinary'.

The Website

When we started working with Thomson Al Fresco, they had recently undergone a rebranding exercise in which Alf was born.

To support the new brand we worked with the internal teams in Thomson holidays to develop a new site that lives up to the charming new brand, as well as integrating with their internal platforms, templates and systems.

The new site delivers a simple, friendly user experience that makes finding and choosing a Parc really easy.

On top of the basic functionality we have added a few surprising features that bring the ‘Out of the ordinary’ charm of the brand to life. One of these is a tongue-in-cheek Parc guide hosted by Alf himself.

Email Campaigns

In 2007, as part of an integrated digital strategy, Thomson Al Fresco asked Equator to develop an email program for the brand.

The objectives:

Develop email creative that would reflect the brand’s positioning as ‘Out of the ordinary’.
Produce an email style that would be flexible enough to communicate brand building messages, as well as tactical offers.
Achieve consistently high open and click-through rates, while maintaining a low unsubscribe rate.

Strategy

The email design has been created to represent Thomson Al Fresco’s unique brand of family holiday and uses the strapline ‘Out of the ordinary’. The colourful style is based around the company’s brand mascot, a small cartoon character called Alf who creates a sense of trust and honest family fun.

The emails contain information about the holidays, but also entertains with cartoons explaining unusual facts about each country Thomson Al Fresco takes you to. In one creative treatment Alf explains the fact that “They don’t have the tooth fairy in Spain. It’s a tooth mouse called Perez. Eek!”

Tactical offers and sales messages are featured further down the email, and provide strong calls to action. Brand-building messages about the company and its unique product and service offering support the sales messages, and provide reassurance and added incentives to choose Thomson Al Fresco.

Subject lines are also suitably ‘Out of the ordinary’, with the overall aim of making the emails enjoyable for the reader – building a relationship of trust and loyalty. The emails link through to the website or, where appropriate, themed landing pages, designed to expand upon the information provided in the email and support conversion to a booking.

Results

The Thomson Al Fresco email program is now a core part of the marketing program, and has been extremely well received by customers.

Open rate of up to 35% achieved.
Click-through rate of up to 31% achieved.
Unsubscribe rate maintained well below 1%.
Integrated approach between emails and landing pages to deliver consistent messaging and increase booking conversion.
Strong return on investment of 5:1 through bookings generated from the email program.

We can do it for you too: If you dial us on 0141 229 1800(and ask for Garry Hamilton); If you send us a message; Or if you visit our studio

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