THE HIGHLIGHTS
Setting the ‘anti-trend’: How On The Beach boosted customer engagement by helping, not selling
On The Beach took the bold decision to answer customers’ questions during lockdown, rather than sell holidays to them. The result was a 53% rise in customer engagement, which now puts the brand in a good position for the future.
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When there is a growing trend that marketers feel they should be following, it can often be better to check in with customers first, to see if taking a new and bold direction instead might pay off.
That was the overriding message of a Festival of Marketing session on setting ‘anti-trends’, hosted by customer journey experts Iterable. Its head of customer success, Eloise Shuttleworth, asked attendees to consider the merits of being “brave and bold”, questioning prevailing trends and instead trying out new approaches that tap into what incoming data suggests customers are truly interested in.
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Adam Zullo, CRM manager at On The Beach, was on hand in the session to tell delegates how the brand has used lockdown’s lull in international travel to choose a new marketing strategy. Rather than cross its fingers and hope to sell holidays customers may have had to cancel, it decided to cease transacting with customers and double down on engagement instead.
“Our job is to find the stories that connect with audiences and engage customers.”
Emily Latham, Channel 4
From selling to helping
Eighteen months on, he reported that this change in its email marketing strategy, from selling to helping, saw active engagement levels soar 53%. The root of the new approach lay at the start of lockdown, when On The Beach’s marketing team took the bold decision to stop marketing holidays. Instead, executives helped its customer centre handle the thousands of queries from customers looking to return to the UK or seeking updates on whether their upcoming holiday needed to be cancelled.
After a couple of weeks of being in “support mode” the marketing team decided, contrary to what many competitors were doing, that it was still not a time to be selling holidays. It had noticed that customer service email open rates often exceeded 90%, and so it was clear people wanted help rather than sales.
“We wanted users to stay engaged and open our emails, so we started sending emails like quizzes, holiday bingo, food and drink recipe emails, even some home school stuff around Ancient Egypt,” he said.
“And then we started focusing on USP stuff; so ring-fenced trust accounts, where we hold customers money in a safe and secure manner, and we have ATOL protection. [We used] things that made the customer trust us so they would still be opening and clicking on emails. Basically, [we were] trying to use the data that we already had and trying to fix it in a way which we could start making those customers still open our content.”
As Shuttleworth noted, established strategies had to be “thrown out the window” at brands such as On The Beach, not least because it is “a seasonal business, where you knew what worked on an annual basis”.
She added: “[On The Beach] had to go right back to square one and figure out, what do we do now, and how do we take the trends that we've seen in the past and completely turn them on their head so that we've got something that will work in the short term, which ended up being the long term as well?”
Click here to watch the session on demand at the Festival of Marketing
On The Beach's Adam Zullo explains why the brand told customers not to book holidays
Engagement levels high as booking resumes
Zullo believes On The Beach’s CMO made a brave call early on, with the decision to buck the trend and advise people not to book for the time being. Instead, the fun emails were mixed with travel updates that were very well received. “Our database has become really perceptive to our updates on government announcements,” he said.
“We started sending reputational emails. It's not an email we ever served before; it is our anti-trend [strategy], and when we do send an announcement, people listen - open rates in excess of 40% on our most active lists, and inactive lists [were] up towards 20%, in some cases higher. And this allows us to reactivate and re-engage our audience, and most importantly, increase our active user engagement by 53%. It's a crazy feat, I know it sounds absolutely insane.”
This has put the brand in a good position ahead of January’s traditional peak booking season, with engagement high and the team committed to judging customer sentiment by analysing which messages resonate well with customers and which do not. Nobody can predict what will happen with travel regulations, but Zullo hopes people will resume booking beach holidays and, when they do, the brand will be in a position of having a higher level of brand engagement than in 2019 before the pandemic struck.
His parting advice to delegates was to remember marketers do not always have to be selling. They can make a big difference by going against the trend of always selling something, and instead moving to building engagement, so their brand is highly thought of when the time is right for a consumer to make a purchase.
As Shuttleworth summarised: “Even in the worst of times, staying true to your brand and putting the customer first can really help turn a negative into a positive.”■
THE HIGHLIGHTS