Coach Operator Merger presents EuroDirect with Marketing Database Appointment

Following the merger of Coach Holiday Group and Shearings Holidays, earlier this year, EuroDirect have been appointed to build, manage and host its' single customer view marketing database for the leading holiday brands of Wallace Arnold, Shearings, National Holidays and Caledonian Travel.

The new group, WA Shearings, is one of Europe's leading coach holiday companies, with additional operations in air, self-drive and hotel holidays. Targeting the growing, over-55 age group, they carry over a million holidaymakers every year to destinations throughout the UK and Ireland, Europe, Canada, America, China, Australia and New Zealand.

EuroDirect has been commissioned to merge and consolidate data from each of the four brands to develop a single customer view. The database will unite thirteen different monthly data feeds including direct transactions, travel agent bookings, holiday insurance data, brochure requests and customer satisfaction and lifestyle survey responses.

The resulting marketing database will be hosted and managed at EuroDirect and delivered back to WA Shearings in EuroDirect's fast counting and data interrogation web window: Intelligence Creation. Each brand will have their own database view enabling the marketing teams to analyse their customers and enquirers on-demand on-line 24x7. Through this analysis tool they will be empowered to mine their data, plan weekly and seasonal direct marketing campaigns and extract targeted mailing lists in-house.

With a comprehensive view of their customer base and a new insight into those customers who buy from more than one brand, the new marketing database will allow the Group to further develop its customer communication, cross-sell and retention strategy with the primary objective of retaining loyalty and increasing customer lifetime value.

The database will hold all transactions, historical and current, including full details of each holiday, the destination, where and when it was booked and with what insurance cover. In addition, a full campaign history will be maintained alongside details of all responders requesting brochures and converting to customers. Customer satisfaction data will also be maintained through a series of satisfaction and lifestyle questionnaires to help consistently improve the customer experience. Management information reports will also be delivered on a monthly basis to help analyse campaign success and customer satisfaction as well as analysing key indicators such as customer spend, time since last booking and average number of passengers for example.

The database will be recurrently validated and enhanced against Royal Mail's PAF whilst being suppressed against the GAS file, the Mailing Preference Service and the Groups own internal suppression files.

Karen Gee Sales and Marketing Director, WA Shearings comments: "It is always quite difficult when companies merge to maintain a thorough view of your customers. This approach enables us to hold and access customer data for all our brand bookings in a single view enabling us to identify customer groups who have a strong loyalty towards multiple brands and target sales activities and product communications to these specific customer segments."

"This combined marketing database will give us the intelligence to manage, monitor and measure our campaigns more effectively whilst improving response and cross-sell opportunities."

John Dobson, Managing Director, EuroDirect comments:

"We are pleased to have been chosen to work with WA Shearings to help build a single view of party. By building such a database, WA Shearings can achieve a group-wide view of their customers and can understand their overall value to their business. By developing their use of customer data in this way they will no doubt increase campaign performance and improve their overall return on marketing investment."