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."