Case Study: North America Travel Service
e-shot™ helps North America Travel Service really take off
North America Travel Services (NATS) have been offering a wide range of bespoke designer vacations for over 45 years. Offering a wide selection of destinations and excursions that offer more than the usual mainstream US holiday, it was essential that NATS could adequately promote the unique features and experiences that they can offer.
Challenges
NATS are a small, specialist business operating in a market dominated by giants like Virgin, Kuoni and Trailfinders. NATS propositions are unique and often require more explanation than the more run-of-the-mill holidays due to their bespoke nature and the unique offers they have. Other communications media don’t necessarily give the ability to provide the detail that is required to highlight the USPs. Whilst social media is a useful channel for getting word out, it cannot survive without the more informative platforms like email and web.
NATS has a small and incredibly busy marketing team who needed a platform that was easy to use and easily possible to replicate professional, high quality results at speed. And e-shot™ fit the bill.
As a holiday company who work closely with our destination partners, e-shots are an integral component of all of our marketing campaigns. They allow us to reach our existing and potential customers with new and interesting holiday opportunities, as well as generally increase brand awareness.
Karen Farrar, Product and Marketing Manager
How e-shot™ helped
Email fulfils several functions in the marketing mix, from maintaining brand presence, implementation of tactical campaigns and complementing destination partner campaigns.
The ease with which campaigns can be cloned and repurposed makes it simple to create tactical campaigns, either for limited time offers or last minute comms i.e. last minute invitations to consumer events. Emails can be created quickly and replies can be immediate, which makes them ideal for short notice offers.
For partner campaigns email plays an integral role, as a key part of the multi-layer campaign. Email is important as it uses both imagery and allows the team to talk in more detail about the locations which together create a spectacular showcase.
As a time poor team it is crucial to be able to both quickly and efficiently put campaigns together, but also be able to understand the campaigns efficacy with easy to understand and informative reports.
Results, ROI and the future
NATS campaigns consistently do well, with great levels of engagement. The impact of GDPR was positive and their list health and updated data management practices mean that though the audience is slightly smaller, they are far more engaged and results are significant.
The importance that e-shot places on support and partnership were key considerations for NATS who were looking for a personalised service to help ensure they maximised their opportunities from using the platform. e-shot™ does everything that they need it to do and help and guidance is always at the end of the phone and with the system continually improved and updated there are always new features to take advantage of.
The team, due to time pressure, are more reactive than proactive but aim to bring more proactivity into their campaigns in the coming months.
It is imperative for us, that our supplier provides the tools we require and is on hand to assist should we have any questions or difficulties. Since our partnership began in 2011, Forfront have proved themselves to be both professional and efficient. Being a smaller company, as are we, there is a consistency which allows us to form a better and more successful partnership.
Karen Farrar, Product and Marketing Manager
Solutions
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