Does your business have the challenge of engaging with customers further up the funnel and driving them towards acquisition – and retention? Leading holiday provider Center Parcs turned to Mapp for assistance with an innovative email programme.
Center Parcs is the leader in the UK short-break holiday market. In moving the majority of their holiday marketing efforts online, they realised that they could offer their customers an improved brand experience.

They understood that by providing their customers with the right content, at the right time, in the right place – the very essence of the ultimate digital experience – they could increase revenue by encouraging customers to prebook activities before arrival.

The first step in the activity booking strategy was to map out the customer journey and understand how the average Centre Parcs customer interacted with the brand. Research told them that customers often left it late to book on-site activities leading to disappointment when the holiday arrived. This inspired Center Parcs to create a customer communication programme that saw a series of bespoke emails sent out containing activity offers and incentives over a set period of time.

The targeted emails – sent 15 weeks before the start of the booking – included different information which evolved as a customer’s holiday drew nearer.

These included:

• Arrival date
• Suggestion of activities to book
• Personalized online itinerary
• Holiday checklist
• The opportunity to pre-order groceries

And the communication didn’t stop after the customer had finished their holiday. The campaign included a post-event email that, along with a questionnaire about the stay, offered an incentive to book with Center Parcs again.

The results were astounding. Center Parcs recorded a 20%+ increase in the number of click-throughs to their activity booking portal. In addition, they saw an uplift of 80% in the number of activities booked online.

At its heart, Center Parcs’ activity booking campaign aimed to create value for their customers. By moving their campaigns online and personalizing them they were able to target and nurture their customers in exactly the right way and collect the data they needed to further optimize their customer journeys.

[Pull quote] “The campaign has seen consistently high open and click rates and significant revenue thanks to more sophisticated targeting and personalization.”

Jeremy Colston, CRM Manager, Center Parcs

For more information on how Mapp helps brands create the ultimate digital travel experience, find out how we helped SBM to execute accurate, data-driven marketing campaigns here.

And to read how Mapp has helped another travel business, Thomas Cook, with its audience targeting and lead generation through the use of relevant content at the most important touch points then download our ebook here.

Or contact us today if you’d like to find out how our team can help.