The challenge

Tourism British Columbia (TBC) hosts the site www.HelloBC.com, the official travel planning site for tourists and prospective visitors to British Columbia. In order to engage its visitors in a dialogue, TBC has an annual email curricula program for users who have requested a BC Escapes Guide. The program has three main elements – Post-Inquiry, Post-Booking, and Post-Travel. The Post-Inquiry emails are sent immediately to thank visitors for requesting a Guide, advise when the Guide will arrive, and to provide them with information relevant to their preferences. The Post-Booking emails are for visitors that have booked travel to BC, and the Post-Travel emails are sent after visitors have returned from their trip to BC. TBC felt it important that each element have multiple touch-points. The Post-Inquiry component should have three emails - 1) immediate 2) 3 weeks after inquiry 3) 6 weeks after inquiry. The Post-Booking component needed to send two emails after someone has booked – one sent two weeks after booking , and a second one following up with those who did not open the first email. The Post-Travel component also sends out two emails – one immediately after their BC trip, and one two weeks later to follow-up for feedback .

The solution

TBC’s direct-marketing agency Blitz Direct, Data & Promotion Vancouver worked with Right On Interactive to develop a custom solution for TBC using ExactTarget as the email marketing tool. Based on customer’s needs, Blitz identified six “rules” for sending emails out of ExactTarget to HelloBC.com web site visitors. The rules were based on the multiple touch-points described above. ROI then developed custom integration with ExactTarget. This custom application takes a “lights-out” approach. An automated process refreshes pre-defined Groups in ExactTarget. The Groups are based on the “rules”. Groups are refreshed at certain times and days of the week. After the Group refresh is complete a pre-defined email is triggered out of ExactTarget. This same application also looks at last week’s Sends, compares with Opens, and triggers follow-up emails to visitors that did not open an email.

The results

For TBC, this meant increasing contact with strong leads, encouraging them to visit the HelloBC website. The multiple touch-points aid in reminding recipients to continue to use HelloBC as a travel planning resource and in moving them along the ‘sales continium’ – i.e book their trip to BC. It also allowed TBC to maintain a lengthy, timely, and relevant dialogue with their audience.

For Blitz, they were able to provide an automated program that saved time from manually sending out emails each week, and lowered the risk of missing deployments and inconsistent send times. Also, the program made it possible to send the email to recipients of a previous email who did not open it – something that would be very difficult to do manually.