Press Releases
Read the latest Case Study from exhibitor CommuniGator
December 2007
Client Profile
La Manga Club is one of Europe's finest holiday and leisure resorts in southern Spain, surrounded by beautiful hills and the intense blue of the Mediterranean Sea, offering a superb choice of luxury accommodation with over 2000 villas, apartments and townhouses set on over 1500 acres for your luxury holiday all year round. La Manga Club is synonymous with golf and offers three of the best golf courses in Europe, but La Manga also offers tennis, swimming, diving, horse riding and other sporting and leisure activities for the whole family. La Manga Rentals are La Manga Club holiday specialists; driving holiday bookings from a UK base.
http://www.lamangarentals.com/
The Challenge
La Manga Rentals had been using a hosted US email marketing solution to broadcast newsletters offering holiday and last-minute deals on a sporadic basis to drive holiday bookings. However, there were issues with availability of the US-based support and the HTML email templates provided were basic and did not convey the correct brand image for the luxury Spanish holidays. In February 2007, Michael Lee, MD of La Manga Rentals met CommuniGator at the Travel Technology tradeshow and decided that as the busy holiday season approached he needed some external help with his email marketing campaigns. In addition, Michael was looking for ideas to grow the newsletter subscriber base using their established website. As the 'shop window' of La Manga Club, the site received a lot of visitors, but did not have an obvious or efficient data capture point.
Solution
Having met CommuniGator, Michael was interested in the managed service on offer (using GatorMail) with a view to bringing the work in-house after the rush of the holiday season. This meant that La Manga would benefit from the best practice email marketing knowledge and creative and copywriting skills of CommuniGator's dedicated team over the busy summer months.
La Manga already knew the preferences of existing subscribers and these were imported into specific interest groups in GatorMail using the Group Builder functionality. To add to these numbers, a web capture form was built in GatorMail and uploaded to La Manga's website as an iframe - website visitors were offered the chance to win a holiday and were able to tick select their holiday preferences (family, golf, tennis, villa, last-minute) which were automatically fed into the corresponding groups in GatorMail. The web capture form then offered subscribers the opportunity to recommend a friend; the web capture they completed with their friend's details triggered an email direct to their friend asking them if they would like to opt-in to receiving La Manga's newsletter and, in turn, offering them the opportunity to refer a friend. This viral aspect of the campaign increased La Manga's opt-in audience 15% over a 3 month period.
Benefits
The weekly email campaigns broadcast from GatorMail form a key part of the lead generation activity for La Manga Club. It enables La Manga Rentals to put together special offers on their website and send the web link to the CommuniGator team to build into the next campaign to those subscribers whom have expressed an interest in the type of late deals on offer. In addition, topical newsletters and recent news on the Spanish resort are sent out to maintain awareness and recognition of the La Manga brand in quieter, off-season periods. This activity develops a good conversational rapport with subscribers and will further improve performance of 2008's booking campaigns.
"Using CommuniGator's managed service has been a huge time-saver for me during our busy time and I feel our brand has benefitted from timely, relevant communication to our audience. We have seen an average of 18% click-throughs on holiday offers this summer," says Michael Lee, MD. Michael continues, "the viral aspect of the campaign has been a great success in expanding our reach and potential holiday-maker database."
About CommuniGator
CommuniGator offers web based email marketing software (GatorMail) which is available either installed on-site or as a hosted solution. GatorMail places the power of intelligent personalised email communication, sophisticated tracking and accurate profiling in the hands of the marketer.
CommuniGator enables you to:
- Generate powerful personalised emails, landing zones and surveys
- Directly track and measure responses to an individual level
- Engage your audience in a personalised, interactive on-line experience
- Make large cost savings on traditional paper based communication
- Increase response rates and time of response compared to paper based campaigns)
- Automatically update profiles of the audience with integration to existing CRM systems
- Provide pro-active, pre-emptive customer support
For more information visit CommuniGator at Stand B09 at the Show.