Targeted offers for discerning customers.
Saga and Titan Travel achieve high activation and open rates with Adobe Experience Cloud.
Established
1959
Saga PLC
Kent, United Kingdom
www.saga.co.uk
Titan Travel
Establisted in 1978
www.titantravel.co.uk
80%
Open rates with targeted email campaigns
Objectives
Improve understanding of customer preferences and needs
Reduce the cost and paper waste of direct-mail marketing
Increase use of personalisation to target customers across channels
Results
Implementation in 6 months with Adobe Customer Solutions
80% open rates with targeted email campaigns
Ability to run campaigns in 1 hour not 5 days
Reduced costly mailings with targeted campaigns
“We’re seeing higher open, click-through and activation rates and our marketers have more time to focus on developing creative campaigns that really draw people in.”
Ben Day
Director of CRM, Saga Group
Reaching discerning consumers.
While the question of how to connect with millennial consumers is often headline news, there is one other consumer group that is equally difficult to reach: semi-retired professionals. They tend to be in their 50s and are affluent, retired or nearing retirement age, but still very active. These consumers have the time to research their options and have the money to get exactly what they want.
Saga PLC specialises in products and services aimed at this discerning consumer segment. The group’s many divisions cover a variety of services, but its two largest operations involve travel and insurance, including house, motor, private medical and travel insurance.
“Saga exists to help our customers lead the life that they want to lead,” says Ben Day, Director of CRM at Saga Group. “For us to succeed, the most important thing is to listen to our customers and develop a deep understanding of what they truly need, whether it’s a new home insurance product or an all-inclusive South American cruise.”
For Saga and its brands, the existing marketing and campaign tools were not sophisticated enough to gain in-depth customer insights. The company often sent generic emails and direct-mail campaign blasts that attempted to reach its unique customers with the same messages.
However, Saga noticed that it was dealing with a highly tech-savvy customer base. The customers wanted to do their research and keep in touch to Saga brands across its call centres, websites, mobile and other digital platforms, often using multiple channels for a single purchase.
Saga looked for a solution that could help to broadcast marketing campaigns more easily and found what it needed within Adobe Experience Cloud. Using Adobe Campaign and Adobe Target within Adobe Marketing Cloud and Adobe Analytics within Adobe Analytics Cloud, Saga gained the intelligent, integrated tools that it needed to understand audiences, personalise campaigns and manage marketing both online and off-line.
“We were looking for a simple marketing tool, but we got much more than we were expecting with Adobe Experience Cloud,” says Day. “It gave us an opportunity to retire multiple tools and rethink how we could better reach our customers on a bigger scale.”
“Thanks to Adobe Customer Solutions, we completed the implementation in just six months and met our stakeholders’ needs.”
Ben Day
Director of CRM, Saga Group
Fast implementation with Adobe Customer Solutions.
Before implementing Adobe Experience Cloud, Saga worked with multiple marketing systems and simple analytics programmes owned by the IT team. Developing new workflows and getting the marketing and IT teams on board would involve a sharp learning curve. To compound the challenge, Saga was also facing a compelling deadline to implement a new loyalty programme that would reward members with discounts, competitions and free events. Saga needed to understand how its customers responded to this new programme and drive more customers to activate memberships, either online or through the call centre.
The company decided that it needed to have Adobe Experience Cloud fully deployed before rolling out the loyalty programme to help monitor and optimise the new initiative. The company kept in touch to Adobe Customer Solutions to expedite deployment.
“We wanted to work with consultants who could give us dedicated attention and meet our demanding deadline,” says Day. “There was no one who understood Adobe Experience Cloud better than Adobe Customer Solutions, so it made sense to work with them. Thanks to Adobe Customer Solutions, we completed the implementation in just six months and met our stakeholders’ needs.”
Personalising messaging for customers.
Rather than co-ordinating responses from multiple marketing tools, Saga marketers now use Adobe Campaign to pull together customer intelligence from both online and off-line sources and build targeted campaigns for email, direct mail and other channels. Adobe Campaign is easy to use, so marketers can set up campaigns without the help of IT teams. Marketers typically run campaigns in one hour, compared to five days with the previous environment.
Adobe Campaign feeds data into Adobe Analytics, providing an end-to-end view of customer interactions from clicking links in a promotional email to purchasing an insurance option. Adobe Target allows Saga to test how different audiences react to different marketing messages, further optimising marketing performance.
“With automation and insights from journey start to finish, Adobe Experience Cloud helps our marketers look at the connection between emails and traffic or engagement to optimise the new loyalty campaigns,” says Day. “We’re seeing higher open, click-through and activation rates and our marketers have more time to focus on developing creative campaigns that really draw people in.”
Saga plans to use this real-time intelligence to trigger marketing communications directly through Adobe Campaign. If a customer began browsing for cruises on its website for example, Adobe Campaign could trigger an email that highlights cruise deals. By focusing on more targeted email marketing sent at the best possible time, Saga hopes to reduce the total number of emails that it sends while still improving conversion and engagement through personalised messaging.
“We’ve moved all our marketing data to Adobe Experience Cloud which gives us big improvements in agility and flexibility.”
Dan Whitehouse
Director of Travel Marketing, Saga Travel
Standing out in a crowded market.
In addition to its own brand of Saga Holidays and Saga Cruises, Saga brought Titan Travel, one of the UK’s leading luxury tour operators, into the fold in 2009. Although Titan Travel targets a similar group of consumers, the company operates as an independent entity from Saga. Titan Travel wanted to deliver the best possible holiday experiences for its customers and differentiate itself through personalised customer journeys.
To achieve this, the company is following in its parent company’s footsteps by using Adobe Campaign to move away from a one-size-fits-all print marketing model into targeted, omnichannel marketing campaigns.
Titan Travel now sends one-third fewer direct mailings annually, dramatically reducing paper, waste and mailing costs while still achieving strong results due to personalised messaging. For digital campaigns, open rates after implementing Adobe Campaign are as high as 80%.
“With Adobe Experience Cloud, we’re integrating off-line and online channels to reach customers more effectively,” says Dan Whitehouse, Director of Travel Marketing at Saga Travel. “Data is available within the hour, compared to 48 hours for our previous solution. That leads to much faster targeting and personalised communications. By translating customer behaviour into targeted messages, we make customers feel at home and encourage and reward loyalty.”
Saga plans to continue growing its use of Adobe Experience Cloud, particularly with its use of Adobe Target to further optimise and personalise messages.
“Stage one of our journey is complete—we’ve moved all our marketing data to Adobe Experience Cloud, which gives us big improvements in agility and flexibility,” says Whitehouse. “Using Adobe Target, we’re beginning to build bespoke digital communications based on live customer behaviour at an individual level. These will provide a more personalised, better targeted user experience and ultimately get more customers to book with us—effectively upturning our old model. It’s an exciting time for the brand.
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