Case Study: How Teletext Holidays’ Created a More Personalised Customer Experience

The Head of CRM at Teletext Holidays details how implementation of user generated content in their campaigns has helped boost customer engagement levels.

Kelly Maher is the Head of CRM at Teletext Holidays, the longest established digital travel agency in the UK. Providing holidays for over 20 years, last year they served nearly 300,000 customers.

As Head of CRM, Kelly is responsible for delivering a CRM strategy that optimises current resources and delivers a world-class technical solution providing a sophisticated, personalised and targeted CRM approach. She is tasked with delivering results, driving customer loyalty, increasing conversion rates on the website and marketing collateral, reducing customer churn and increasing repeat holiday purchases.

Kelly works closely with other teams, including Analytics, Sales, Operations and IT, to ensure their CRM strategy and loyalty programmes are fully mapped against strategic customer segmentation areas.

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A CRM function enables a brand like Teletext Holidays to connect directly with customers and understand who they are, while understanding which brand messages resonate with individuals and trigger positive responses. It also helps to increase reach and brand loyalty through targeted content and messages, whilst at the same time speeding up the evolution of our brand’s marketing with immediately available data based insights.

“In my view, a brand’s reputation is informed by what others say about it rather than what it says about itself,” Kelly said. “That means my team and I need to find new ways to persuade our customers to become advocates for our brand and to encourage them to explain the values and benefits of Teletext Holidays to their friends and family.”

Tackling the Challenge of User Generated Content

User Generated Content (UGC) is one of the most trusted forms of marketing; from YouTube stars promoting products to companies paying people to push their content on social media, this is a form of marketing that drives measurable sales.

Kelly elaborated: “I know that using UGC in email campaigns can result in a 43 per cent increase in click-through rates, up to three times as many conversions, and a 86 per cent consumer trust rating as an indicator of product quality. An Ipsos Mori study from 2014 found that UGC is 50 per cent more trusted than any other content and can help to drive maximum returns for any campaign by combining UGC with brand content, resulting in a more authentic, personalised and connected customer experience.

“My team and I are always looking for more ways to engage with our customers and build on our relationships with them. And there is no doubt that sending personalised emails has helped improve our relationship with our customers, and our results have improved as a result. Adding UGC into our already personalised emails enables us to have instantly accessible content that connects deeply with our customer base.“

Key Objectives For Using UGC

Kelly and her team wanted to enhance the customer experience they’re providing by offering customers and prospects more engaging content. To do this she needed to be able to:

• Automatically find, create and publish UGC content to engage and convert customers
• Keep social posts across all channels up to date instantly, easily managed from one central location - rather than having to find content themselves and get individual permissions to use these
• Achieve more authentic, personalised and connected customer experiences
• Boost engagement levels
• Increase email conversion rates
• Enable the creation of hyper-personalised email campaigns

Ultimately her goal was to increase engagement, help raise the brand above competitors by connecting more closely with customers, build more brand loyalty, and access a world of content, which is costly and time consuming to do in-house.

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Adding UGC to CRM Campaigns

While Kelly and her team have been working with SmartFocus for over a year already to help Teletext Holidays send contextually relevant and unique engagements across all of their digital channels and the website, this summer they started using UGC in their campaigns and Kelly said the results have “dramatically improved”.

On the back of the implementation they doubled the engagement rate, which is on top of the growth they already experienced since using The Message Cloud. “However, there is no doubt that sending even more personalised emails by including UGC has improved our relationship with our customers, and results have dramatically improved,” Kelly said.

She continued: “Onboarding onto The Message Cloud was seamless. It is part of The Message Cloud and so was extremely quick to add to our campaigns. Thanks to Smart Content, my team and I can instantly access the most relevant user generated and third party editorial content. We can manage workflows, curate the most engaging content and publish it straight away to target specific customers across any channel in real-time. We can also measure the impact and ROI of that content instantly.”

How Implementing UGC Has Met Teletext Holidays’ Objectives

So has this change helped Teletext Holiday meet their objectives by increasing engagement and enhancing the customer experience they’re providing through more personalised messaging?

”Since using Smart Content, we have seen an unprecedented doubling in customer engagement in our campaigns,” Kelly said. ”My team and I are now able to use up-to-the-second user generated content from all major social channels including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter to populate our emails with truly personalised, highly engaging content for every user.”