Your flight has been cancelled - how On the Beach increased email engagement during the pandemic

If you’ve not heard of On the Beach (OTB), then you may be familiar with their recent campaign and TV ad starring the one and only, Iggy Pop. 

Because life really is better on the beach, right? 🏖️

We think so. That’s why we were excited to welcome OTB’s CRM Manager, Adam Zullo onto The Big Bright Podcast to chat with us about an extraordinary marketing campaign that he and his team executed during the pandemic. You’ll learn: 

• The role of CRM (customer relationship management) in marketing 
• How OTB used customer data and listening to inform their marketing messages 
• Why a 40% email-open rate was so extraordinary 
• Apple’s IOS 15 update - what this means for marketers
• Tips for email marketers wanting to ramp up engagement rates 

Interviewer: Amy Burchill  https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-burchill-64b53361/

Guest speaker: Adam Zullo https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamzullo/ from On the Beach

Podcast produced by Let’s Talk Video Production: https://letstalkvideoproduction.com

Transcript

Hello and a very warm welcome to The Big Bright Podcast. I'm Amy, the marketing executive at Bright. Today I'm excited to welcome Adam Zullo on to the podcast!

 Adam is the CRM Manager for On the Beach. And for those of you who haven't heard of On the Beach or have not been on their website, then you may recognise them from the recent TV ad featuring the one and only Iggy Pop! On the Beach are in the business of selling beach holidays and on this episode, we are going to explore the extraordinary marketing campaign that On the Beach executed during the pandemic and how they achieved a whopping 40% email open rate! For anyone who doesn't know, the industry standard is 20%. So this is an incredible statistic for any marketing team, especially during a time when holidays were basically non existent. So let's get into it. Welcome, Adam.

Thank you for having me.

We're very excited to have you here. To kick us off, please could you tell us a little bit about yourself and what the day in the life of a CRM Manager On the Beach looks like?

I'm based in the northwest, I live just outside of Manchester and the office for On the Beach is in Manchester city centre, so near Piccadilly. We're currently hybrid working. So the majority of it is at home with a few office days sprinkled in.

I've worked in the CRM space for nearly six years, starting out as an email executive which involved building emails before moving towards managing databases and forward planning the whole CRM strategy. That's currently what we're doing at the present day. So I've worked at On the Beach for nearly three years as CRM Manager, I look after email, push, SMS, and then some direct mail campaigns as well. We're a small team and our executives work on the trade side of the business. I  also work on the automation side. So, things like abandoned baskets, scrapbooks and post-booking.

I've also worked with a number of stakeholders, such as product owners, contractors, data scientists, you name it, CRM kind of works with it, the industry as a whole very exciting one. Obviously, it's seen a huge amount of trauma these last 18-20 months, but travel is coming out the other side really strong, and probably stronger than when it came in. I mean, think about it, who doesn't want to book a holiday? But the good thing about this role is there is a huge amount of responsibility. And if you have an idea, you can really make it happen at On the Beach.

Are you seeing lots of new bookings now that we're coming out of the pandemic, but also going into the colder months as well? Are people desperate to get back on the beach?

Yes, and no. When we released our free COVID test promotion, it coincided with the end of our off sale message> we've not been selling holidays during summer due to uncertainty, we've obviously been through a period of nobody booking holidays and things have been a little bit crazy. But it's kind of a period now where bookings do reduce up until you get to the peak of January. So we had the free COVID testing offer and It went crazy. Everyone started booking holidays. But it's kind of petered out a little bit until we get back to that peak period.

So could you explain a little bit about what sets you apart from other holiday retailers?

We're technically like a mediator. We don't own any hotels, and we don't own any airlines. So we basically package the deals together, and then the customer gets the cheapest price. But the really great thing about On the Beach is that we hold our customers money in a ring fenced trust account. So this essentially means we can't access it until the customer has travelled. So in the case of refunds, we can hopefully give that cash back to the customer pretty quickly, which helps us to build a lot of trust in the industry, which, over the last two years has been fraught with a lot of chaos.

So how do you send that message across to new customers? Is it on your website? Do you email them about that?

It's on our website, you can find it on the home pages, but we also send welcome emails. As part of that journey, the welcome journey that you receive when signing up to emails, you'll see that within our content, and we do try and highlight it in USP bars within emails. We don't gloat about it, probably because we've not really had to gloat about it. Usually, people book a holiday, they go on holiday, and there's no cancellation. So we obviously do talk about it a little bit more now. And when you join our mailing lists, hopefully, you'll see that straightaway as well.

So our primary channel is email, it's cheap - some still call it a free channel - and as a way to communicate at scale and fast, but we do use other methods. So push is a great way to broadcast a message. And it's also very cheap as well. SMS and direct mail over channels that we use on occasion, but they are more expensive and therefore less cost-effective, but depending on your audience and the message, they're also a really great way to interact with customers and other projects.

So how do you collect information on your customers and how does that inform the messages you send out?

So in terms of signups we ask for email addresses and in some cases first names, however, we mainly received the bulk of the data from either a booking or what the user is actually doing on our site.

So, if a customer is identifiable, we can see what they are looking at such as hotels, the board basis, where they are flying from, where they are flying to, number of days they are traveling. And when we received this, we attached the data to a user's profile, some places call it a single customer view, and personalise our content and our email content accordingly on what we've learned. Obviously, there's a limit to what we want to collect. And we're not going to collect all data, which could be seen as intrusive. So it's good to have limits on what you want to process. And also, there's limits on what you're allowed to process as well. Being a small team, we tend to send our most engaged segments. However, we can use this behavioural data from onsite behaviours, or even click and open data from emails to create smaller segments of who we may want to interact with.

So, for example, we know that an all inclusive customer, they usually go on to repeat purchase another all inclusive holiday that can be in the range of kind of over 80% retention rate. So we know generally, an all inclusive customer wants to receive all inclusive content, if we send them a room only deal or offer or themed email, they're probably not going to open and they may unsubscribe. So as far as using that data that you receive, obviously in the signups, but also the payroll stuff that you see from when the user is actually on the site.

That seems very logical to me. So if we go back pre-pandemic, what were the key goals you were striving for in your marketing? And what were the engagement levels?

Our main goal was bookings. So we wanted to increase year-on-year by around 15 to 20%, which I know sounds like a big target. But we had big, very still achievable ambitions and our content was recognisable to our audience, and we were capturing market share really well. But it was first and foremost acquisition lead. And that means flight, releases popular destinations, basically clickable content and engagement levels back then were really strong, but probably not as strong as we are coming out of the pandemic. So we've learned a lot during the time of being basically off sale as well.

So going back to when the pandemic hit, what were your initial reactions to the lockdown? Was there a lot of panic across the team? How did you adapt? And did you manage to adapt quite quickly?

It was a bit crazy, that is the best way to describe it. I mean, everything literally changed overnight. We stopped sending emails, I think it was Friday the 13th of March. It feels like such a dark day, not just because it's Friday the 13th but also because countries started to shut their borders.

So the first three weeks into the pandemic we had to help our contact centre. For example, Marrakech has shut the border, we've got thousands of people that are due to go on holiday or thousands of people that are trying to come home, let's send out a bulk email that can hopefully just tell the customers not to worry or actually go to the airport as quick as possible because Marrakech is about to shut its borders.

So those were some mad times and obviously, we really had to adapt to that. And because we stopped sending emails, we started becoming more at one with our service communications. So when out the service comms, we saw open rates in excess of 90%. This is understandable as a customer wants to know what is happening to their holiday, whether they can get home and whether they can go abroad. We noticed that plain text emails that some people reserve for post-purchase questioners and privacy policy updates were seeing a huge spike in opens. And that's because they were landing in different mailboxes. So they were given higher priority. So when you send a plain text email, it can usually end up in a primary inbox rather than a promotions inbox. And you'll see that particularly on Gmail, and because of that, it meant that we obviously got higher opens. The more that someone opens an email, and the safer it is, the higher up in someone's mailbox you're likely to get and less likely in spam. And that's what we found, we found that we were getting a good reputation because we were sending emails that people really wanted to read. And because of that, we're getting fantastic open rates.

Were the emails quite straight and to the point or quite formal? What tone were you taking?

Those service emails were obviously serious, because people's monies and whether the holiday was gonna go ahead we're discussed within those emails, but we did learn a lot from that. And using things like the word "important" in subject lines, we notice would get a higher open rate. So we basically took those learnings into our marketing plans that I think we're probably going to talk about a little bit later on, but it's something that we probably didn't take as much notice of pre pandemic until we actually had to live and breathe it during the pandemic.

In terms of company culture, as a whole, has the pandemic brought you all together? Or are you more working from home now and you're a bit distant? How's it been going?

For me it was hard to adapt to iat first, I loved being in the office. And I think being in marketing, it's nice to feel that really camaraderie and feel like you can get some really good idea creation. And we were worried that was going to basically disappear when working home. But in all honesty, the team and senior staff made it easier and simpler for us to work in a collaborative environment. And in addition to that, we have company-wide meetings with the senior team, and they keep us posted with new and interesting news in the travel and business space. We also had company-wide socials over Zoom, including comedians coming in. So that was a really nice change of pace. Yeah, from the four walls of our home offices.

Oh, that's brilliant. Are you managing to get back into the office and have in-person socials now?

Yeah, we were in the office just this week. So it was nice to see everyone. We've got other teams coming back into the office as well. So it's nice to have that back on the agenda. And I think it kind of feels like you're reconnecting with people, like long-lost family or something.

During the pandemic, you basically had to stop selling holidays, I watched you do your talk at the Festival of Marketing, you were talking about anti-trends, it was definitely like an anti-trend to do what you did during the pandemic. Can we break down the thinking behind what you did? And how did you know that this was the right approach to take at such a sensitive and difficult time?

I'm going to reverse a little bit further back as well. And I'm going to be honest, originally, I'd say that we got our strategy a little bit wrong. So we stopped sending our highly bookable content and change to content, which we thought would increase engagement. So informative destination related emails looking to target users who have either been or were showing interest in that destination.

Remember earlier, we were talking about behavioral content. So there's search and abandonment data. And we started creating personalised emails with data that customers provided us with and then segmented them based on who would find this content interesting, rather than broadcast messaging. But what we found is that although this content is really engaging for those who have been on site, it wasn't engaging enough to retain those who have not opened in a long time.

So what we had to do is we had to then change our plan. So how do we keep our actives active? We use information that we mentioned earlier that we learned from the service comms we sent out. So remember those 90% + open rates, if you use words like "important", you'll see a higher open but not only this, we found that timely updates into user's primary inbox achieved much higher opens and engagement.

We know what people are opening, so the question was, how can we actually utilise that? And we don't like to make it easy for ourselves. As you just mentioned, we stopped selling holidays, not just because the industry wasn't allowed to. It's because we took the decision to do that. Air trvavel reopened and as you mentioned, the business to the decision to stop selling holidays. All airlines and holiday companies were pushing for bookings in a market which has basically been parched for 12 months. We wanted the customers to trust us, and we won't be pushing you to go on a holiday when it could potentially be cancelled. And what actually did happen is we noticed that I think it was Portugal at the time, they went back on sale for Portugal, all the other companies in the industry. Two weeks later, Portugal got removed from the green list and put straightaway back onto the amber and red list. And at that very moment in time, we'd obviously said that we're not going to be selling summer 21 holidays. So we really did come out smelling of roses really. But because our databases became very perceptive to our updates on these government announcements, they've started really basically reading what we say. So we call them reputational emails, not a type of email we ever sent before. And that, as you mentioned earlier, was our anti trend to start sending these reputational, plain text, government announcement updates. So when we send the announcement, they listen. Open rates in excess of 40% on our active list, and then our inactive lists, which are people who have basically not been engaged with us for over 12 months, they were actually close to 20%. So as you mentioned, right at the start of the call our inactive list are as active as some people's active lists. So yeah, this really allowed us to reactivate and re engage our customers and enabled us to basically increase our active engagement by around 53% over around three weeks, and then that led perfectly in time to our free COVID testing promotion.

And was senior management on board with this?

Yeah it was the company's decision to take holidays off sale, a very punchy strategy. So you can see we work for a company that is willing to listen to new and interesting ideas. But having said that, some of the reputational content came from senior management and so when they take a risk, we believe we can take a risk as well. So for us, it was absolutely fine to do what we were doing because they were willing to take those types of risks and obviously the company saw huge reward from it.

Yeah, so you're quite well supported. What does your top management team look like?
From a marketing point of view, we have our chief marketing officer who oversees both brand and performance, up to directors at that level. And then it works its way down into our brand team, currently only small, a head of strategy on that side and brand manager, we've got a head of PR. And then on the other side, we've got head of data, got me, CRM manager, and we've got a couple of other managers in terms of content, PPC, but we're a small unit, that's basically everyone, probably around 15 to 20. In the whole of the marketing team for 40 to 50 company, we are quite a small operation at present.

But sometimes that can work in your favour, right? So if you have like a smaller team, the more riskier decisions are more likely to go through because there's less people opposing them, I suppose.

Absolutely, yeah, it's a small structure, there's only really a couple of people that you need to speak to, to try and get an idea off the ground. And again, I mentioned earlier, I work with stakeholders across the business with the product teams and tech and development through to data science. So if you've got an idea, although there's a limited resource, there is an opportunity to just grab them all together, and try and push the idea through. So it's a positive definitely not always negative.

Definitely. So what are engagement levels looking like at the moment, are you still seeing the same level of interest? Or have people just gone back on holiday and aren't really looking at their emails anymore?

Yeah, engagement is still strong. But however, we are moving away from the opens metric, mainly due to the challenges the CRM community will see from the iOS updates. The good news is that the industry is back to a place closer to pre-pandemic levels. And this means we can go back to our core objective, which is booking lead content.

You mentioned the iOS update, could you tell us a little bit more about that? What does that mean for email marketers?

I'd say is probably the biggest change that's happened in the CRM space for maybe the last 15 years. For anyone who doesn't know about iOS 15 and how it works, we can see when a user opens an email, so we can see down to the second within the data when somebody opens an email. And when you download iOS 15, you'll be presented with an option on Apple Mail, whether you want to protect yourself or not protect yourself.

If you select protect, that'll mean that we as CRM, people who use ESPs(email service providers) will no longer be able to see if you didn't open an email. So in that sense, when we send an email, we'll also believe that you've also opened an email if you're using iOS 15, and Apple Mail. So that causes a huge issue. If your segmentation is based on opens, and a lot of people's are, it means that you'll start receiving more emails rather than less. So actually, that protection from Apple Mail is not ideal, because you're receiving a lot more comms from people. And if marketers don't adapt to that, they'll actually start seeing higher unsubscribe rates, they'll start seeing send time optimization issues. So again, email marketers, we have tools where we can send emails at the exact time that we think you need to be opening that message. So there's a huge amount of problems that comes from this. So segmentation is going to have to have an overhaul.

We'll talk about behavioural campaigns. So I look after a lot of the automation, we were talking earlier about post-purchase communications, auxiliaries.

We use a filter, so say somebody opens an email, again, if we see that everyone's opened an email, we must be thinking that they might be engaging with that content, or especially that subject line. So again, that causes more problems for the customer because we might be thinking, "Okay, we'll send them another email, because they opened it", when actually, they might have never opened an email, which was about the holiday booking and we didn't realise and that didn't enable us to then send an SMS or a push to hopefully grab their attention to let them know about maybe some important pieces of information. So it's a huge issue. I'm trying to make it sound as dramatic as possible because I think it is. But if people don't adapt to it, I imagine we'll see higher unsubscribe rates, we'll see less personal communications, and we'll be seeing people receiving the wrong messages on the wrong channels, just because they don't have an idea of how they're actually opening.

Yeah, it's quite scary, really. And it's always a challenging time in marketing, isn't it? We'll include some links in the show notes and also in the blog post that we write up afterwards so you can find out more about that. Okay, so going back to your marketing. Can you give us some examples of the types of analytics tools that you use to test your marketing efforts?

Yeah, absolutely. So we split test everything. Most ESPs have a/b testing tools built in. Usually it tests subject lines, body copy, send time, as mentioned, although that might become a bit of an issue soon. In addition, we take a look at Google Analytics to understand the sessions and conversion rates and our UX guys have tools at their disposal as well. So we can usually track how a customer is moving through their journey. So we've got a lot of tools at our disposal that enable us to create the best possible journey for a user.

So what are your top tips for marketers looking to ramp up their customer engagement levels? And if they're having any problems considering the last 18 months, what's your advice to them?

I'd say this last 18 months has been a roller coaster, and therefore don't panic, you can have periods of time where your database is not engaged. But you can improve this when the message and the time is right. So yeah, although we saw issues where we saw a list really reduced in size, but we knew if we kept people engaged within a certain limit, the demand would return to the industry, and we could really profit from it when we send the correct message. But if you're looking to boost opens, I would strongly recommend sending emails which can land in primary inboxes. That's plain text and simple emails and include the customer's first name. The subject line will vastly increase your open rates.

Just make sure to test everything because this might help increase engagement, but check it doesn't also increase your unsubscribes.

Also, try to add more personalization. If a customer has been looking at a Turkey holiday or dynamic banner in a ticket email which is related to Turkey, nudge them back into that booking journey, and hopefully you'll see the reward of them making an order or booking at the end of it.

Fantastic. That's really good advice. Can you tell us what email service provider you use?

Currently, use Iterable. We integrated with them prior to me joining. They are a very good ESPand would recommend them.

What is your top beach destination and why?

This is a tough one. Obviously pre-pandemic we loved them, but I would say in October 2020 it felt like freedom! We were obviously still in the pandemic and 2020 was a crazy year but we found a week where we could just escape to Greece because it was on the green list and it was the gorgeous blue sky - it was just fantastic.

Sounds like a dream. Yeah, we went Scotland recently for our first holiday. Scotland is beautiful but it's just the novelty of being able to go somewhere after the pandemic I think really helps. What are your top three must-have items to go on a beach holiday with?

Stay Safe kids! Pack sun cream, always. For me, it's a pack of cards. If you're not playing gin rummy are you even on holiday? Are you even abroad? So definitely pack some cards and then just sliders or flip-flops. I mean, you can't go away about them.

That's about it from me... oh, sunglasses! Let's not forget sunglasses.

Yeah, perfect. I couldn't agree more. Well, thank you so much, Adam. It's been an absolute pleasure. And I hope you enjoy your next holiday wherever it might take you!

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