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Xanterra Parks & Resorts Boosts Campaign Performance up to 839%

January 15, 2017

170116 Redpoint Xanterralivingroom_871622Xanterra Parks & Resorts may be the travel and hospitality industry’s sweetest secret. The company owns or manages 34 hotels with 5,600 rooms, manages 8 million acres of land, and owns six luxury yachts, 89 food and beverage outlets, seven golf courses, 16 swimming pools, four marinas, and four stables. With all of these properties comes the incredible opportunity to cross-sell, heighten one-to-one customer engagement, and ultimately grow their business. With the help of RedPoint Global’s proprietary customer data platform (CDP), Xanterra boosted marketing campaign performance as high as 839% and enjoyed year-over-year revenue improvement of 91%. Their story is not unlike many of our customers, who come to us seeking a 360-degree view of their customers as a foundation to enhanced customer engagement and strategic business improvement.

The Challenges

Xanterra wanted to move towards one-to-one marketing that reflected the unique passions and preferences of each guest, creating valuable synergies within and across all the company’s properties. The entire project started with getting the data right, which turned out to be a major challenge because Xanterra’s diverse portfolio of properties relied on more than 100 sources of customer data – each with unique characteristics and complexities. Data from its multiple brands lived in silos and couldn’t be consolidated for marketing action.

The first step on the road to one-to-one marketing was for Xanterra, with RedPoint’s help, to unify its data into a common database. Building on this foundation, Xanterra next aimed to segment its customers, and map their journeys through the customer experience. With unified customer data, segmentation, and guest mapping in place, Xanterra could leverage many new opportunities to drive value, improve marketing performance and operating efficiency, and enhance the guest experience.

The Solution

Xanterra recognized RedPoint Global’s unique ability to deliver a complete end-to-end solution – from data to insight to action – through a unified platform. Thanks to RedPoint’s platform, Xanterra could connect virtually any data source, channel, or media through ready-to-use adapters and built-in messaging orchestration.

According to Andrew Heltzel, director for Marketing and CRM at Xanterra, “RedPoint engineered a data intake solution that allowed us to keep basically all our existing IT infrastructure 100% intact. We didn’t have to change a single reservation platform to get all our data into our common database. We didn’t have to standardize systems or data entry processes across all of our businesses, or address inconsistencies, or overcome a lack of connections across our enterprise. Instead, by leveraging RedPoint’s data management strengths, we quickly got a 360-degree view of our customers.”

RedPoint’s CDP technology handles all cleaning, standardization, and enrichment with more than 300 third-party appended attributes. “That took us from ‘unknown’ or ‘partially known’ profiles to very strong profiles, known both demographically and psychographically,” said Heltzel. “Plus, for the first time, we have visibility across all of our brands’ data. Now, we know if you’ve cruised with us on Windstar, if you’ve also stayed with us at Glacier National Park, and if you’re also a prospect for us now at Austin Adventures. This immediately helped us create more meaningful, targeted, and timely messaging.”

Xanterra can now tell which brands organically share common types of guests and successfully market across them. This practice is aided with the seven core segments that the RedPoint platform “bubbled up,” which allow Xanterra to create robust personas for and market across their customer base. RedPoint also made it easy to track lifestyle changes that shift customers from one persona to another – potentially a key driver of campaign lift.

Putting comprehensive data and personas in place enabled Xanterra to map out every digital and analog guest touch for most of its brands, including emails, call centers, and front desk interactions, and to align those touches with the consumer’s emotional state at the moment. With this data, Xanterra centrally manages post-book, pre-arrival communications and can lessen the burden on local marketing teams. Xanterra’s marketers also use RedPoint’s visual tools to construct automated behavioral-based campaigns that encourage prospects to share the information.

The Results

With the help of the RedPoint Convergent Marketing Platform™, which includes our proprietary CDP technology, Xanterra was able to develop far more relevant offers, featuring unique and targeted imagery, content, and subject lines through a blend of segmentation, A/B testing, and its fresh 360-degree customer view. These new campaigns earned 73 cents per email, on average, versus 8 cents for previous average campaigns. This was an improvement of 839% once the RedPoint system was fully deployed, and included growth in every segment.

Xanterra is now focused on building deeper two-way links with their call centers and leveraging their data to help customer service representatives have more personalized, relevant, and profitable conversations with prospects. This is a natural outgrowth of their digital personalization efforts, which resulted in 91% year-over-year revenue improvement and 103% year-over-year increase in transactions.

With the help of RedPoint, Xanterra conquered its customer data challenges and built more personalized and relevant marketing campaigns. They now intend to move deeper into omnichannel marketing with the aid of RedPoint’s powerful social media toolset and pursue new B2B opportunities, extending their business from a historical B2C emphasis.