With powder from two successful virtual reality ski campaigns just settling, Monarch is thinking about what to do next. Pamela Whitby reports

“If I receive a postal mailer through the door and it doesn’t grab me within a few seconds, then it’s in the bin,” says Liam Gibson, direct & overseas marketing manager at Monarch Airlines. 

That certainly didn’t happen with the first of two innovative direct marketing campaigns, which launched in September 2012, to raise awareness of Monarch’s move into the ski space. What landed through the door of 55,000 profiled customers was a supersized fold out mail pack developed by direct response and relationship marketing agency WDMP.  The pack unfolded to reveal an impressive die-cut mountain range with aspirational images and action shots. 

By downloading the free augmented reality Blippar app, potential customers could hover over the pack to explore the resorts and mountain in 3D, and click on the destinations for more information about the location, average snowfall, après ski bars and so on. To ensure rich and relevant content, Monarch partnered with British Olympic skier Chemmy Alcott to provide rich content in the form of training videos, warm up and even fashion tips. A ‘snow globe’, which customers could input an image into, and then share across their social networks, was yet another ploy to drive customer engagement. 

The only way to determine the true success of a direct marketing campaign is to look at the data, says Gibson. So, did this first “relatively risky” campaign, which Monarch allocated around 19% of its yearly marketing budget to, pay off? 

 It seems it did. Here are some stats worth sitting up for:

• 55,000 – the number of people who received a pack
• 7,000 – the number of bookings generated with a response rate of 12.9%
• £2.2m – overall revenue that came from the direct channel with an incremental ROI of 18.1%. 
• 24% - the increase in average booking value from users that used the AR app to explore the Monarch mountain and link to the website.  
• 21.7% the percentage of all people contacted via email who visited the site as a result of the campaign 

Careful Targeting

When this first campaign launched, Monarch was new to the ski scene so it was really important to do careful targeting. As Gibson points out, “you can spend less money and have a cheaper mail pack, but if its not targeted then you really are wasting money”.  From its existing database of 4.8 million, of which 1.9 million are opted in, Monarch targeted 50,000 existing customers and bought in a further 5,000.  This selection was made based on a tool, developed by WDMP, that allowed Monarch to profile its users against the Ski Club of Great Britain’s member database, which turned out to have a similar demographic. 

Prior to the direct mail campaign, the recipients sent an email saying that something good was coming through the post; follow up emails were sent to remind them of the offers and discounts.  As Monarch was new to the ski industry, and in the spirit of getting to know its customer, it took time to understand what skiers really like, or dislike. It learnt, for example, that skiers hate to pay for lifts, so free passes were offered as part of the promotion. 

Upping the game 

Having made its mark on the ski scene, Monarch followed up with a second campaign which “really upped game in terms of technology” and was segmented by group and non-group bookings. Again, working closely with WDMP, the team came up with the idea for ‘photosphere’ - instead of having to download an app, users could hover over a QR code or simply link to the website to find a 360-degree experience. 

Best viewed on an iPad, the HTML5, browser-based tool allows users to visit the Monarch mountain; routes are highlighted and when clicked on more information appears about a particular resort or destination including scoring charts for après ski, slope ratings, snowfall, live snow feeds from ski club of GB, live pricing and a regular competition called ‘search the slopes’. This is still live until the end of this month to maximise bookings from the season. 

To date, this photosphere campaign has generated: 

• £ 4 million in bookings 
• Over 12,000 visits to the website. 
• 1500 new sign ups ‘and counting’ from the ‘search the slopes’ competition 

So, the snow season may be nearly over but Gibson is clear that new digital technologies, coupled with traditional postal campaigns, can be applied to any direct marketing effort. Another interactive marketing campaign is on the cards for 2014/15 but Gibson admits: “We’ve set the bar high and need to be on our game to beat it”. 

Watch this space!