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How unifying customer profiles is paying off for this iconic travel brand

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How unifying customer profiles is paying off for this iconic travel brand

Swiftcurrent Lake in the Many Glacier region at Glacier National Park. Image provided by Xanterra.

Xanterra Travel Company owns an extremely unique and diverse collection of travel and hospitality brands that all share a common mission — to provide travelers with unforgettable experiences. 

Xanterra manages concessions at many well-known national parks and destinations including Glacier National Park, The Grand Canyon, and Mount Rushmore. Their properties cover a combined eight million acres of land. They also own or manage over 30 hotels adjacent to these iconic locations and, as if that weren’t enough, they own six luxury yachts, seven golf courses, and 89 food and beverage outlets.

“We’re a company that that grows organically through acquisition,” explained Andrew Heltzel, Xanterra’s corporate director of marketing, CRM and analytics. Heltzel has been with the company for 11 years. 

Five years ago he found himself faced with the task of unifying customer identities across multiple brands and experiences. Xanterra needed to combine their customer data and profiles into one single identity to better personalize marketing messaging and identify opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling to their vast customer base (Xanterra’s 8000 staff members service over 20 million guests each year.)

To achieve this monumental task, Xanterra partnered with Redpoint Global, a customer experience platform that specializes in creating a “Golden Record” for each customer by combining and resolving multiple profiles into a single identity, enabling much more targeted and relevant personalization.

“We help brands create a golden record of their consumer by resolving all identities that the consumer might use,” said John Nash, Redpoint Global’s chief marketing and strategy officer. “Brands can integrate all attributes into a single customer view and append third party data to it. We update that with identity resolution in real time.”

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Onboarding the right technology 

Because of Xanterra’s growth model, they didn’t have the luxury of standardizing the systems they use throughout the organization to facilitate guest bookings and operations the way a company like Marriott would. When searching for a technology that could achieve an advanced level of customer identity resolution, Heltzel’s team cast a broad net. 

“We just sort of get what we get,” said Heltzel. “Redpoint allowed us to leave our existing infrastructure in place. We brought in over 100 different sources of data and established a Golden Record across the different interfaces and source systems.”

Heltzel notes that when scoping out vendors — a process that begin in 2017 — Redpoint stood out during the RFP process. They understood Xanterra’s data complexities and brought the best and fastest solution compared with the competition. “They gave us the most confidence that they would deliver on their promises — which they have,” he said.

To kick off the vendor selection and onboarding process, Xanterra established a core team of about 15 individuals made up of leaders from every brand in their portfolio. “This was probably one of the first enterprise-wide projects that impacted all the companies within the organization,” explained Heltzel. “It was new territory for us.”

Finding the golden ticket — er, record

The  onboarding process with Redpoint took about six months. “It was surprisingly fast in my view,” said Heltzel. “We could have gone even faster, but we decided to go through the implementation process brand by brand.”

Xanterra worked with Redpoint to establish a Golden Record of guests across their different brands. This enabled them to see which customers were traveling with brands throughout their portfolio, a huge breakthrough according to Heltzel. 

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Redpoint was instrumental in training Heltzel’s team. They worked with Xanterra to take a “crawl, walk, run “approach within the platform. 

“They restrained our marketers from getting out too far over their skis too quickly,” said Heltzel. “Redpoint had a really great team of trainers and support that we could access 24/7 as our brands started to really engage with implementing the platform.”

Once all the data was combined and customer identities unified, Xanterra began creating audience segments with personalized messaging.

A leap forward in personalization and ROI

The impacts of their new unified marketing approach were felt almost immediately. For the first time, Xanterra was able to segment their audiences in a way that allowed them to deliver offers to specific groups of customers (e.g., a family group, a group of golfers, retirees, etc.) Some brands saw increases in their email ROI north of 400% within the first year.

“It was absolutely stunning,” said Heltzel. “We were coming from basically nothing — just a batch and blast type of email tool that didn’t even allow us to manage customer preferences. Unsubscribes were a little sketchy at best. We’ve really made a massive leap forward with our partnership with Redpoint.”

Heltzel credits a major reason for their success to Redpoint’s dedicated support throughout the entire process of onboarding, implementation and usage. 

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“Dale Renner, one of Redpoint’s founders, came out to visit us here in Denver when we were at the most critical part of the project—the implementation and adoption phase,” said Heltzel. “He assured us that he would be there to support us to whatever extent necessary to ensure we were successful and he stood behind that.”

Read next: How a smart email strategy helped Apple Rose Beauty thrive during the pandemic

A digital transformation initiative of the size and complexity of Xanterra’s requires committed vendor support — a true partnership. “We see Redpoint as strategic business partner — not a software vendor, not a data vendor, but a true strategic business partner of ours,” said Heltzel.

Technology as a means of future proofing

Travel businesses were hard hit by COVID, and Xanterra was no exception, but having Redpoint in place helped them prepare for — and address — changing consumer behaviors, demands, and expectations caused by the pandemic.

Said Heltzel, “Overnight, we pivoted our messaging from marketing-focused to more operations focused. So, how to prepare for your upcoming travel, what to expect when you arrive, etc.”

Heltzel notes that today’s travel environment remains fluid. For example, they recently had a COVID outbreak among a large contingent of food and beverage staff at Yellowstone. This forced Xanterra to pivot from dining table service to grab-and-go food and beverage options.

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“From an operations perspective, we were able to use Redpoint and our dataset to impact the customer experience and help set expectations up front so that no one was taken by surprise when they arrived.”

For companies looking to undertake this advanced level of digital transformation, Heltzel’s main piece of advice is to do your homework up front. 


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Said Heltzel, “A lot of our success with Redpoint is largely attributable to how deep we go into our brands, and how Redpoint could support them, not only 10 years ago, but looking into the future. We took our time doing our due diligence around the type of customer experience we wanted to achieve,  which was delivering real-time personalized experiences across every channel. Hands down, all of our marketing leadership said yes, that’s the future. That’s where we need to be. We were able to lean into the Redpoint solution to take advantage of that capability over time.”


About The Author

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Jacqueline Dooley is a freelance B2B content writer and journalist covering martech industry news and trends. Since 2018, she’s worked with B2B-focused agencies, publications, and direct clients to create articles, blog posts, whitepapers, and eBooks. Prior to that, Dooley founded Twelve Thousand, LLC where she worked with clients to create, manage, and optimize paid search and social campaigns.

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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More promotions and more layoffs

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More promotions and more layoffs

For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.

The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.

Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes

Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643. 

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Here are the median salaries by role:

  • Senior management $199,653
  • Director $157,776
  • Manager $99,510
  • Staff $89,126

Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.

One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%). 

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Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.

Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams

Employee turnover 

In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”

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Men and Women

Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540

This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.

In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.

Methodology

The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents. 

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Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.

Get MarTech! Daily. Free. In your inbox.

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