Daka 90: The Measure of Success

Daka 90: The Measure of Success

Daka 90 is Israel’s number one online travel and booking portal. With a clientele in the hundreds of thousands, the company was already using email communication on a regular basis to build, support and maintain a valued customer base. One such use of email was to provide a weekly Hot Deals promotion, which consisted of some thirty destinations and the limited-time special offerings and discounts available for them.

The aim was to generate the highest possible clickthrough/order rate.

Stephan Sade, VP Marketing and Operations at Daka 90 says “Hundreds of thousands of emails go out each month providing our customers, per their request, with information on the newest and hottest travel packages. Our problem was – we had no idea how effective these marketing programs were, or if they were bringing in added revenue at all.”

The need to measure their effectiveness led them to ActiveTrail.
After an initial meet with our ActiveTrail team of email experts, it became clear that although Daka 90 put in every effort to produce the most effective campaigns – customized, full-graphic sales incentives – what they didn’t spend time on was what happens after clicking on “send”. There was no way to answer key questions, such as:

• Did the email get there?
• How many didn’t arrive at the inbox, and why?
• Of those that arrived, how many were opened? When?

And especially significant in this example:

• How many of the opened emails resulted in actual sales? (clickthrough to purchase tickets)

Experience has shown that without effective tracking and analysis of an email campaign, there is no way to measure success. Moreover, the time and money spent on campaign creation can be wasted if the campaign doesn’t arrive, or if it misses its mark. That’s where ActiveTrail steps in.

To enable measurable results of their campaigns, Daka 90 began using the powerful, web-based, easy-to-use ActiveTrail email delivery system for delivery and statistics, alongside our expert professional services package for on-call personal analysis of data retrieved.

Deliverability: Getting there is half the battle

The first obvious result was the leap in deliverability. Differing from the previous home-grown system, ActiveTrail was smoothly passing through SPAM filters and ISP blockings thanks to its high anti-SPAM standards and investment in ISP relations. But high deliverability was not enough. Daka 90 discovered that over 15% of their email hard-bounced (indicating emails no longer in use or with syntax errors), and not enough clients opened the email at all, resulting in lower than expected booking rates. The ActiveTrail tracking system did show, however, that although sales were less than optimum, they were generated by those who read the offer. This information was invaluable to Daka 90, enabling them to focus on how to reach more of the users instead of taking an entirely new approach to their sales strategy.

The hard-bounces were dealt with first, requiring an update of customer information, performed by Operations on a manual basis. The second solution involved a change of subject line to facilitate greater email opening. Active Trail helped with A/B testing which proved that a more specific lead in the subject line led to much higher email opening rates than with a more generic title in the subject line (e.g., “Travel to the Far East 50% off” versus “Daka 90 Hot Summer Deals”).

From Campaign to Sales: Increasing the bottom line

While changing the subject line enabled greater email opening, it did not ensure greater clickthrough/ordering. To help increase sales, our team of Professional Services experts worked closely with Daka 90 to define, trial, and get results by defining emails that capture the audience. In this case, it involved promoting fewer travel packages – a reduction from dozens to 4 – where all four offered the same percentage of savings, but where one was a five star, prestigious venue. Together we learned that there were a greater number of orders placed when the subject line reflected the most expensive, versus the best deal hotel.

“With Active Trail, our email delivery rates increased by 90 percent, and our revenues, measurably – by 66 percent. That’s what we call success.” – Stephen Sade, VP Marketing and Operations, Daka 90.