BeachBound’s Introductory Offer campaign launched in November of 2022 and ran through December 9, 2022. With their Introductoy Offer, BeachBound guaranteed that customers could book a vacation package (airfare and hotel) for $400 less than anywhere else.
BeachBound, an online travel agency, launched in 2022. The brand faced many challenges, including a lack of brand awareness, a lack of brand trust in a high-cost category, and lots of well-known competition. BeachBound wanted to make a large splash by introducing the brand to customers with an amazing offer, with the hope of encouraging trial. The primary goal was to grow bookings. BeachBound wanted to show consumers why the brand was better than the competition in order to gain trust and create long term customers.
The limited time offer gave customers the opportunity to shop the site for the first time and book a trip for less, during a time when airfare was high, and travel was more expensive than normal. BeachBound’s Introductory Offer saw great success through an increase in bookings and trial of the brand.
After conducting a large brainstorm with several different offers and ideas, the team settled on “$400 less than anywhere else, guaranteed.” This meant we had to start by lowering prices sitewide in a way that helped insure we were in fact, $400 less than the competition. This was our first challenge. We knew we could get close to this guarantee, but how would we be sure? Our revenue management team did the research and wrote the function to make this possible. We then prepared terms that outlined on the off chance someone did find a lower price, the steps they could take the get a price match and then an additional $400 off. We prepared our call center to handle those types of situations, although we did not face that challenge once the sale went live as our pricing model worked.
We then began to prepare a marketing plan. We wanted this to be a very strategic sale that would increase brand awareness to facilitate launch. We researched how we could reach the highest percentage of our target audience with the most efficient spend. We settled on six key markets: New York City, Phoenix, Sacramento, Dallas/Fort Worth, Philadelphia, and Houston. In those markets we ran terrestrial radio, podcasts, Spotify/Pandora, and OOH. We ran paid social and display nationwide. We also ran a broadcast news story nationwide. We planned 11 emails, 4 SMS messages, 4 social videos, 4 story sets, and worked with our website development team to identify 7 unique placements within the website for ads regarding the offer. We also worked with 2 influencers who traveled on unique trips during the offer and promoted the sale from their channels. All of the creative was unique to the campaign with a very cohesive look and feel throughout all channels.
The primary objective of the campaign was to increase bookings. BeachBound saw a 400% increase in bookings over the period, making the campaign a huge success. After the campaign ended, while bookings did decrease slightly, the brand continued to see increased site traffic and bookings compared to the months leading up to the campaign.
Another primary goal was to increase brand awareness. BeachBound saw over 10k email clicks that drove over 7.7k sessions to the site, the highest performance on email to date. SMS also saw its highest performance during the sale. Lastly, BeachBound received over 332k organic social impressions on campaign related content.
BeachBound conducts a post-trip survey and results from that survey have been overwhelmingly positive, with most customers saying they will use BeachBound again. This shows success with our third goal which was to build a repeat customer base.
Overall, this campaign brought lots of buzz and attention to the brand and significantly increased bookings, making it a successful Introductory Offer and brand launch campaign.
