People visit Scotland for a wide range of reasons. Some are looking to take a short break in one of the country’s bustling cities, while others visit to complete the famous whisky trail. Families, in contrast, often choose to spend their Summer holidays getting away from it all on one of Scotland’s remote islands.
VisitScotland had an existing pool of prospective vacationer contact information, but they were keen to further increase the size of this database. The organisation also frequently lacked the necessary customer profiling information to connect the right prospects with the most appropriate travel itineraries, so capturing this additional data was also a key goal. By having this information, Visit Scotland can promote the most appropriate and attractive adventure in Scotland, with the aim of attracting more visitors.
Finally, VisitScotland were looking for a way to amplify the effectiveness of their outbound marketing activities. By encouraging their contacts to share their plans or experiences with their social networks, they could enable Scotland to be promoted as a holiday destination to both a wider and younger audience.
To meet these requirements, 3radical and VisitScotland created an interactive quiz experience that was deployed as responsive web content embedded into the VisitScotland website. Existing contacts and new site visitors were encouraged to provide self-reported data by answering profiling questions that were embedded into a Scottish trivia quiz. In return for completing the quiz, users were able to earn entries into a prize draw to win a dream trip to Scotland.
After engaging each prospect, they were shown a ‘pop profile’ that described the segment they belonged to, such as ‘Scottish Nature Lovers’ or ‘City Breakers’, based on their responses.
This preference information was then used to send follow-up email communications with suggested travel itineraries appropriate to each segment and designed to convert more prospects into vacationers.
In order to maximise the impact of the campaign, users were able to earn additional prize draw entries by sharing details of the quiz experience with friends and family members via a range of channels, including Facebook, Twitter and email.
The quiz was a resounding hit with both previous visitors and new prospects with thousands of people engaging and tens of thousands of concentually earned data points being captured by the campaign.
Based on the data provided, VisitScotland was able to determine that the most popular visitor category was ‘City Breakers’, insight the organisation was able to leverage accordingly in follow up communications.
Over 90% of respondents reported they were either ‘very likely’ or ‘likely’ to take a trip to Scotland in the near future, with ‘Outdoor Adventure’ and ‘History and Culture’ being the two main reasons they cited for planning a visit – valuable insight that again could also be incorporated into subsequent outbound marketing activities to help drive visitors to Scotland.
As VisitScotland have already collected this valuable visitor and prospect data, they can now use this to more effectively engage vacationers with targeted messages after the pandemic has subsided.