According to the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, 2006-2009, 65% or greater of the population that is over the legal age procures travel reservations online. Given such research, it is no surprise that travel/hospitality industry marketers are re-allocating the majority of their marketing budgets online. Bigmouthmedia's 2010 Travel Report reveals that companies intend to increase the proportion of their marketing budgets being spent online to 57% in 2010. As the industry responds to unprecedented economic pressure, a clear majority also intend to significantly increase spending on social media over the next year.

The travel industry is notorious for sending the same campaign to each person in its customer file or its prospect database, regardless of whether or not the offer is a fit. Driving campaign performance in the travel sector is almost entirely driven by destination and offer relevance. Through extensive experience supporting nationally recognized travel, hospitality and gaming brands as well as local, independently owned properties, V12 Group has developed significant, relevant experience in each of the critical success factors that drive response in travel oriented direct marketing.

V12 Group's experience and research has identified the following primary business issues, goals or objectives facing travel industry marketers in 2010:

Improve campaign performance

• V12 Group has significant experience in helping travel marketers develop comprehensive understanding of their customer base and target audience opportunities. We do so by developing clear profiles of each segment in the customer base which allows clients to develop segment specific creative imagery, messaging and calls to action to ensure the right message goes to the right person at the right time. This ensures all marketing expense is focused on the right target audience.
• V12 Group can also use the findings of customer profiling to identify which data elements are needed for campaign segmentation and offer creation to existing customer bases. V12 Group can then append such attributes to the client's customer file.
• V12's Consumer Database contains 209 million U.S. Consumers and 116 million households. This represents slightly over 85% of the U.S. population. This contains information such as demographics, lifestyle, behavioral, travel interest selects as well as social media attributes such as social memberships (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), social graphs to identify social influences and online psychograph data points. This allows marketers to develop the appropriate target audiences and drive relevant client and prospect campaigns across any channel they choose, whether that be offline, online, email or the social media sphere. Further, V12 Group's consumer database can be made available in the travel call center and web customer interactions as a means to expedite the interaction and improve conversion while also eliminating data capture errors.
• In some instances it may be appropriate to use a multi-channel campaign approach. V12 Group can augment direct mail campaigns with email data and deployment to improve campaign performance through multi-channel marketing.

Reduce direct marketing cost by using lower cost media

• In numerous client engagements we find prior customers returning for reservation handling via Google or other search engine. This significantly escalates costs associated with customer acquisition. By developing customer profiles, models and segmentation strategies that provide insight into customer behavior and preference, travel and hospitality marketers can target and tailor relevant offerings, calls to action and content to the right audience and deliver messages using email marketing. This drives bookings while developing brand recall at the same time.
• Emailing to house lists has been the area of largest budget increase as a result of economic slowdown. The travel industry experienced an 11% growth in email marketing expenditure in 2009. As a result, email list growth is a top-issue facing most every company. V12 Group can dramatically increase penetration of client house lists by matching client files to our 75+ million opt-in email database. We permission pass all matched records and append those that do not opt-out. We can also suppress bad client email addresses by matching to our 1.2 billion record hard-bounce file. The net result is significant growth in email coverage of their customer database and improved accuracy.
• Most industry thought leaders forecast that business will return focus and budget allocation to new customer acquisition in 2010. Email has become one of the channels of choice for leading brands, however working with a reputable partner is far more important in email than in other channels. V12 Group is one of the direct marketing industry's proven full-service providers. As a result of our infrastructure, consistent results and flexibility in private labeling our services, the majority of the industry's largest companies turn to V12 Group for prospect email marketing.
• The V12 Group database also contains social media attributes. These social media attributes include social memberships (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), social graphs to identify "social influencers" and online psychographic data points. This will enable marketers to drive relevant campaigns offline, online, through email and within the social spectrum.

Effective use of social media

• In addition to all standard Consumer Database information, such as demographic, lifestyle, behavioral and channel data (email address, postal address, cell phone, landline phone), V12 Group also contains social media attributes. These social media attributes include social memberships (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), social graphs to identify "social influencers" and online psychographic data points. This will enable marketers to drive relevant campaigns offline, online, through email and into the social sphere.