Travel and Leisure Case Study: Walt Disney World

CLIENT:

Located near Orlando, Florida, Walt Disney World (WDW) is the world’s most popular resort vacation, drawing millions of visitors from around the world looking for once-in-a-lifetime family vacation.

CHALLENGE:

A trip to Walt Disney World is high on many families’ vacation wish list. But over the years, WDW has identified some key barriers that prevent prospects from booking trips, among them: affordability, age of children, lack of urgency, and feeling overwhelmed by the planning process. To overcome these issues, Disney wanted to test the effectiveness and measurability of targeted email messages in generating orders for WDW vacation planning kits.

SOLUTION:

Using historical response data to prioritize lead generation efforts, Environics Analytics identified the PRIZM clusters of prospects most likely to request a kit. Thanks to a partnership between EA and Sympatico / MSN, which applies PRIZM segments to highly responsive emails, analysts created target and control groups for an email message so that open, click, and response rates could be compared. Because PRIZM classifies Canadians into 66 distinct lifestyle types, the analysis provided enough detail to allow Disney to zero in on promising prospects. E-CRM tools designed by ThinData also permitted instant PRIZM analysis of all respondents in order to track who opened, clicked through and responded—or failed to respond. In addition, researchers conducted a response analysis so that WDW could understand who responded to this campaign versus those who might make better prospects for another campaign, perhaps with a different message or an offer better tailored to their lifestyles and sensibilities.

RESULTS:

The EA analysis identified two distinct groups of PRIZM clusters that made up WDW’s best customers: Affluent Escapists (white-collar, professional families in new suburbs) and Blue-Collar Indulgence (average-income families), and applied insights from Social Values research to create differentiated messaging for each group. Using the targeted approach to email marketing, the open rates from respondents reached nearly 29 percent—greater than the industry norm of 25 percent; click rates were three times the industry average. The analysis also found potential opportunities among consumers who have promising characteristics (high presence of children and high theme park visitation rates), but who did not respond well to this family-focused campaign. These included certain clusters of affluent young singles and couples, some upper-middle-class suburban ethnic households and very affluent maturing families. WDW has plans to explore which messages and channels resonate with these groups to develop new markets.