Travel leader relies on Vibes’ "seamless” Marketo integration to drive 10x boost in member engagement

Key Results

The Results

The travel loyalty leader partially measures the success of their marketing programs by their ability to drive inbound phone calls. “We would send emails out before, and it would take 10,000 emails just to drive 1 phone call. Now with Vibes, only 1,000 SMS messages sent drives that first inbound phone call – one-tenth of the amount of effort to effectively engage with our members”.

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The company spokesperson also highlights that “The Vibes team is always providing ideas, helping us to develop solutions and to do things better that we’d never even thought about." One recent example was that the company's internal team had been very excited about sending MMS messages to their members, yet they’d been unsure that it would actually work with their Vibes/Marketo integration. The Vibes team proactively set up a meeting to show them how their current set-up in Marketo would allow them to easily trigger MMS messages within Vibes, and now the team is set up for success with a fully-integrated SMS, MMS and Mobile Wallet solution. “Vibes are very proactive, and they help us remove barriers to ensure that mobile messaging just works”, said the company’s VP spokesperson.

The Challenge

A leading travel loyalty company had primarily been engaging with its members through email until 2019, and had a strong sense that, as consumers shifted their behavior and interaction with brands to their mobile devices, the company would have an opportunity to potentially drive much higher member engagement and follow-through with them via SMS and mobile channels.

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This company set about to look for a highly-regarded and experienced SMS provider, with a stated goal of avoiding simple “batch-and-blast" SMS broadcasting tools. They were interested in helping their marketing team eliminate busywork as well, and therefore sought to bring in a platform that integrated beautifully with Marketo, their marketing automation platform. This was important because they had a desire to personalize text messages based on where members might be in their journey, and to do it all from one place, as opposed to within different pieces of software.

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The Solution

After exploring mobile marketing platforms and “playing around” with several, they found that most were missing the automation and integrations they needed, and that these other solutions were quite limited compared with Vibes. The company selected Vibes as their mobile engagement platform of choice in 2019, and they haven’t looked back.

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They company zoomed from 0 to 50,000 SMS subscribers in their first year alone. The out-of-the-box integration with Marketo was a huge reason why. Marketers can write SMS messages right within Marketo – and the team at the travel loyalty provider loves this for both broadcast and automated messages, so that these marketers don’t have to go learn another tool.

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“We can send very personal messages that are related to a member’s interaction or lack of interaction with us”, said a company leader. “If there are situations in which a person is making a transaction and they have savings credits that will be deducted from their account, we can easily alert them about it, to help build rapport and a relationship with these customers." The company also now sends broadcast marketing messages on special sales promotions and other key details they’d like their member base to know about.

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The company is also using Vibes’ Mobile Wallet functionality to support their travel and rewards partners. When the company sets up a mobile wallet integration with a partner - for instance, when guests book a room at a resort - it includes all branding and personalization to ensure that guests have a fantastic experience from the moment of booking to the time they leave the property. "We didn’t have to hire a development firm for this; we did it with Vibes, and now have a tool within the company that really helps marketers, without having to rely on a third party”, said the company’s spokesperson