Email Journeys:

A Customized Marketing Communication

What is an Email Journey? An email journey is a monthly email cycle developed by Road Scholar to bring curated products to the user's inbox. 

The problem:

Road Scholar has over 2,000 trips available to book on any given day. A very small email marketing team consisting of 1 designer (yours truly!), 1 writer, 1 analyst and 1 project manager was responsible for producing all of our emails. Pre-2017, we were producing 3-4 emails a week that each featured 9 programs. 

52 weeks a year, about 4 emails a week x 9 programs

= 1,872 possible product placements in email per year. 

One program promoted once a year? Clearly, this was not sufficient enough to meet our needs as a business, and the demand on the email marketing team was already pretty great.

We thought to ourselves... what if?

What if we could have emails going out that supported every product category or destination of our offering?

What if leads interested in a specific destination or interest could receive emails supporting that interest?

Seems pretty straightforward, to be sure - but at the time, with such limited resources, we were not able to manually curate and produce the high-quality content our users required (and deserved!)

Our Vision & Goals:

• Produce engaging content

• Leverage existing web assets

• Weight audience segments by activity and interests

• Build templates to support dynamically generated content

• Find a way to automate the process

Knowing Our Customer

We knew a few essential demographics of Road Scholar's primary customer. But for our email program, our first goal was to get to know what differentiates one subscriber from another so that we can be sure to send them specific campaigns we recognize as relevant to them. Our email analyst began by developing an inferred preference scoring model using all of the data we have in our universe. Based on this information, we broke our offerings down into 4 broad categories: Travel Style, Interests, Destination, and Product Line. We then segmented our offerings and audiences into subcategories.

Building the Content

Ok - We have the concept, we have the data. What were we going to do with it?

Enlisting the help of our ESP, we developed a sophisticated email template using their programming language.

Using this single template allows us to dynamically generate hundreds of personalized emails to a wide-ranging audience with unique interests.