Background

Fiji is a chain of over 332 romantic tropical islands situated about two-thirds of the way from Hawaii to New Zealand. Its friendly people and idyllic setting make it a tremendously popular leisure travel destination. Fiji depends on its tourism industry, but when marketing in North America, it faces tremendous competition, relatively low brand awareness and a perception among travelers of being distant and difficult to reach. When Fiji needed help with its marketing efforts to more effectively use the internet and generate measurable return on investment, it turned to Destination Analysts.

Solution

Destination Analysts worked in conjunction with Fiji’s advertising agency to develop a highly effective strategic plan to market Fiji in cyberspace. This included the development of a new website bulafijinow.com, and email marketing campaign (Message in a Bottle), with a strong integrated research component.

Bulafijinow.com presented visitors with a compelling reason to select Fiji over its competition. Destination Analysts creative team developed a variety of fun, useful travel planning content and integrated it into a website designed also to capture user information for sales and research efforts. This website was also designed to capture user information and automatically send sales leads to the Fiji Visitor Bureau’s partners. This effective technique allowed for the capture of over 10,000 visitor names in a eight month program and generated hundreds of sales leads for the bureau’s partners.Our Message in a Bottle email promotion was then developed to capture the attention of potential travelers and generate incremental visits to the Fiji. Message in a Bottle is one part whimsy, one part romance, and two parts savvy electronic marketing.

The Bureau and Destination Analysts knew that a package trip to Fiji was a big ticket item and many people felt Fiji was a once in a lifetime trip. We also knew that email promotions are increasingly endangered by the flood of unwanted junk mail. Message in a Bottle takes readers through the highly-visual, emotional experience of reading a romantic message thrown into the sea, which washes mysteriously into their email boxes. In a Flash-based environment, an imaginary character shares with the reader their feelings about Fiji and other items they have stuffed into the bottle. Tropical beach sound effects and friendly animated crabs moving about the message add an air of reality and reader stickiness, making this promotion an extraordinary success.

Results

The results of the Fiji Visitors Bureau campaign were dramatic. Follow-up surveys of visitors to bulafijinow.com illustrated the most effective advertising channels and showed that the campaign drove over 8,000 incremental trips to Fiji, with an estimated economic impact to the islands of over $11 million dollars. The Message in a Bottle campaign clearly effected traffic with over 600 of these trips being impacted by the promotion. Open and click through rates for this campaign were fantastic—48% of people who received the message opened it and fully 28% of these people read the messages. By any standard in email mail marketing, this campaign was a grand slam.