Summary
CheapCaribbean’s team of “beachologists” offers low-cost luxury vacation packages for travelers to visit the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America.
The company wanted to create a promotion for nurses—an audience that aligns well with their brand—but had learned from a similar campaign for teachers that manually verifying them would be costly and ineffective.
CheapCaribbean used SheerID’s Audience Network to launch the new program, which brought 8,000 nurses into its travel club, reduced fraud by 36%, and saved more than 100 hours of staff time.
Challenge
CheapCaribbean prides itself on providing high-quality luxury vacations at unbeatable prices. The company has a wide audience, but it identified nurses as an ideal consumer community that offered the brand a lucrative opportunity and the chance to give back to hard-working individuals.
“Nurses earn good incomes, have flexible schedules, and are often overworked and underappreciated, which makes them perfect candidates for a vacation,” said Dana Studebaker, CheapCaribbean’s senior director of marketing. “We knew that rewarding nurses with a personalized offer would be a great way to win their business—and their loyalty.”
To engage nurses, CheapCaribbean created a new ER&R Club that would provide them with exclusive travel deals. The company planned to promote the club by telling prospective members that if they joined, they would be given the opportunity to be one of 50 nurses who received free roundtrip airfare for two to a CheapCaribbean locale of their choice.
CheapCaribbean previously ran a similar campaign for teachers, but they used a manual, in-house verification process that could take up to ten days to complete. This led to a poor customer experience and high levels of discount abuse—problems CheapCaribbean didn’t want to repeat.
The company wanted their new ER&R program to highly engage both nurses and the press, but it needed to find a better way to prevent fraud and protect the integrity of the offer.
SheerID made it easy for us to truly reward nurses and launch a positive brand relationship with them.
Solution
CheapCaribbean launched its ER&R Club by using SheerID’s Audience Network to implement the personalized offer to nurses. The travel brand promoted the program through email, PR, and social media, and when nurses responded by visiting CheapCaribbean’s website, SheerID instantly verified their eligibility.
This solution created a streamlined process for CheapCaribbean staff and a customer experience for nurses that was much more user friendly.
“SheerID greatly simplified our verification process and ensured only nurses could redeem the offer, which increased its value in their eyes,” said Jordan Clegg, CheapCaribbean’s brand manager, integrated marketing. “The platform made it easy for us to truly reward nurses and launch a positive brand relationship with them.”
Results
The entire program was wildly successful, bringing more than 8,000 nurses into the CheapCaribbean fold. It also gave the company the means to nurture nurses further, and to survey their interests, so the company could design vacation packages that appealed to them.
The program also:
• Earned more than 83 media pickups of the story in national news outlets such as Good Morning America, ABC
News, MSN, and Yahoo, as well as high-value travel and nursing publications like Travel + Leisure, Nurse.org, and Insider.
• Garnered more than 700 comments on social sites.
• Had an email open rate that was 2x higher than other campaigns.
• Reduced fraudulent applications by 36%.
• Saved 117 hours that staff could now devote to planning other campaigns.
• Reduced the ongoing program management workload by 6 hours per week.
With the help of SheerID, CheapCaribbean is now poised to win the ongoing loyalty of nurses, an audience that numbers four million in the US and—in some states—earns more than $100,000 each year. And the company is well-positioned to engage other consumer communities with the same success.
“Not only can we more easily engage nurses during key times like Nurses Appreciation Week in May, we can improve our outreach to teachers and consider expanding into other high-value consumer communities like the military and first responders,” Dana said. “SheerID will be an important marketing partner in our future growth.”