Case study: Parkdean Holidays

Background

Parkdean Holidays is a UK-focused self-catering family holiday park operator, with 24 parks spread across England, Wales and Scotland, in some of the most picturesque locations in the British Isles.

The challenge

Parkdean Holidays engaged us in late 2005 to deliver upon one simple goal: to sell more holidays. As a young, private-equity owned business they are agile and result-driven. This was one of their main motivations for selecting and retaining us as their digital agency of record - in that we bring the same approach to their marketing objectives.

A total package

Through a combination of Flame Digital's creative thinking, website design and search engine strategy we have seen web bookings grow fantastically over the last two years. We are very much looking forward to building on this success in the future as Parkdean Holidays grows as well.

Paul McLaughlin, Head of e-Development, Parkdean Holidays

Parkdean's objectives were clear: support their business goals by creating and implementing an online marketing strategy that brought the right audience to them - and allowed them to quickly and measurably convert these people into customers.

Our response was to design a complete end-to-end customer acquisition experience:

• A totally revamped website that would provide an engaging experience of the Parkdean Holidays offer
• A better holiday booking process born out of research and understanding of the customer - aimed to increase bookings and minimise drop-off
• A wide-reaching search marketing campaign to actively drive potential customers to the site in a manner most likely to make them buy

See the sites

Analysis of user data allowed us to identity clearly what was working and what was not; we then worked closely with Parkdean Holiday's internal teams to create a visual approach that married their brand values and aesthetics with a robust technical platform and their reservations systems.

The result is a website that truly leads the market, showcasing Parkdean Holidays' array of parks and facilities. We launched the current layout at the end of 2005, and rolled out a design and usability update in October 2006.

The whole site is crafted in a way intrinsically designed to guide users through the decision-making process - and towards booking a holiday.

The booking process

Our user experience specialists embarked upon a detailed process of research and prototyping to develop a simple and logical booking system - one that has since proven to have one of the highest conversion rates in the industry. In fact, it has meant that the website as a whole boasts a sales conversion rate double that of the industry average.

SEO and Pay-per-click

Once launched, we put in place a comprehensive search strategy to acquire and retain potential audience. This comprised of an ongoing optimisation of the website itself for specific keywords we knew customers were searching for (things such as 'holiday park', and 'family holiday uk').

In addition to this, our search marketing team developed a wide ranging Pay-per-click campaign designed to reach potential customers across a wide variety of search engines and content sites. Managed via Google, Yahoo and MSN, the activity has performed spectacularly: we have actually lowered Parkdean's cost-per-sale via search engines to under 25% of what they were formerly having to spend.

Results

Over the past two years Parkdean Holidays have experienced massive success in their online and digital marketing activities, boosting brand recognition, site traffic, customer interaction - but most importantly they have grown their holiday sales far in excess of their targets and expectations.