Educational Travel Company Boosts Conversions – Road Scholar

Challenge

Following a pause during COVID, Road Scholar was ready to supercharge its conversion rates, turning more prospects into mailing list subscribers and participants. The company sought to re-engage website visitors using personalized, hyper-recent retargeting via direct mail marketing services.

Evie Eich, Senior Director, Campaign Circulation & Analytics, explains, “We needed a partner with the programmatic direct mail technology to figure out who’s a prospect and who’s not, and then mail a postcard to the best subset of people, the high-level prospects, to remind them of us — quickly.”

Solution

Eich had previously collaborated with LS Direct’s Mike Robinson. “We wanted to work with Mike again, and LS Direct’s product seemed like a great direct mail marketing solution. We finally had that chance after the pandemic.”
Boomerang direct^®, from LS Direct, is an omnichannel program that identifies website visitors most likely to convert and sends targeted follow- up mailings as soon as the next day.

“LS Direct is constantly dropping postcards based on the most recent website activity. So, it’s basically every single day,” says Eich. “For example, I viewed something on the website, and I got a postcard within two or three days, which is really fast for direct mail retargeting.”

Not only is the postcard mailing timely, it’s also customized. Boomerang direct delivers personalized messaging based on browsing activity to reach unique customers with powerful calls to action.

“It’s tricky because we don’t offer discounts like other companies do. As a nonprofit, it’s not a good fit for us,” Eich explains. “Instead, we offer personalized travel recommendations based on the prospect’s previous viewing history.”

Road Scholar has an in-house design team that seamlessly partners with LS Direct on the postcard’s aesthetic. Their designers select images and send them to LS Direct to create the layout and handle the printing, sending proofs for approval along the way.

“The postcards look really good. They’re compelling,” says Eich. “We change out the creative every month, so they constantly look fresh and different. We also have frequency rules in place, so recipients never receive two of the same postcards in a month.”

Road Scholar values LS Direct’s flexibility and ability to drive real results using direct mail marketing for nonprofits. Based on the success of the retargeting, they’ve boosted their monthly test budget by over 500% since launching the program.