Real Results

Travelodge is a franchised group of over 500 economy properties in North America. Travelodge was working with a collection of outside vendors who supported their database management, direct mail and fulfillment programs, distributing materials to both franchisees and consumers. This collection included a costume vendor, an inflatable’s company, a fulfillment company, a mail house, and an inventory storage company. This multi-source approach had resulted in poor inventory control, frequent shipping errors, wasted labor and capital, and extended literature response time.

To streamline direct marketing and fulfillment processes
To decrease costs
To increase customer satisfaction through improved fulfillment service

To consolidate all database management, direct marketing, and fulfillment resources, thereby decreasing labor costs and increasing efficiency.

Towne brought all direct marketing and fulfillment related work to a single location, retaining the association with the costume and inflatable’s companies but assuming coordination of this relationship.

When Travelodge was purchased by HFS, Towne's support allowed for a seamless transition and even greater economies than had first been projected. HFS, headquartered in Parsippany, NJ, now controls the franchises' direct marketing and fulfillment programs through interface with Towne. Towne, in turn, has hired a former Travelodge marketing promotions coordinator to enhance communications between all parties.

Towne has assisted Travelodge by streamlining the following activities:
Materials storage, maintenance, and distribution, including costume vendor mgmt
Fulfillment of materials according to pre-arranged distribution schedules
Data management
Inventory accuracy
Originally managed by 12 marketing representatives, Travelodge's marketing operations are now handled by 2 internal marketing representatives who interface daily with Towne.

Pergo Flooring, one of the world's largest flooring manufacturer/distributors, opened its North American division in 1994. Originally based in Sweden, Pergo commanded a presence in several countries as a premier provider of residential flooring products but was virtually unknown in the United States. Pergo's challenge, therefore, was to introduce a new product and to create sales volume.

To introduce a new product in North America.
To create sales volume
To capture and efficiently manage audience information for later use

To increase awareness through full-run advertisements in several major publications, and to build both a customer and a dealer database for program tracking and later use. To hire both an advertising agency and a direct marketing/fulfillment company who would work together, designing and implementing programs for reaching these goals.

Pergo hired The Richards Group, a local advertising agency, to help design an inbound telemarketing program. Advertisements were created using high-profile four-color photographs and an 800 number to generate inquiries. Industry publications such as Better Homes & Gardens and Architectural Digest, and more generic publications such as Time and Newsweek., were chosen as vehicles.

Based on the theory that inquiries generated through industry publications are from consumers who plan to remodel immediately and inquiries generated through generic publications are from consumers who plan to remodel in the future, inquiries are assigned a priority and materials are sent via first class or via bulk mail. During the inquiry call, operators answer immediate questions about the product and provide callers with information on their three closest distributors, promising to provide the names of five more distributors with the fulfillment of their catalogs. In addition, dealers are provided records of all consumer inquiries in their area.

Since the program's inception, Towne has provided more than 1,000,000 callers with retail catalogs and has provided dealers with a reliable resource for customer referrals. In 1997, we anticipate this volume to increase substantially. In addition, Towne has worked closely with the Richards Group, redesigning the fulfillment package in an effort to minimize printing, handling, and postal expenses. As a result, Pergo has saved 20% over last year's costs with the implementation of this newly designed package.

Additional programs
In 1996, Pergo decided to run a test to see whether a customer rebate program would increase sales. Towne assisted with the selection of 6,000 Pergo database names based on specific inquiry dates and, after verifying all criteria were sufficiently met, mailed a $50.00 coupon and a "Refer a Friend" card to qualified customers.

The promotion was so successful that Pergo later advertised the rebate offer through a national newspaper group. This effort was again quite successful: Towne managed the inquiry receipt and distribution of over $100,00 in customer rebates.

In an effort to bring more visitors to San Francisco, the San Francisco Visitors Bureau planned to build an image for the city as the nation's dining capital. To this end, Towne's challenge was to help increase the quantity, quality, and timeliness of dining information available to prospective visitors. San Francisco's Visitor Information Center staff, who were currently handling phone requests and fulfilling dining information from their facility, finding it extremely difficult to handle the volume and had become overloaded as a result of this program.

To increase the number of visitors to San Francisco
To emphasize San Francisco as the nation's dining capital
To make up-to-the-minute dining information easily accessible to the consumer
To give member restaurants a vehicle for publicizing specials and promotions
To relieve Visitor Center Staff of responsibilities related to this program
To decrease communication response time
To track demographic information on the dining customers

The Bureau would create demand for dining information by using advertising and telemarketing/demand fax campaigns. Towne would manage all inbound order receipt and fulfillment functions, and would help build a targeted database using information gathered during customer surveys.

The Bureau launched "Preferred Dining in San Francisco with Visa," an integrated marketing program designed to provide dining customers with the necessary information to attend festivals, dining events, and other activities within the city. 800 vanity phone and demand FAX numbers, sourced by Towne, were published in all advertising. Further, Towne began receiving formatted newsletters on diskette bi-monthly and printed them within 48 hours. The response packet, now fulfilled within 7-10 days of request, includes a current Preferred Dining newsletter, the "Preferred Dining in San Francisco with Visa" card, and a San Francisco Visitors Guide.

Currently, Towne has distributed 75,000 preferred dining packets and identification cards, and the member restaurants who participate in the program have seen overwhelming success as the number of visitors patronizing their establishments continues to rise.

Crystal Cruises spends a significant percentage of their marketing budget each year on travel agent literature fulfillment. Until June 1996, district sales managers phoned Crystal voice mail daily and gave verbal orders for the shipment of marketing materials. Sales support then transcribed each order by hand and faxed it to Towne, where it was re-keyed and fulfilled from our location. Travel agents, who were unable to obtain brochures through Crystal Cruises' overloaded brochure request system, had resorted to calling the reservations line to request literature. Reservations center operators keyed brochure requests into their computer and sent a diskette to Towne weekly for fulfillment. These processes were cumbersome and labor intensive, and left much room for error.

Consumers were directly affected by the inefficiency of the system: sales support rushed through consumer inquiry calls because they had become overloaded with work, and travel agents were unable to provide brochures about the cruise line. Unfortunately, the company's infrastructure did not allow for expansion of services in this area.

To improve service to the travel agent community
To reduce handling and administrative costs for Crystal Cruises
To reduce order response time.
To relieve reservations and sales support agents of order-taking duties in order that they may handle higher-level customer service matters

The plan was to remove at least one step in the order taking and order entry process, thereby reducing overhead for the client and response time for the consumer.

In June 1996 Towne installed order entry software in all sales support terminals at Crystal Cruises' Los Angeles headquarters. With the new system, callers to the 800# line are given a series of menu options. Reservations requests are hot transferred to reservations center agents, and brochure requests are transferred to brochure request agents. Brochure requests are then entered directly into Towne's system. Orders are printed minutes later on pick slips at our facility.

As a result of this system improvement, Crystal Cruises has been able to cut sales support overhead by 30%. In addition, order response time has been reduced from a former 36 hours to 24 hours, and data errors have decreased dramatically.

When Towne began working with Celebrity Cruises in 1996, they had compiled detailed profiles on each passenger who had cruised with them over their 7-year history. Some past passengers were also members of Celebrity's Captain's Club, a paid program where members receive stateroom upgrades, advance notice of promotions, luggage tags, and other benefits. Unfortunately, the data was unclear as to which past passengers were also Captain's Club members. In any case, this data, which included over 550,000 records, had never been put to use as a marketing tool. Towne was challenged to standardize the data and design a continuity program wherein personalized communications would entice past guests to purchase subsequent cruises.

Our goal was to help Celebrity Cruises increase sales by creating and implementing a sophisticated past guest program. This would include optimization and use of existing consumer information, as well as the design of a program to capture new data.

The plan was to household the file through address standardization and strategic customer profiling. Fortunately, with the exception of the Captain's Club information, the majority of the data was relatively "clean" at the onset; nonetheless, accomplishing this task represented over 250 hours of complex programming.

Tactical implementation included sophisticated data hygiene, postal sortation and customer segmentation. Next, we designed an overlay to determine which past guests were also Captain's Club members.

Once the program was in place, Towne began working closely with SHR, Celebrity's mailing collateral development agency, to ensure each piece met postal automation requirements. For example, new postal regulations require that a mailer's spine, or folded edge, always occurs at the bottom, making machine processing possible. Our direction to flip the orientation of all mailers has resulted in significant postal savings for the client.

Celebrity Cruises' association with Towne has allowed them to focus more marketing dollars in the direction of highest return: maintaining current customers.

Our input has reduced mail delivery time, allowed pieces to arrive at their destinations in the best possible condition, and saved Celebrity thousands of dollars in postage and in handling-related mail spoilage. Celebrity Cruises has seen a significant rise in past guest patronage since the onset of this program.