Huge Reply Card

Background

‘I want the world’ is the brand rallying cry for Virgin Holidays. For the next step of the media neutral campaign, Elvis had to enhance the brand idea through direct marketing. The mail piece had to bridge the gap from big brand message to direct response with a price focus, enticing customers to book early for their summer holidays by featuring value for money prices. It had to be a hard-working piece to drive sales. But it also had to be entertaining and actively encourage a healthy diva-like nature.

Idea

The holiday market is cut throat and everyone shouts about how their prices are the lowest. The solution came from recognising the ‘feeding frenzy’ manner in which holiday companies speak to customers. Often the focus is on how great the holiday companies are. With Virgin Holidays, Elvis wanted to show a company that had their priorities straight - it’s all about what the customer wants.

Prospects received a mailer showing destinations, different ways of seeing them, great value prices. What more could they want? Outside, the teaser read, ‘will your next holiday tick all the boxes?’ Inside, a huge reply card listed more than 60 options, from wanting ‘things my way’ to ‘everything to be done for me'.

Results

Elvis’s campaign to reposition Virgin Holidays as a global travel company included TV, radio, online, 250,000 direct mail packs and 150,000 emails to existing and potential customers. Results to date are extremely good, with the digital element of the campaign alone generating an ROI of 400:1, leading the client to hail the work as the ‘best ever’. Although the DM ‘specific’ results are positive with 2,111 bookings so far, most of the recipients went to the website and therefore form part of the digital results.

Volume/size of campaign

250,000 mailings

Our Thoughts

This is direct direct, but with all the brand values you’d expect from Virgin. It’s cheeky, funny, it’s appropriate and it’s successful. Why is it that so much direct mail seems to have been written by a civil servant? This, by contrast, has been written by a human being. And I salute him.