The Client
holidaycottages.co.uk, part of the Travel Chapter, is one of the UK’s largest accommodation providers with over 7,500 self-catering properties across the country. Every cottage in the brand’s extensive directory has been personally inspected by a dedicated team of property managers to ensure the highest quality and an unforgettable stay. We began working with holidaycottages.co.uk in 2019, providing Community Management on all of their social channels.
The Brief
At the start of the partnership, we were tasked with not only providing customer service on social media, but also using interactions to drive revenue. Because the brand was seeing an abundance of comments and interest across their social media pages, they wanted to find a way to convert these casual conversations into real bookings - and they were confident that we could achieve this for them.
The Strategy
The strategy for holidaycottages.co.uk was simple: deliver our usual high standard of Community Management, but also install a sales aspect. This involved training our team to identify buyer signals during conversations and developing a tracking system to measure the success of the service. It was also decided that custom URLs, specific to 3sixfive, would be created whenever our team sent a customer to a page on the brand’s website, allowing the client to identify which traffic had been generated by us. Furthermore, we agreed to extensively study their catalogue of holiday cottages, which meant we were able to offer personalised recommendations based on prospective travellers’ wants and needs, and could direct them to the perfect accommodation to meet their requirements.
The Results - Month 1
The strategy proved to be highly effective. The tracking system was vital for assessing the success of the campaign and made it easy to do so. Booking transactions were recorded along with customer journeys after referring from social to the brand’s website. As well as a low bounce rate, we achieved the following results within the first month.