Project: Segmentation

Direct Holidays is one of the main brands in the Thomas Cook portfolio.  Thomas Cook is one of the world’s best-known names in travel.

DDL Insight worked with the Direct Holidays marketing team in order to establish a segmentation system that would be utilised within the 4 million consumer held marketing database.  The Direct Holidays marketing database contained full customer contact and transaction records for customers throughout UK and Eire.

As a starting point, DDL Insight carried out a basic analysis in order to understand the basic profile of Direct Holidays customer, the various types of holidays they travelled on, who they travelled with and where they travelled to and for how long.  Once this stage was complete, the next phase involved more complex analysis.

For the second phase, DDL Insight utilised CHAID, RFM/RFV and cluster analysis in order to drill into the data to reveal customer groups and trends.  Demographic data was utilised as part of the process.  Other techniques utilised included visual mapping, where DDL Insight utilised their geographical mapping software to plot regional information against the segment groups.  All the data collected and presented enabled Direct Holidays to have a clear visual picture of the customer groups, types and geographical spread.  DDL Insight recommended to the client a specific number of segmentation groups and subsets and provided the rationale behind this in a final stage presentation of findings and conclusions. 

The end sophisticated segmentation system was utilised for Direct Marketing campaigns and to track and monitor subset conversion.  The advertising was closely linked to the segment categories that were established.  Over time DDL Insight were able to refine the segments and track customer progress and loyalty.